SkyDrive is a threat to Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

SkyDrive is a threat to Dropbox

pcworld.com

60 pointsdavux63 comments

Probably against the grain here, but agree. Not so much SkyDrive but more the integration between Mesh Skydrive, windows, mac, free office web apps and windows phone 7.

It's a seriously impressive, well integrated platform that costs nothing and doesn't tie you into keeping the data in the cloud. There's a copy always on your machines.

no-one is doing it as well as Microsoft if you ask me. Outside the mainstream tech press trendy Microsoft bashing I know a lot of people who are switching back to Live and Office 365. They're sneaking in the back door while everyone is bitching about them.

Add in support for the 360, and it becomes a cloud home media center.

Yikes. That's a really good point.

In general, the 360 is a pretty powerful freight train. "Add in 360 support" to almost anything Microsoft does and the picture changes pretty drastically.

trendy Microsoft bashing

I've noticed an uptick of the "poor maligned Microsoft" angle lately. It is a boorish tactic to neuter counterpoints (essentially the yang of the "fanboy!" rallying cry). I would argue that many Microsoft products get a pass they would not get from any other company.

I tried Skydrive with OneNote, imagining a world of integration and usability. It was a horrible failure, not least because Skydrive has a comical latency for changes to propagate, rendering it useless for many purposes. Add the terrible, terrible UI. Further the "bundled" angle is a tactic that most consumers and businesses are rightly wary of now, and it gives Microsoft little advantage.

Dropbox has nothing to be afraid of from Microsoft. And eventually Microsoft will simply abandon SkyDrive (after various rebrandings) and leave adopters in the lurch.

I know a lot of people who are switching back to Live and Office 365

Sure....

In the real world, their products do real work. Why not praise that? Fuck consumers - who cares! Business is where they make a killing because their products fill all the gaps.

OneNote works fine for me. Latency is usually in the seconds range which is fine. I don't think you'll be switching devices every 5 seconds. Even on a shitty O2 GPRS connection it's fine for me.

>I've noticed an uptick of the "poor maligned Microsoft" angle lately. It is a boorish tactic to neuter counterpoints (essentially the yang of the "fanboy!" rallying cry).

There are a bunch of MS haters around, even on HN.

For example, Microsoft watcher and insider Paul Thurrott's site http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN(banned from even appearing on the new page), most probably due to excessive flagging from haters and fanboys of other platforms, while Gruber's posts get top billing.

> I would argue that many Microsoft products get a pass they would not get from any other company.

Really?

I've flagged Gruber in the past for posts that were contentless flamebait (in my opinion, of course).

I don't know what the story is with Thurrott. Because of the banning, it sounds like a special case that the mods of HN have ultimately decided on, not just the users. So I'm ok with believing that it's not just a story about factions and groupthink.

I think excessive flagging can hellban websites, just like too many downmods can hellban users.

I really don't see anything remotely ban worthy on Winsupersite, do you?

Dropbox is now at the inflection point of having become a standard. All of the various cloud-drive solutions are gauging themselves in comparison to them; as such, they have won.

Will SkyDrive manage to become a good competitor? I would expect so, especially given how Microsoft can push into the field by piggybacking it on Office, etc.

However, should Microsoft? No.

For Microsoft, SkyDrive will not sell more copies of Windows or Office. Instead, it will simply be another waste of money and resources on a feature that will not sway people to their products. If you're going to get Office, you're going to get Office - a cloud drive won't convince you over some other offering.

You have it backwards. SkyDrive won't sell more copies of office, it's office that will sell more subscriptions of SkyDrive.

Not really - my point is that SkyDrive adds nothing to Microsoft's strategy.

It won't really sell large numbers of Office, and the fact that less than 1% of people use more than 7gb (the free tier) means that it will make very little money overall.

Office will certainly sell subscriptions of SkyDrive, but they'll be free subscriptions mostly and the people won't really care about it. It doesn't make the core product offering more compelling, which seems to be their core strategy based on the yearly price.

Dropbox has done so well because they aren't just the first mover - they are the standard by which others are judged. With this in mind, Microsoft is making a mistake trying to make an offering to compete with it. They should have just made a deal with Dropbox in the first place.

Dropbox integration would be a fantastic selling point for Office; SkyDrive integration is not.

> "Dropbox integration would be a fantastic selling point for Office; SkyDrive integration is not"

I think you may be discounting businesses that actually purchase a lot of Office licences. SkyDrive can be a way of providing file-syncing and sharing that's 'good-enough' for their employees/company. (edit: by which I mean it's a valid strategy to try and protect your turf).

I can see an analogy here with Sharepoint. My (limited) experiences with Sharepoint have been annoying and tedious yet the fact that it integrates with existing MS products and is 'good-enough' has made it very successful for Microsoft [1]. I'm not trying to suggest that SkyDrive could be a $1b business but that we shouldn't write it off so quickly.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-billion-dollar-bus...

