The new wealth myth of personal cloud storage

Before there are Dropbox, Apple, Microsoft, Google, after the Jinshan, Tencent, Sina, personal cloud storage market head surging, the future in the end how?

Dropbox ahead

The current personal cloud storage market, Dropbox is undoubtedly the leader and industry benchmark. As a start-up company in San Francisco, Dropbox relies on 70 employees to provide synchronization, backup, and sharing of files to 50 million users, and up to 300 million of files are synchronized daily through Dropbox. According to a recent report by Forbes magazine, the company, which was founded for only 3 years, had a profit of more than $200 million in 2011, and the company valued more than $4 billion trillion, another wealth myth in Silicon Valley.

Before the advent of Dropbox, it could be seen as the embryonic age of personal cloud storage, that period of network file services, very not convenient: to first open the Web site will file upload, slightly inattentive may upload failed, if uploaded, the file to be slightly modified, and have to upload; When you go to another machine to access the file, You need to download it first. So in that era, U disk is a necessity.

In the 2008, Dropbox completely subverted people's networked storage life. It shows the ideal file synchronization mode: The file is placed in the specified folder, and the file is automatically synchronized to the cloud and all other devices of the user immediately. Just put your own more than one computer installed Dropbox, you can continue to edit the unfinished documents anywhere, U disk appears redundant. Dropbox another attractive feature is the safety of data, even if personal computers are lost, broken, files are still in the cloud, synchronized on a new computer, and all files are returned. In Dropbox's related posts, users often say, "Thanks to the Dropbox, they can finish the work in time after the computer broke down and so on." And, in companies, sharing project files with Dropbox is commonplace. Even the famous American Black Eyed Peas will.i.am and their producers through Dropbox jointly created the song "I Got a Feeling."

Powerful features and a good use experience allow Dropbox to be ahead of the industry's rivals, such as Box.net, a group of cloud storage companies. The popularity of capital markets also confirms Dropbox's lead. Dropbox from Combinator and Sequoia Capital and other companies to melt 7.2 million of dollars can guarantee its continued rapid development. Now they are also negotiating with some computer manufacturers and handset manufacturers to Dropbox contracts. It seems that their goal is to have each individual device run Dropbox, making it an operating system-level service.

Big companies are eyeing

At the same time as the Dropbox in full swing, the IT industry will not be a few big guys ignore. They all start, or are in the private cloud storage market.

Apple, in fact, began to integrate the idisk of cloud storage in the Mac system as early as 2000, and subsequently joined the fee-based MobileMe service, but was limited by the market share of the Mac at that time, and was limited by the idisk imperfect function, the Apple product is not popular. But now that Apple has melted down MobileMe and unveiled its icloud service, Dropbox is seen as its biggest threat because it is directly integrated into the latest Mac operating system and iOS. Although Dropbox-like file drag-and-drop synchronization is not supported for dilution of file operations, it has developed programming interfaces that allow software developers to integrate icloud support in their own software or applications, enabling the synchronization of software across different devices.

In addition to Apple, Microsoft, as an operating system provider with a large market share, could be a disaster for other cloud-storage companies if it integrates services based on cloud storage into the operating system. But it may have been feared by antitrust lawsuits in the late 90, and Microsoft is no longer able to easily integrate new features into the operating system, providing the Dropbox with the necessary space to live. But Microsoft is apparently unwilling to cede the market to others, recently it to the iOS device to provide SkyDrive personal cloud storage applications, but also put down the figure, seriously to the consumer services. After all, in the mobile device market, iOS market share can not be ignored, and Microsoft's own WP7 is not enough.

Search engine giant Google also has a reserve in this area, the "Google online document" Support all uploaded file format, it has become an online storage services, but also can edit Office documents online. But it's not as convenient as the Dropbox client, but it fits the big idea that Google wants to put everything in its browser.

Amazon is a new one, starting at the beginning of 2011 to provide users with free 5GB of music storage space. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to classify the service as cloud music, but who knows when Amazon will suddenly announce support for more file types and become a network hard drive?

Domestic manufacturers try to catch up

The domestic market, which has always reacted quickly, has sprung up to compete for personal cloud storage. For example, the most like Dropbox Jinshan T disk, currently registered to provide 20G space, and also support Windows, iOS and Android platform. In addition to provide folder synchronization service Sina micro-disk, QQ network disk, and Aliyun mobile phone binding Aliyun space and other services. Of course, these manufacturers still have some deficiencies, or is not fast enough, or support platform is not enough.

Personal cloud storage market has gradually become lively, but it is still difficult to find a comparable Dropbox products, it is no wonder that Dropbox dared to claim to lead the competition for 5 years, only enough technology accumulation to dare to say such words. Other manufacturers want to weave a larger cloud, but also in accordance with their own advantages to design a differentiated products, after all, there are various forms of clouds, the sky can be beautiful.