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.
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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.