Yahoo! Mail Partners With Dropbox To Add File Attachments
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
That's completely backwards. Dropbox started as a consumer tool and is now creeping into the workplace.
I don't know a single person who uses dropbox for personal stuff, but I know tons of businesses in the furniture industry that use it all the time. For them it's only second to ftp. So it's my anecdote against yours, showing opposite things.
In fact, remote storing of business data is a huge red flag for a lot of people, so many businesses do not use the service.
You may or may not have an office for the project, you may or may not have a base of operations. You'll have dozens of people who need to coordinate frequently (constantly, really), though. And Dropbox is a major help.
Scripts, schedules, budgets, art, paperwork (reams and reams of paperwork), call sheets, gear lists, location scout photos, maps, breakdowns of 100 different sorts, VFX tests, various collections of footage (though production footage tends to be large enough to warrant sneakernet), etc etc.
I sometimes do coodinator work of various sorts on low-budget movies, music videos, etc. Dropbox made very quick inroads into that world. Even if the production doesn't have one for the whole project (and they should), departments will often set up their own. Particularly art departments, with their 50-bajillion details to track.
I've got a couple of film projects I'm developing with partners, and we use Dropbox from very early in the process. Scripts, storyboards, concept art, etc. One of our partners is in Portland, and another in New Zealand, but Dropbox keeps us all on the same page (along with Skype and Gmail, of course).
Then the entire Corp Comms department at my old work used it almost exclusively with all their vendors for PSDs, PPT Slidedecks, TIFFs... Basically any deliverable.
You're completely behind the curve. People have been using Dropbox to do their work from its' very early days. This is nothing new, they're just making it more "official".
Meanwhile, we did use Box (albeit for very different use cases from Dropbox).
I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.
Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.
On the other hand I am not sure that Yahoo is particularly awful - I use it as a garbage account for trashy site registering, and my father uses it for his main email for which it works perfectly well.
Better than this hideous new interface hotmail has foisted on me, and which is the main reason I am actually going to make the switch to Gmail.
At least they're not using AOL.
I'm pretty sure she's used it since before gmail even existed. It works for her, why would she switch?
For instance, Comscore: http://gigaom.com/2012/10/31/gmail-finally-beats-hotmail-acc...
* gmail: 220
* something.edu: 30
* yahoo: 14
* hotmail: 12
* aol: 0
And yes, these are mostly active users - we see no statistically significant difference in engagement levels between the major webmail services.
Gmail only thoroughly dominates amongst techies. Regular users largely either don't care, or very often active prefer the "Outlook style" interface of Hotmail or Yahoo.
Mostly surprised Yahoo would do this - I can't imagine we'll be seeing a similar deal with Gmail/Outlook.
Google so far will still win in the overall big ecosystem. You just can't compete with the synergy and safety of one organization fully controlling / having full management capabilities over all of the pieces.
Google is a tough company to evaluate in the long haul, because the value of some of the services Google offers to Google is difficult to assess. Plus, they make mercurial and random decisions.
You mean the single-point-of-failure of having all of your eggs in one basket, and one company completely in control of every piece of your life. You're right, how could anybody compete against that? :-)
I'm certainly guilty of this myself: I use most of Google's services, for both personal use and I use a paid Google Apps account for my startup's email / etc. And I use an Android phone. Maybe it's time to start re-evaluating some of this stuff... Hmm...
Because it's a single-point-of-failure, and because you're giving one company a disproportionate degree of control over your data.
On the contrary, this is a fast way for them to add more revenue from users that upgrade, to a service which has never made much money.
Yahoo! Mail has always been about getting users into the Yahoo! network rather than the direct revenue. E.g. a substantial percentage of users going to Yahoo's homepages go there to check their e-mail.
When I was there (I left early 2007, so things might have changed), Mail drove a very substantial percentage of Yahoo's pageviews, but most of the revenue from those users came when they interacted with Yahoo outside of the mail property - when they were checking their mail they'd rarely click on ads because they were busy with their e-mail. Better monetizing the Mail property while cutting storage costs would be fantastic news for Yahoo.
> You just can't compete with the synergy and safety of one organization fully controlling / having full management capabilities over all of the pieces.
Sounds like an ad for Big Brother....
The model you mention is the same as Google, though Search came first, and Gmail was secondary - though just as valuable.
Re: Ad for Big Brother - I LOL'd. Unfortunately, Big Brother is controlled / manipulated by for profit businesses, who all have individual goals, and that don't care about the greater ecosystem.
Maybe I'm a little traditional but last time I checked Microsoft handled this just fine on their own, is Yahoo Mail really in such a bad place that they need to outsource their file attachment hosting?
When I'm using outlook, I click on a file once and it downloads, simple as that, I don't want to have to screw around signing up for yet another service just to use it.
I don't really care how amazing Dropbox may be, if I have to screw around accessing another service instead of just clicking "download attachment" then the user experience is already ruined for me.
I can see it being a disaster in some cases, but I see it as a huge plus in another section.
Dropbox is just about ubiquitous enough for this to be useful.
| is Yahoo Mail really in such a bad place that
| they need to outsource their file attachment
| hosting?
| When I'm using outlook, I click on a file once
| and it downloads, simple as that, I don't want
| to have to screw around signing up for yet another
| service just to use it.
- When attaching, the user could be presented with a dialog that allows them to select files already in their Dropbox account. Therefore if you wanted to upload a file, you could drop it into your Dropbox folder, then compose an email.
- When attaching, the user uploads the file to their Dropbox account via the Yahoo! Mail web interface.
Both of these ways will probably create a URL to the file on Dropbox (publicly accessible, private with password, obfuscated single-use URL, etc).
[ Also, we're talking about webmail clients like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail. It really seems like you're comparing them to Outlook+Exchange, which is something completely different. ]
- Share from Dropbox: when composing an email, insert a link to a file already in your Dropbox.
- Save to Dropbox: when reading email, save a received attachment to your Dropbox.
- Upload to Dropbox: if you try to attach file over the 25MB attachment size limit, you're given the option to upload it to your Dropbox and link to the file on Dropbox.
More likely they're in a place where they'd like the referral revenue that's likely involved if/when those users upgrade to a paid Dropbox account.
When Gmail launched and Yahoo panicked and increased limits, they quickly realized that users actual e-mail storage use didn't grow very quickly - it's probably far outpaced by growth in storage densities.
Shifting attachments to Dropbox gives sufficient space for most users on the free tier "forever", but of course Dropbox gives users other benefits which they might very well want to pay for.