

Nobody will win the storage war - brettcvz
http://blog.filepicker.io/post/28994860495/nobody-will-win-the-storage-war

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stcredzero
_> as Steve Jobs has proven, tight integration between components results in
better user experience._

A note to the younger readers out there. Talking about "tight integration"
like this is fine, but some people who have heard the term "tightly coupled"
apply it to the same thing. It's not the same thing. Apple's APIs and SDK are
very good because they are generally NOT "tightly coupled." "Tightly coupled"
generally means that it's not so great about respecting encapsulation.
(Sometimes the letter of the law is upheld, but the spirit is violated.)

(I like the term "tight integration" as it's the same general meaning of
"tight" when people talk about bands.)

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ananddass
Also,this does not seem to be a market where small players are trying to
unseat a large incumbent. Strategically, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox and
Box are all in incredibly strong positions. Thus the market is unlikely to
consolidate into one or two platforms for a long time. It may very well be
that we see a similar pattern as we saw in evolution of PC platforms where it
took decades before Mac, Windows and Linux emerged as the dominant standards.
Even then, developers have had to work on cross platform compatibility for a
while now.

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enos_feedler
i've always thought dropbox should play more on its strengths as a technology
layer. When I think of a successful dropbox I think of all my critical
applications having a logo in their startup banner saying "powered by dropbox"
proudly displaying the dropbox logo. But thats where it could end. Why do I
need to have a dropbox account? Why do I care about a quota? Can't the
application just take care of all of that behind the scenes? All of things
that make dropbox great could be built within the context of that application
(sharing with other users of that application, live syncing with collaborators
of that application). You could optionally sign up for a dropbox account which
would just allow binding an app's dropbox-powered datastore to your global id
(with permission from the app).

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jasonzemos
Except dropbox's technology layer isn't infrastructure. They do sync, but
that's pseudoinfrastructure compared to what s3 really provides them.

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ljd
Fragmentation of providers in markets can indicate that consumers see the
product as a commodity.

Storage is becoming more and more of a commodity. It's not a good or bad
thing, it just means that storage providers might benefit by adopting
strategies that work in other commodity businesses.

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zissou
I agree with both your premise and conclusion regarding the on going
commoditization of storage. The OP lays out application integration and
software integration as routes for storage providers to follow, which I tend
to agree with, but the ideas can be better generalized as problems of
horizontal and vertical integration (respectively). Different forms of
commodity businesses exists in both the horizontal and vertical markets here,
so as you point out, storage providers are likely to begin searching for
customers with problems that they can build/grow into the function of their
platform.

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Thrymr
Consumers will.

~~~
mey
Agree

Increased competition for a commodity will decrease prices for the consumer.

~~~
duaneb
Or, we could end up with many different services with similar-yet-ultimately-
disparate feature sets that people just give up. The consumer wins when she
can use competing products together without jumping through hoops - Someone
mails a word document, she saves it to Dropbox, and opens it with Pages on her
iPad.

We need open standards and competing implementations. It's an absolute mess
right now.

~~~
mey
<http://xkcd.com/927/>

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duaneb
I just want open standards!

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barista
People often tend to forget that storage as offered by the likes of dropbox is
not a product, its just a feature that makes a product better. With deep app
platform integration that iOS, Windows have brought in, there will be less and
less need for people to use an external store thus making these guys
irrelevant...

~~~
ananddass
Would respectfully disagree. Dropbox and Box are building an awesome app
platform as well and as long as users want neutral solutions (non iOS or
Windows), they should be OK. In fact Box and Dropbox will start specializing
as the author noted.

~~~
niels_olson
I definitely benefit primarily from Dropbox's neutrality. Much as I benefit
from the neutrality of lastpass and xmarks. I can use them at home on the
latest Mac and Linux, I can use them on personal VPS instances, I can use them
at work, even in a fairly locked down network environment.

iCloud is useless at work, and my officemate has switched from SkyDrive to
Dropbox for the same reasons. We now both doubly benefit from the wide-ranging
accessability and sharability of Dropbox.

~~~
barista
are you confusing neutrality with it being a web app? What part of the above
things you could not do with say skydrive?

Basically I don't see a difference between dropbox and skydrive (or gdrive
or....) as a developer, if I had to choose, I'd probably choose a platform
from a company that has a long history of building platforms (Microsoft or
Google or any other big co) as opposed to dropbox which is a tiny startup
somewhere with no viable long term life expectancy.

~~~
oscilloscope
Dropbox has a Linux version. It's not a web app. I've used it in
Unity/Gnome/Nautilus. It feels exactly right. It also works perfectly on OS X,
Windows, Android and iOS.