Ok, that is a good point - there's certainly some instances I'm not familiar with such as the one you cite.

I'm still dubious, especially due to the market penetration Dropbox has, but I guess we'll see :)

Dropbox has little "market penetration" in the overall market of MS Office buyers.

Dropbox is familiar to us and the circles we are in, but that doesn't mean it has any traction at all among the middle-America soccer moms using MS Word to make flyers for little league or the pet shelter. (The recent photo sync update should help with this.)

Techies typically "misunderestimate" the traction of entrenched tools among normals and the value of building add-ons for those entrenched tools.

With a 25GB/user limit less than 1% of the users need more than 7GB of storage.

That sounds like an argument in favor of keeping the 25GB cap. Does Microsoft not trust their own data? Are they really allocating 25GB/user currently, do they need the revenue from the 1% that will now have to pay or what is going on?

Good point. The only thing I can think of is that they don't have to give too much for free -- they just have to give more than their competitors.

Dropbox gives 2gb for free, so 7gb from Microsoft is more than enough to be a competitive advantage.

Also, by not starting out at 25gb, Microsoft can slowly increase the free rate, as and when necessary, and generate lots of free press and happy users along the way as well.

Lastly, since Google's service hasn't launched yet, perhaps it's not prudent to get into an arms-race right off the bat.

This may be a result of some pressure for the online services division to start turning a profit as they are MS's largest money pit at the moment.

Lack of Android and Linux support is still a concern. MS has to address this or enable third party apps access to these platforms in order for it to be a real threat to Dropbox. Especially Android since it's one of the fastest growing OS out there.

From http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

>If you have an Android device, we also encourage you to try other apps from partners built using SkyDrive APIs. For example with Browser for SkyDrive or Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive, you can view, access and upload documents or photos on your Android phone. Portfolio for SkyDrive lets you organize and upload photos from your Android phone in batches to SkyDrive. If you want to add SkyDrive support to your app, site or device, please visit our developer center.

Looks like there's OneNote and third party apps, but official support would be nice.

SkyDrive is a threat to Dropbox because they're cheaper? I think Drew Houston said it near the beginning when asked about competitors, "Do you use any of those?" That's the difference.

Anyone coming up with a personal equivalent to Dropbox? as in same simple interface, but storage is a multi-terabyte box at your home/office (instead of a few gigabytes "out there")?

If memory serves one of the YC companies was doing exactly this, however I forget the name.

I haven't tried or used this, but you could try implementing your own version of sparkleshare: http://sparkleshare.org/

It's open source, and uses git to backup files. Not sure how close to your needs it is, but I'm sure there's other stuff a google search away.

http://www.aerofs.com/

This assumes their software can be installed on the storage box.

I haven't used it, but there's Pogoplug and/or its software: https://pogoplug.com/

I use Transmit and Amazon's s3. Not the best but works well for storing photos. Cost me about $1 a month.

http://www.syncany.org/ looks promising but - like many OS projects - lost some steam after the founder took on a full-time job.

https://www.cubby.com

Cubby - LogMeIn product .. 5Gb Free Cloud

+ "Unlimited peer-to-peer (P2P) syncing means no storage limits when you're syncing between your own computers. Storage limits only apply to cubbies that are synced to the cloud."

https://www.cubby.com/faq

"LogMeIn Prepares To Take On Dropbox & Box With Launch Of Cloud Storage Service Cubby"

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/12/logmein-prepares-to-take-on...

http://owncloud.org/

My home machine has a hard drive??

Yes much like Windows Mobile is an Android killer.

yup, or as much as G+ is a threat to Facebook. It's all about the network effect.

In my professional circle, everyone is using Dropbox. Dropbox is doing a great job. There's little incentive to move.

There is traction to changing away from Facebook. How social/networked is your dropbox experience?

Very. I have a shared folder with a few classmates for class projects. I have a shared folder for crazy videos/media/Top Gear episodes my friends post from all over (not everybody wants to upload thier vids to youtube for the whole world). I've got a shared folder among friends sharing music (piss off RIAA) Anytime somebody needs a file from me, I give them the DB link. You can run scrips and host websites from DB. I think just the potential to do awesome things, and the simplicity of how it just stays out of your way, means it will hold customers a lot better.

I rely on Dropbox shared folders for exchanging files with some clients. I also use the Dropbox integration of a few essential iOS apps quite regularly. For me, switching would mean having my clients install Skydrive, as well updates to those iOS apps for Skydrive support.

