Most of the companies similar to Box and Dropbox will be gone in 2 years | Hacker News Reader

Most of the companies similar to Box and Dropbox will be gone in 2 years

businessinsider.com

21 pointstlogan5 comments

This is obviously a ridiculous non-article, but I think it's interesting in the meta sense. What benefit is BI getting out of publishing this? Are its editors invested in this startup that's supposedly going to sweep a market away from G/MS/Dropbox? Or do they really just get that many clicks from readers who think they now have the inside scoop?

Media 101: Always tell people what they want to hear

Actually, I believe there will be a change in cloud storage. There will be less sync of files and more raw block device access. Imagine if your local ISP could offer this with low latency and cost slightly above an external hard drive.

For example Bitcasa was a great idea. Horrible business execution though and a lot of performance and stability issues.

I don't see local ISPs offering this; I _do_ see CDNs offering this sort of service though. A CDN is Dropbox or Box with more reach, and they already have the POPs, they'd just need more capacity.

Aren't 60TB and 100TB SSDs just down the road in the next few years?

A CDN doesn't have the in-house expertise to do this successfully, and the fundamental nature of file storage is at odds with how they operate.

Every CDN is desperate to add other businesses to their portfolio, because vanilla CDN is considered a commodity. Unfortunately, they are all focused to distraction on bottom-line costs (which are almost entirely network driven). This will lead them to fail to recognize how to nurture a non-commodity service that is largely systems driven.

Then there's the operational culture shock. CDNs operate many small deployments where data loss has no hard consequences. Dropbox-like companies operate few very large deployments where data loss has extremely major consequences.

At first glance it may seem like it's just storing some bits here and sending some bits there, but the focus of your business and the collective instincts of your team are big factors in your product and company succeeding in a particular market. Greatly larger SSDs might lower certain barriers to enter the file storage business, but there's more to it than that.

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