The ease with which customers can <i>or will</i> migrate from one service to another is greatly exaggerated by this article, and many many other articles like it.<p>Look at web search--it's no harder to type www.bing.com instead of www.google.com (it's actually 2 letters easier), and for most common searches, the results will be exactly the same. "What time does the Super Bowl start". "Facebook login".[1]<p>And yet, Bing has not significantly dented Google's web search market share despite $billions of investment in technology, advertising, incentive plans, etc.<p>> If Dropbox accidentally destroyed just one person’s file, he said, it could erode the trust of all its users.<p>Ha! Dropbox destroys user files against the will of users all the time--it's inherent in the concept of a syncing service, and why we warn each other, "Dropbox is not a backup service."<p>And if you're thinking of just straight-up data corruption or loss, look at Evernote, which does that on a regular basis yet continues to grow.<p>There's nothing more to this story than the fundamental threats that face any business in any industry: if you fail to please your customers, you leave the door open for competitors. But, that doesn't mean there is no margin for error. Or even a small margin for error.<p>[1] <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2051199/Facebook-Login-Fiasco-Demonstrates-Challenge-in-Competing-with-Google" rel="nofollow">http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2051199/Facebook-Login-...</a>
> <i>If Dropbox accidentally destroyed just one person’s file, he said, it could erode the trust of all its users. “This is like the same sort of genre of problem as the code that you use to fly an airplane. Even if it’s a little bug, it’s a big problem.”</i><p>As someone who writes code for jet engines, I find this perspective laughable. A better analogy would be if an automated baggage handling system lost your bag. You'd lose your stuff and the airline would lose your trust. You might rant about it on a blog and a few people would get upset and switch airlines with you. But nobody dies.
As a frequent Uber user in Chicago, I can attest to the fact that Uber <i>often</i> has no available rides for me when I need one. Just this past weekend at a rather busy intersection in Chicago, after requesting both an UberX and regular Uber taxi multiple times, I kept getting texts from Uber saying "we can't find an Uber for you at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please try again soon!"<p>So the article's suggestion that "customers opening up the app and seeing no rides on the map" would be an existential threat to Uber is currently being proven wrong by Uber's success. That happens <i>all the time</i> and Uber is still doing alright.
"Dropbox is not diversified"<p>How diversified was Google in its first ten years? Ads and desktop search overwhelmingly ruled. How diversified is Facebook? How diversified is Twitter? How diversified is Apple? (with the iPhone generating 75% of their profit)<p>This tends to apply to almost any big company in its formative years. They get big because they put all their wood behind a killer arrow that made all the rest possible. That's not to say Dropbox will have that future, but rather that criticizing them for not diversifying at this point is a low quality criticism.
The ignorance and arrogance of Uber about the French union situtation is mindbogglying:<p>> <i>This is also why Uber believes it can’t compromise once it begins to offer its services in a new city, or a new country, like France. It strives to work with regulators to accommodate its existing service rather than changing how it works.</i><p>It's not the regulators/government that are a problem, it's the taxi unions. You're talking about a place with a very strong, and very long history of active union activity.<p>"We can't compromise on service". "Fine, we'll drag your drivers out of their cars and set the cars on fire. Your move."
I've personally never found Dropbox to be what I want in a file-sharing device.<p>Ultimately, I think its really a shame that the OS vendors haven't made 'cloud-based auto-discovery and user-control over publication' a major feature of their OS. The reason we need/want/love Dropbox is simply that the mainstream OS vendors dropped the ball, imho, and got lured away into Web2.0 land when they should simply have been adding these features - a distributed, cloud-based networked filesystem - directly to the OS. Why do I need another custom extension for this, from an unknown startup, when it could as easily be implemented as an OS feature? I think the reason is, the vendors are asleep at the wheel.<p>I've enjoyed the process of setting up my own cloud services for things like filesharing, using whatever tools I can .. but I sure wish it were just something to 'turn on' in OSX or Ubuntu, or whatever .. without requiring a third-party involvement (Ubuntu One or iCloud = no thanks!).<p>So I see Dropbox's future as being pretty cloudy, personally. I think the repercussions for American cloud providers, especially, are coming .. the desire for a private cloud is a big itch.
"Uber could make the recent complaints go away fairly quickly. It could drop surge pricing. And it could acquiesce and change its service in cities where government and industry have come out against it."<p>This is false. If Uber gives an inch, their competitors will go for the kill and move on to targeting the jugular. What they want is for Uber to not exist, and for there to be no new competitor or revolution in their business. There is no way to appease their competitors that results in Uber surviving as a useful service.<p>What Uber's competitors want is very simple: 1) they want to not have to compete with any innovation; 2) they do not want to have to change or improve their services; 3) they want no new, fast growing entrants allowed in their markets<p>Basically what they want is a frozen, guaranteed market with zero market forces. That's why their response is: violence, regulations, political leverage, etc (anything but innovation or actually competing with Uber).
If all startups face the same problem then the strongest startup wins. Simply naming a risk that all startups face and then saying the strongest startups in their respective domains are more at risk isn't really cutting it for me. If there's anyone that would figure out how to store my files in the cloud reliably it's probably dropbox and if there's anyone that's going to solve the math, science and cs problem of moving cars around...it's probably uber and not lyft or any of the other competitors. For now, their $ Billion valuations are safe and sound.
The alternatives are either running your own service or switching to a dropbox competitor.<p>Even at huge companies with resources dedicated towards IT infrastructure, systems still go down with regularity. Dropbox is probably still more reliable than what many large companies use.
The real strength of Dropbox comes from the ecosystem of apps that use dropbox to store data. It is hard for newcomers to challenge that network effect. But competitors like Tonido are doing interesting stuff by focusing on the security, privacy and the private aspects of owning your own cloud. If they are able to change the narrative from utility to trust and security then newcomers have a fighting chance.<p>Finally it comes to what wins the customers: Trust or Utility or the Balanced of Both.