Cloud files: Features, products or companies?

Heavyweight players have joined the cloud. Recently, Microsoft has made major changes to SkyDrive, Google has launched a long-awaited drive, and Apple has already launched the icloud. Unsurprisingly, three of the world's most powerful technology giants have gone hand in hand in the cloud market. Not only does this prove the importance of cloud storage, it also means that the theory of verbal discussion will soon become a reality.

SCALEVP is an early investor in box and a leader in the field of corporate file sharing based on cloud computing. "I agree with Bill?" Gayle, but I'm going to do a broader discussion on this. " File synchronization and file sharing are just a feature, but it will be the hallmark of a new architecture created by PCs, tablets and smartphones, a file that is stored in the cloud and accessed and downloaded locally as needed by any device.

This is a transformation of the computing architecture that has been running through the entire PC era from Apple to generation, even in the early smartphones. The recognition and acceptance of this change by the three companies is a great endorsement of the technology industry and is setting the direction for its development.

These changes are a big problem for startups like Box and Dropbox. The typical risk for startups early on IS, "Does this change really happen?" "But now the risk is gone and whether they will eventually evolve into a function, a product or a company, making it easy for individual users to sync files between multiple devices." Box makes it incredibly easy to share files and structured collaboration with businesses. You can call these pure functions, but their features are real user needs, whose value has enabled tens of millions of of users to change their behavior and move files to the cloud.

Startups with this kind of clout have the capital to go for it. It can build products around this function, and Dropbox and Box are doing the same. They are building the next generation of cloud file systems, Dropbox from consumers, and box focuses on collaboration from an enterprise perspective. A document system is not a feature, it is a complex product, the previous successful document system has successfully established billions of dollar enterprises, such as Microsoft, Novell and receptacle appliance.

Perhaps the description of the new file system is incomplete. Traditional document systems are often invisible to users, often bundled in a device's operating system or network operating system. The rapid development of new products is precisely because of their ease of use and the implementation of application-level functionality, but the technology of this user synchronization or enterprise collaboration is ultimately based on the management and reading of the files stored in the cloud.

Google, Microsoft and Apple will not just wait and die. They will compete vigorously, using tight technology integration and financial bundling with existing products to advance adoption rates. If this is just a functional battle, this strategy will have a certain effect.

But if it's an architectural change, and it's really built on a stand-alone cloud-based filesystem, the trade-off between the traditional defense strategy and the inevitable "installation base" will fail. This trade-off will weaken the functionality of the product, the best product on the market must be independent of the file type, and can take advantage of the existing cloud-based architecture.

Consumers need Facebook, Twitter and other consumer apps, and even products (Tv,xbox) integrated into the platform, and businesses need platform-level integrated directory systems, security systems, and legacy applications. Both are difficult problems and require a huge platform. But they are also very different.

Over the next 10 years, consumers and businesses will store most of their files in the cloud and create a billions of-dollar software market for cloud-based file systems in the process. Everyone has a file. As a result, cloud based file systems can be the biggest opportunity in the cloud computing world.

Consider only the business market, estimated at $50 per user per year and 200 million of information workers worldwide, which will be a 10 billion dollar market per year. So companies should solve problems as a whole rather than as a feature. Driven by this technological age, this feature has become a product that will evolve into some heavyweight companies in the most meaningful markets.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)