Introduction
Dropbox is one of the most popular and simple online file sharing platforms as well as the leading cloud storage company in market with 25 million users up-till now. From the presentation conducted by Group 9, there are many interesting points in the seminar.
Dropbox and its competitors
The most important aspects of Dropbox is the simple, intuitive front-end application and the ability to easily sync files as users only need to put files to the cloud folder once and it will appear everywhere. That simple-but-amazing ability saves end users from having to switch between different cloud storage platforms for different tasks or for different types of data. Moreover, the professional version of Dropbox provides much more advanced administrative tools and supports. However, it doesn't support multi-user collaboration on a single file compared to one of its competitors, Google Drive. Beside Google Drive, there are still lots of similar and outstanding online storage and synchronization service providers such as Apple's iDrive, Microsoft's Skydrive, Box, VMware, Microsoft and many others. As other competitors are all trying to come up with better services and platforms, Dropbox should retain its original goal of data freedom together with easy, simple and cross-platform synchronization to be able to sustain its leading position.
Dropbox is one of the most popular and simple online file sharing platforms as well as the leading cloud storage company in market with 25 million users up-till now. From the presentation conducted by Group 9, there are many interesting points in the seminar.
Dropbox and its competitors
The most important aspects of Dropbox is the simple, intuitive front-end application and the ability to easily sync files as users only need to put files to the cloud folder once and it will appear everywhere. That simple-but-amazing ability saves end users from having to switch between different cloud storage platforms for different tasks or for different types of data. Moreover, the professional version of Dropbox provides much more advanced administrative tools and supports. However, it doesn't support multi-user collaboration on a single file compared to one of its competitors, Google Drive. Beside Google Drive, there are still lots of similar and outstanding online storage and synchronization service providers such as Apple's iDrive, Microsoft's Skydrive, Box, VMware, Microsoft and many others. As other competitors are all trying to come up with better services and platforms, Dropbox should retain its original goal of data freedom together with easy, simple and cross-platform synchronization to be able to sustain its leading position.
Business model and the rising concern
of free users
Currently Dropbox is still using a freemium business model, where users are offered a free account with a set storage size and paid subscriptions for accounts with more capacity. However, as the number of free users increases gradually, Dropox’s prospects and potentials in the future depends largely on whether free users will pay money to gain more storage space online or just create other free accounts. As a result, the “Enterprise version of Dropbox” appears as an attempt to rectify the problems. Although there is still controversial discussion regarding what is so-called the “Enterprise version of Dropbox”, it could be a potential business model to increase revenue, and by collaborating and integrating with other popular applications and products such as Facebook, Instagram or Microsoft Office, it could stand out from its competitors by becoming one of the most pervasive service provider in the market.
Lacking of version control
Currently Dropbox is still using a freemium business model, where users are offered a free account with a set storage size and paid subscriptions for accounts with more capacity. However, as the number of free users increases gradually, Dropox’s prospects and potentials in the future depends largely on whether free users will pay money to gain more storage space online or just create other free accounts. As a result, the “Enterprise version of Dropbox” appears as an attempt to rectify the problems. Although there is still controversial discussion regarding what is so-called the “Enterprise version of Dropbox”, it could be a potential business model to increase revenue, and by collaborating and integrating with other popular applications and products such as Facebook, Instagram or Microsoft Office, it could stand out from its competitors by becoming one of the most pervasive service provider in the market.
Lacking of version control
Since most Dropbox’s users utilize
it to collaborate their daily works, it is strongly and reasonably recommended for Dropbox to have an implemented layer of version control. Moreover, having collaborative editing tools similar to what Git does should also be integrated to help users manage the documents in systematic ways. Although it is technically possible to
add that extra layer, it can be a huge drawback of usability considering the conceptual complexities
behind. As a considerable number of
users choose Dropbox because of its simplicity in sharing files, adding a different layer to the
application may potentially undermine such elegance, thus affect users' perception
and increase the chance of losing that group of customers. Before coming up with an acceptable mechanism, implementing new version-control layer should not
be Dropbox's top priority. In the meanwhile, Dropbox shoud try to improve its existing version-control functionalities.
Security issue
Not every company store their confidential data
using cloud storage services mainly because of the security issues. Those data
are usually stored in local storages so that they can have full access control. While Dropbox does have encryption to protect the entire data
user uploaded to its server, they are in control of the encryption keys that
they can actually view the contents if they have to. Moreover, files are not
encrypted and thus potentially, the public servers can see everything. I am currently working on a research project to enhance the about
Attribute Based Encryption, it provides us a solution to the mentioned
problem. Furthermore, there are only simple access control. A team or a company usually need more
advanced administrative tools to management the activities, access
rights and storages for each user.
Conclusion
Dropbox needs to continuously improve services quality in order to remains in its leading postions.
What you mention about the security issue is really a big issue for Dropbox ot improve. The lack of protection for users' personal data will really blow away users. Another point is about the extra layer to implement collaborative access and version control of Dropbox. I think the idea of version control is not just what we critically think about version control. In a nutshell, in normal life it is just like our redo and undo operations. So why not Dropbox implement the version control feature in a more user-friendly way? The extra tough work is definitely required but it is possible to implement the new feature without loss of the original simplicity.
ReplyDeleteI think security is always a concern, like, back in July when it was hacked, it was a serious waking call for lots of companies and startups to consider putting their files in the cloud.
ReplyDeleteI think now Dropbox is trying to expand its user base, encourage its users to store their stuff in Dropbox and when the quota burst, encourage them to pay monthly and thus sustainability. Here, we can see that it is a little similar to Evernote, therefore, perhaps they can actually follow Evernote, and Partnership huge companies and integrate Dropbox into everything! Then again, Apple has iCould, Microsoft has SkyDrive.... kinda difficult isn't it?
Dennis
Yes, I agree with you that Dropbox need to improve their version control. Actually, Dropbox has file versioning built in. When you edit or delete files, Dropbox keeps prior versions in case you wish to restore them. With a couple of clicks you can overwrite the current version with an old. However, it is very bad compared to Git. While that’s great for basic applications, you could take things a step further and store a SVN repository in your Dropbox (http://that-matt.com/2009/04/host-personal-svn-projects-for-free-using-dropbox/). It would work fine for a single user, but it wouldn’t work well with more than one committer.
ReplyDeleteTo be exact, they store them for 30 days under the free service. I imagine that a more complicated VCS--if they were to implement it--would have to focus on making its operations *very* simple to use, more than anything else.
Delete