Everyone here is talking as if it's a all/nothing game. I'm using both DropBox (to continue to share with existing people) and SkyDrive for my larger, private stuff. I was able to move several gigs off of DropBox (with no effects with current people I share with) and then downgraded my account. A 2 Gig should be enough for me to share with the people I already share with, and I moved several gigs to MSFT.

Personally, I think DropBox should have had a smaller, paid plan than the $10/50 gigs. I only needed about 5 -7 total.

Problem solved for now, though.

Edit: I should add that my gigs of stuff I uploaded to SkyDrive today took a fraction of the time that my DropBox uploads take (not entirely sure why, but I've always felt DB throttles large files when uploading).

I don't get it. Can I say the same thing about GDrive?

"Yes much like Google+ is a Facebook killer."

So GDrive too is destined to fail?

I guess it's cool to be snarky and earns you some points, but are you trying to make a point here?

I wouldn't say that.

Dropbox is good because is ridiculously simple. I've been using Windows 8 + Skydrive full time and well, it's not a sunshine.

It's buggy, and just upload files (not folders) and I don't believe it will get so much better after the official launch.

And yes, Dropbox is probably screwed. I've been using SugarSync just because it gives me more free space.

If google drive is just as good as dropbox, well, you know the drill.

It's certainly becoming more impressive, though I think the network effect of Dropbox will certainly help them along.

Having the built in Office apps in Skydrive and the ability to have the same word doc available on every computer as well as the phone is very handy.

I don't think amount of free space is a great competitive advantage. If that is the case Sugarsync should be at least 2x bigger than Dropbox (since they are give 2x more free space than Dropbox).

I believe amount of free space only become competitive advantage after services have the same service quality as competition and the same level of integration with applications using the cloud storage (editing, collaboration, project management, photo sharing, etc.).

As of now Dropbox has way more applications supporting it than SkyDrive so it seems Dropbox is still ahead.

I just got my ridiculously named teenager mail address to 25gb skydrive, alas, I'm not going to use it because I can't ever send files with that name to anybody. Registered a new account, it forced me to give out my ZIP code, and bam, only 7 GB, I was thinking that offer would be available for all customers before launch. Well, I'm already. pretty happy with my paid dropbox account, and Microsoft's out a potentially paying customer.

I would say Windows Mesh is more a competitor than SkyDrive because its folder sync and online storage capacity. Neither are getting anywhere near as much traction as DropBox, but it would do MS good to merge these services asap.

Threat? No. An perfectly viable alternative? Certainly.

That's exactly what they've done. Mesh became the SkyDrive desktop app. It lets you get remote access to your PC (either files or remote desktop), as well as sync with the cloud.

I'm home now running both the SkyDrive app and the LiveMesh app which itself has cloud storage. I think MS needs to clear things up as both services have serious overlap and will cause consumer confusion... even if that mean removing cloud storage from Mesh. As it is now, users can choose to have LiveMesh needlessly sync the local SkyDrive folder.

Mesh has a nice interface with baked in sync scenarios such as browser favorites and office settings. The quick and easy remote desktop is a good touch as well.

The sad thing about Dropbox is that my free Dropbox account has less space than my free gmail account. If I found a service which was as reliable and provided at least 7 gigs of free space, I would jump ship w/o thinking twice.

Close enough, http://getfreecloud.com/ gives you 6 gigs.

Stop being selfish and refer more people :). I'm up to 16GB free on mine.

Uh, if only it was this easy... Everyone i know is already using Dropbox.

SkyDrive supports really awesome collaborative editing of Office file formats in the Office 2010 desktop apps. That got me (and a few friends of mine) to use it instead of Google Docs for collaborative editing of documents.

Microsoft has an app for Windows and for Mac OS X that integrates SkyDrive with the local OS

So, no Linux? Then SkyDrive is no threat to Dropbox, at least to my household.

Ah the good old "How come [add name here] won, no one I know voted for him."

What % of people use Linux?

When I last tried, any client can access SkyDrive over WebDAV using http://d.docs.live.net/{cID}

(cID can be found in most SkyDrive URLs).

Does webdav sync to your disk automatically and such?

It was read-only when I tried that, every file writing would fail.

Since when is PCWorld's opinion worth anything?

We need a plugin that automatically encrypts everything before it goes to the cloud and then decrypts it when we download. So when the subpoena start to rain our data is safe regardless of what Microsoft or Dropbox are forced to do by the gov

for those that took the point: I meant an extra level of encryption, just in case there's a backdoor on the default one.

Keeping a truecrypt container (with built-in hidden container, naturally) synched with dropbox is quite easy.

Does this require unmounting the TC volume for releasing the file system lock on its container and letting for the sync to happen? Or does Dropbox know how to use Shadow Copying now?

On unmount, unfortunately. It's a bit of a pain, but it ends up working for me because I keep any TC volumes unmounted unless I'm directly working with their contents.

http://www.wuala.com/

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