Dropbox have one special ingredient - it actually works. Do you think Samsung or Acer are going to come up with something robust and resilient? Even if they did, do you think it would work on Mac or iOS or WP7? Do you think Microsoft's solution would work outside of Windows?
Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)
Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.
As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".
Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:
you're missing what i'm saying. i don't think there's an opportunity for competition dropbox's market, they are undoubtedly the best at what they do and their users love them. they do a great job, but i think that the job they're doing is going to become irrelevant soon.
>As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing
the amount of digital data i have is not growing, it's shrinking at an alarming pace. i don't have any documents. google has documents that i have authored, and i can retrieve them from google any time i want to, but i don't have them and i don't have to worry about where they're stored. i don't need a service to keep them synced between my computers because they're not on my computers. i let google worry about delivering them to me.
>there keeps being new kinds of data beyond binary files
this is what i'm talking about. dropbox keeps track of binary files. it doesn't currently handle new, less tangible types of data, and until it does its potential is pretty limited.
Hard though it may be for people that live in the Valley and work as programmers to believe, most of the world isn't permanently connected to adequate-speed internet. For the 99%, they do need to worry about where files are stored, specifically why they can't access them even on the laptop they used to create them.
That's why Dropbox will continue to annihilate any service that doesn't locally save data. If my files are in Dropbox I can freely access them on the laptop I used to create them whether I'm sitting in a hotel that has so many stars you have to pay for WiFi or on a beach in Thailand. And the next time I have my laptop on within the range of publicly accessible free WiFi, it's all in the "cloud". If the internet connection is extremely intermittent I can have my updates save asynchronously without the endless frustration of browser error messages (or even worse, an Ajax smokescreen concealing the failure of an app to update server-side).
And even if I'm sitting in my office with a perfect high-speed connection doing average office work, the chances are that at some stage I'll be using a program with functionality not available in filesystem-less SaaS. In which case I don't really begrudge the extra few gigs of disk space Dropbox takes over pure cloud hosting.
Doing a crappy subset of their job will become irrelevant - I certainly agree about that. Doing the "whole" job is really what we are debating. I'd make the case that having lots of crappy different services out there is what provides the case for something that can aggregate, backup and provide access to those pieces. (Only time will prove that right or wrong.)
> the amount of digital data i have is not growing, it's shrinking at an alarming pace
You then list how you have new digital data in the form of Google documents :-) They used to only have a few types of data ("documents" and spreadsheets). You now also get presentations, drawings, forms, tables and collections. And guess what, Google do indeed provide a crappy subset of their experience. Have you every tried to edit/view a Google doc on an Android device? I'd be delighted to have those docs also sitting in Dropbox available on all my devices at all times and to the many local programs I have that provide better viewers/editors than Google ever will. (Note this doesn't mean I want Dropbox to be the primary location for them, just that I want Dropbox to provide enhanced access and backup.)
> dropbox keeps track of binary files. it doesn't currently handle new, less tangible types of data, and until it does its potential is pretty limited
It does handle photos and sharing. I agree that binary plus photos is limiting, but the whole point is that by expanding beyond that they will have the opportunity for growth.
"google has documents that i have authored, and i can retrieve them from google any time i want to, but i don't have them and i don't have to worry about where they're stored."
You should really automate backups of your google docs to local storage. I've lost data when documents inexplicably disappeared.
Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)
Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.
As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".
Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox
Admittedly around 6,000 things aren't that interesting:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox#votebox:popular:600