In my little ecosystem the biggest threat to Dropbox is from Apple’s iCloud as it morphs this autumn into iCloud Drive. This facelifted service will work very much like Dropbox, with individual file control and the ability for disparate apps to sync data.
…
The big thing is that iCloud Drive will be much cheaper, certainly much less than Dropbox at current rates. Talk is of 200GB for $48 a year (a quarter the cost of Dropbox) and a terrabyte at even lower cost per Gigabyte. Currently the Dropbox ceiling for individuals is 500GB at $500 a year.
Integration with the OS and cost are the two biggest enemies of Dropbox.
The fact that only now Dropbox is building its own datacenters instead of relying on AWS is a big handicap for the company founded by Drew Houston. In a way Dropbox is the victim of its own success. With so many customers, the monthly bill for AWS must be scary.
There is also the integration part. You can be sure that iCloud Drive will morph even more into iOS and OS X. Dropbox will increasingly feel like something added to the OS rather than blended into it.
In my case, iCloud Drive cannot come fast enough. I really cannot wait to ditch Dropbox and finally achieve iCloud’s nirvana. I’ve been impressed with the speed, ease of use and the way the service is transparent to the user. There aren’t any sync icons in the menubar, nothing. Just pure and simple cloud sync/storage integrated in OS X Yosemite.
Though Apple is quite late to introduce a really trouble-free cloud drive, we are all happy to see it coming. However, I believe Dropbox will be with us Apple users for quite some time since we all need to share files with non Apple users and Dropbox will maintain better interplatform compatibility than iCloud Drive if Apple sticks to its norms..
Maybe we will keep a smaller Dropbox storage account along with our main and bigger iCloud Drive, but I will certainly wait before removing that icon from the menu bar
Do you see yourself using Mail Drop in Yosemite? That’s another feature that makes Dropbox really useful. The only real, temporary advantage of Dropbox IMHO is that it’s widely used. Once people starts using the built in iCloud Drive, I can’t see many people going Dropbox with the exception of power users.
I am a heavy user of Mail, so yes Mail Drop is a bless. But dropbox is becoming a household name fast just because more people learn about it. Dropbox will continue to be a service even Apple users will use if not to send then surely to receive from family/friends/colleagues who don’t have Macs and will never hear about iCloud Drive and its cheaper plans…
Yeap, I can be very pragmatist some times
But I do believe Dropbox deserves its reputation because they moved fast and they offered the first trouble-free cloud sync service to the masses. So, I think this blue/green icon will stay up in my menu bar for the forseeable future.