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Comment by terpua | Hacker News Reader

I would say Dropbox is on its way.

It's one of the more successful ones but for all the hype I haven't signed up and neither has anybody that I know outside of HN. Now I'm probably not the target audience anyway so that's no surprise, but I really can't see something like dropbox being the next google.

They have a business model that requires payment for anything but the most trivial uses (which is great, they'll be profitable, but it is a definite brake on growth). Hard to do that soft of thing without charging for it, and as soon as the price goes over $0 the market is much smaller.

It's a much bigger decision to pay at all than it is to pay $10 or $20.

Data syncing is a huge problem and its need will only expand. Dropbox is at the forefront of this (i.e. when I think of search -> google, shopping -> amazon, online storage -> dropbox).

The consumer space is growing (more devices and users) and the enterprise space is wide open. I can see Dropbox going after Sharepoint et al.

You're right, it might not be enough to be the next google but they might come close.

With the cost of storage being what it is I seriously question any business model that tries to sell you a plan based on the size of the storage on the other end of a wire.

You're basically setting yourself up to have a 'gmail' pulled on your 'hotmail'.

Why not extract value before that happens? There is always going to be the risk of a new competitor operating below costs, but money in the bank is the best way to fight that.

PS: Nobody things the best way to beat gmail is to offer 1 TB email accounts. Email fell behind the HW curve but as long as Dropbox stays reasonably close to actual costs nobody is going to dramatically undercut them.

Students are a big user group. The allure of accessing your school related files from anywhere (web access is a big plus) is quite big. They're probably not that lucrative, though.

Its a cheap off-site back-up solution. Think about it: Back up everything on multiple PCs for $20/mo. Access from anywhere, even the web.

I haven't converted to a pay using yet, but I'm at 50% of my 3.5GB. When I hit my space limit, I will likely switch.

Okay, this is just a counter-anecdote, but I know tons of people that are using Dropbox. It's really big and getting rapidly bigger in academia, which is how I first found out about it.

Last week I had to send a PDF to one of my students (an undergrad philosophy major) and suggested dropbox, and she already had a public folder set up.

I could not disagree with you more - my mother has a dropbox account (and she is _not_ technical), so does my brother, my grandmother (though only because I set it up for her) and pretty much every person I know who is working on anything related to computers.

It sounds to me like you are quoting verbatim something Chris Anderson might say.

Software companies in the valley have gotten along just fine charging for services and software with only giving users a token free trial. Microsoft and Oracle are doing just fine.

If you want to look at the big players on the web, there are far more public companies charging for services then there are whose main product is free. Akamai, Sales Force, Amazon, Ebay, NetFlix, Omniture (now adobe) I could go on and on.

When talking about public companies who give their primary service away for free, I can only think of 4examples with market caps over a billion: Google, Yahoo, IACI, and sometimes Monster.

There is a lot of hype about free, thanks especially to Chris Anderson's highly accessible book and influence, but if you look at the results and who really made it big (not 100 million dollar exit big, but multi billion dollar market cap big), starting with a business model where you charge your customers is the best way to achieve that.

Another example: Citrix opensourced xenserver some time ago. The basic version is free as in speech and bear.

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