Dropbox recently invited its 50+ million subscribers (source: Dropbox fact sheet) 
to upload their photos resident on their mobile devices up into their Dropbox account in the cloud. As an incentive, Dropbox offers up to 3GB of extra memory. I’ve just done that and am happy thus far with the service. But, two major thoughts come up in light of this action:
- The warfare over the image (and your photos) is just heating up.
- The battle in the clouds might remind us of the key Battle of Midway (whose 70th anniversary is June 4-7th, along with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee). There is a looming battle between some of the “biggies” (Google, Apple, Oracle…) and some smaller players for ownership of our data in a virtual warehouse.
The war of words images
Inspiration from Manuel De Los Santos (on YouTube)
On the heels of the changes of Facebook’s image-enhanced timeline, the rise of Pinterest (4 million daily visitors), the Facebook purchase of Instagram (cf my write up on the $1B instabillionaire), Dropbox is now encouraging its users to upload all their mobile photographs in the hopes, I can only assume, of making Dropbox evermore indispensable for its users. Considering the sentimental value of one’s photographs, the opportunity to back up your photos seamlessly is highly pleasing.
A…head in the Cloud
Presumably, Dropbox’s move is in reaction to the Google Drive initiative, which is cutting the proverbial silver lining out of the clouds. Between the iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox, we now have three solid options. Of course, there are many other in-the-cloud storage options. The fight to be ahead in the battle of the clouds will be rather exciting to watch. People are becoming increasingly comfortable with the concept of the Cloud. The way that “shared” data is respected — from a confidentiality standpoint — by the cloud owners (ie Google, Dropbox, Apple…) will be important to monitor. The small print about how these services “co-own” our content can be quite off-putting. The other challenge I see relates to the stability of the cloud, whereby that content may not always be predictably available and secure. Stormy weather may yet lie ahead.
What do you think of this latest move by Dropbox? Are you a buyer or a seller?
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