The Changing Nature Of Online Storage

 

Chart showing popularity of three leading providers of online storage and file transfer.

 

The most interesting and dynamic entrant has been the file storage software dropbox.com. File storage is offered by all the players, but less on a peer to peer sharing basis (i.e. share the same files with colleagues/friends) than on a personal storage (i.e. storing your own files in the cloud) or professional sending basis (i.e. sending customers a link to some files which are stored in the cloud). Dropbox, founded by bright MIT graduates, seems to have really nailed it with a combined software and cloud service that allows colleagues to all be able to access the same files from different computers. The download acts like a regular folder in your hard drive's "My Documents", and automatically updates across all machines without the need for active syncing (i.e. no need to hit a button to update). Hence to access a file, it's already on your hard drive, vs other alternatives where the files need to be downloaded from a folder stored on the web.

 

This is a huge time and ease of use benefit. Another remarkable asset is Dropbox's ridiculously simple registration and download process. One need not even know what will happen because it will make sense as soon as you start. Dropbox also have a yousendit killer, i.e. professional users can send clients and colleagues links to large files.

 

At the time of writing, paid plans are $10 or $20 for 50GB and 100GB but their service is overwhelmingly a free one (2GB). People who want to lift their storage limits are required to send invitations to their friends and followers via email, Twitter or Facebook. Dropbox is what Microsoft Live should be and we think it makes a logical acquisition target for Microsoft or Google, whose Google Docs service is a very useful but limited online service that has no downloadable component. Surprisingly they don't do storage yet and without a download component Docs' ability to really overtake Microsoft Office is going to be limited by reliance on bandwidth. The long term struggle will be that as an online service Docs is much slower than old school software. As Microsoft touts its reasons not to use Google Apps (Apps is the enterprise service of which Docs is one key product), we'd concur (ever tried copying and pasting 100,000 cells into Google Spreadsheets?!). 

 

As a remote employer, we at Software.com use and love Docs for multi-person file collaboration and we use Dropbox for file sharing, but we think that without evolving their product yousendit.com and its ilk may struggle to survive. As a software service, Stuffit has been around for a long time and benefits from a large customer base to market to, but without developing a hybrid download/cloud-based service for shared files, it may struggle to compete against Dropbox or the next wave. This is represented in this comparison of Google keyword searches for the two (Dropbox is the red one):

 

 

 

Chart comparing Google search volumes for Stuffit and Dropbox over time