Why won’t Dropbox and Drop.io fail?
Like their brothers in arms from 2000? (Xdrive and the general wasteland of storage services)
Other than marginal tech and usability improvements, slightly better broadband availability, what’s really different this time around in the consumer storage space?
Seems like history repeating itself from the outside, though I presume those guys know things I don’t.
Do you know?
kortina’s bit: Dropbox is more than personal online backup—it’s personal online backup + synchronization. As software (email, docs, crm, calendar) has moved into the cloud, client computers have become thinner. As a result of doing more work inside the browser and less on desktop apps, I’m much more mobile moving between machines—mac laptop, windows laptop, mac desktop at work, iphone. Now, however, I feel the pain of local files on a single machine more greatly because I move more frequently between these machines. I’m more willing to pay for synchronization of local files across these machines.
Drop.io isn’t personal online backup at all. It’s a flexible, simple collaboration tool for sharing rich media, files, chatting, and filling in all the gaps where email is insufficient or clunky. It seems like a natural tool to use as we collaborate more in the virtual office and less in the physical office.
I’m ready to pay for both as soon as I hit the limits of their free verions.
