The Heart of Dropbox
The Heart of Dropbox
Last Thursday, after waking up to the news of Dropbox’s most recent announcements, 1 I couldn’t have been less impressed. To quote myself from a chat I had with a friend: “Dropbox is an unfocused mess.” But then I actually watched the event.
I’ve long been a believer in cloud storage; back in college I experimented with storing files on shared hosting (and accessing them via FTP!), and was a day one subscriber of Amazon S3. I couldn’t have been more excited when Dropbox was launched in 2008, and not only moved my personal files to it but also used it to build a syncing system for a computer-based teaching system I had developed. 2 At business school I would conservatively say I was responsible for 50 new Dropbox customers, and I’ve had the 100GB plan ever since it was available. As a consumer, I’m a fan.
The entire premise of this blog, though, is to take off the consumer product-focused hat, and instead look at the larger strategic picture and business fundamentals. On the first point, I’ve long been and remain very bullish about cloud storage as a business. Forgive the stretched analogy, but in a lot of ways cloud storage is to the enterprise as messaging, the other emerging category I’ve followed with interest, is to consumers.
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- Messaging targets what is most important to consumers: their communication with their friends and family (in many ways it is our connections that define us). Corporations, though, are defined by the sum of people, processes, and priorities, represented as data. 3 This makes storage of that data equally indispensible.
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