I have been using Dropbox for a while and I noticed that many of my acquaintances are using it too. In some of the European working groups I am in it has become a standard way to store, share and exchange documents. It provides 2 GB for free and you can upgrade to a 50 GB or 100 GB capacity for a monthly fee (9.99 and 19.99 respectively).

They have managed to attract 45 million users and fell under the eye of Steve Jobs who proposed to buy the company but they refused (and now Apple has its own Cloud).

Now they are expanding their services to biz customers (they already have over a million of them, I consider myself more like a residential customer…).

For them they plan to offer 1 TB at a yearly fee of 795$ and additional licenses, each with an extra 200 GB of space, at 125$ a year.

Interestingly, they are targeting the cell phone users, by embedding their client in HTC phones starting 2012. In Japan they have a deal with SoftBank to embed their client in their Sharp cell phones. In Europe some of the Sony Ericsson Android phones have the client embedded.

Their strong point is the transparency to the terminal, and that is why I use them. You can share files from your Android phone and read them on your iPad without a glitch.

Simplicity is at the core of success and the seamless experience they provide explains why so many are using it. Whether they will be able to capture a serious biz customer base remains to be seen. Will business trust placing their data on the Cloud?

Clearly, the push being made by several Telecom Operators, if successful in creating trust will in the end favor players like Dropbox, unless the message got by potential customer is not “trust the cloud” but “trust the brand”.

This cloud evolution is going to be another challenge for Telecom Operators that may risk pouring money in creating infrastructures and trust and end up seeing other taking advantage of that. This is likely to be the outcome, unless the Operators’ Could proposition moves away from the pure storage at low cost…

Tags: cell phones

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Future of Interfaces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.