On the leeward side of the stock market correction on August 24, it would be natural to speculate which big private tech companies might run out of gas if markets took a more persistent downturn. Resoundingly, one of the most common picks for bubble-poppers is Dropbox.
Ever since Steve Jobs famously disparaged it as “not a product” there have been speculations that it would die along with the file sharing business. But new features indicate a direction that would let it thrive.
Increasingly, software interfaces are moving towards dialog-based paradigm: both smart assistants like Facebook M or messenger interfaces like Magic are examples where you “talk” to the computer to accomplish a task.
There’s not much use for traditional file sharing in a world of messengers, because everything you want to share just gets dumpted into the dialog, living on the servers of whatever messenger you uploaded it to.
However, cloud storage providers like Dropbox usually contain about 20 percent duplicate files–mostly songs, movies, and images that other users also uploaded. Naturally, the server can achieve some efficiency by keeping a single file instead of zillions of copies. In many ways, Dropbox is less a “store” of your personal files and more like a curated list.
So it makes sense that Dropbox recently announced link-storing inside both web and mobile products. Drag in a link, and it gets represented as a clickable icon in whatever folder you’ve added it to. Effectively this turns Dropbox into a product more like Pocket: a curation tool, but with a massive cloud storage tool attached.
For now, the message wars are in full effect: iMessage, Slack, Lync, Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and dozens of other enterprise and consumer chat platforms still balkanize the world of text-based communication.
Between networks, the lingua franca is links: files and videos and photos aren’t treated as objects to be placed in folders, but as shortlinks to be curated. Whatever energy we save by using messengers and abandoning the file system has been at least partly offloaded into link management.
Dropbox built a $10+ billion company on file sharing. What can it build on curation?
Photo credit Benny_bloomfield on Flickr
Dropbox might not die off in a market correction after all originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Comparing Amazon EC2’s C3 and C4 Families
- What to know when choosing an EMM solution for your enterprise
- Survey: What the Enterprise Cloud Needs to Become Business-Critical
