As Chad breaks his principles to pimp his product and go negative on the other guy here; he hits on something interesting, well I think it’s interesting. It’s how a product becomes a feature; in this case ‘sync n’ share’ functionality.
We’ve seen products become features before; deduplication has moved from being a product to becoming a feature of most storage arrays. And I don’t think it’ll be too long before we see it beginning to appear in consumer storage devices either.
But ‘Sync n’ Share’ is of a whole different order; the valuations of some the companies is quite scary and Chad is probably right about the general unrealism of them. The ‘Sync n’ Share’ companies are vulnerable to attack via a number of vectors; this is not a criticism of the products…Dropbox for example is a great product on many levels; it has great functionality but maybe some questions about security and privacy.
However its ease of use and access means that it has been embraced by both the consumer and the business user (Yes, I know they are consumers); this has scared the crap out of the IT department who find it very hard to compete with ‘free’…you try and build a business case which competes with free; you can talk till you are tired about security concerns.
Few want to pay for it, certainly at scale; it starts to amount to a frightening figure. [Hmmm, business cases and responsibility for presenting them; that’s a whole different blog.] So what happens; the end-users, even if banned by security policies, will continue to use the services. The services are just too damn useful.
And as mobile/BYOD/desktop/laptop/home-working proliferates; they become necessary. People’s home directories are migrating to these services. Work on a document on your desktop, present it on your tablet…without having to transfer it; this workflow simply works.
What we are going to see is vendors of operating systems and storage systems start to build this functionality into their products as a feature. If you are a NAS vendor; you are going to provide an app that allows the user to access their home directories from their mobile device or the web etc…If you are Microsoft or Apple; you are going build this into the operating system. If you are sensible, you are not going to charge a huge amount to provide this functionality; those business cases become a lot simpler, especially if you are simply layering on top of existing home directories and shares.
And what was once a product..is now simply a feature.
Those valuations are going to plummet; I don’t think that application integration and APIs will save them. If I were Dropbox or Box…I’d be looking to sell myself off to a vendor who wants the feature.
Comparisons with the fate of Netscape might well be made…