Can someone explain to me why dropbox has been so successful? I get that its a good idea but what makes it so valuable?
a good idea - 1 point. executed really, really well - 100 points.
Fun Historical note: FolderShare was founded 10 years before DropBox. MSFT paid to acquire FolderShare and then squashed all of the good things about it out of the project.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-03Fol...
Second-mover (or N-mover) advantage and clean execution is undervalued, IMHO.
I think this is a really good point. The market-timing was right for dropbox. More people with multiple machines (mostly laptops) so the desire to backup/sync across devices became more important.
It was amazing for me to watch companies in "cloud storage" space just not delivering. Their servers were down, clients were using 99% of CPU, etc. Yes it is ok that service has some bugs but these companies were adding features (mobile app, integration who knows what) before even making basic stuff working.
Just look Google Docs. Why they cannot just make that "documents" don't intermittently disappear (you get 404 but after retry they are back) before they change interface. Why? I really don't know.
http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...
Facebook is valuable because it increases the (perceived) size of your social circle, and maybe you make more friends, maybe you get laid more. Ok I get it.
Dropbox you get synced files? Ok that's useful obviously but so what? It seems like at best a 100m business to me, not a 4b one, what's the angle here?
2 things people pay for:
- Convenience
- Peace of Mind
My friends use it to share pictures and music/movies. We don't have to think about it anymore. That's something.
Lastly, I'm a professional freaking software engineer and I don't know how to get files onto my droid x. Then I remembered dropbox has an app. Well what do you know; put file in folder; file appears on phone..! =)
It turns out there isn't. That's simplicity. That's why they "won."