Backblaze, the online storage company, found that only 10 percent of people backup regularly I would imagine anyone reading this who has tried to convince friends and family to buy a $70 drive for Time Machine or similar is nodding wearily. There are multiple reasons why the latter is a more attractive target for all software-as-a-service companies, especially those focused on data:Ĭonsumers need to be convinced of the value of their data – Despite the fact that data is precious and unique to each consumer, the vast majority of consumers don’t know or don’t care. That is likely why Dropbox has spent much of the last year pivoting away from consumers to the enterprise. I’m increasingly convinced that, outside of in-app game purchases, consumers are unwilling to spend money on intangible software. After all, notably absent from my piece on Business Models for 2014 was consumersoftware-as-a-service. Today, though, I’m not so sure Dropbox’s model makes sense theoretically, but it ignores the messy reality of actually making money. A services-centric company like Dropbox, on the other hand, ought to pursue a horizontal strategy predicated on maximizing the number of interconnects with the layers above and below. Not so for iCloud: data is available only on Apple devices, and it’s not exactly clear how to get it out…The only coherent strategy for Apple is a walled-garden of sorts that protects their vertical business model. In The Dropbox Opportunity, I argued that Dropbox’s business model gave them a key advantage vis–à–vis device/platform vendors like Apple:ĭropbox’s approach to my most important data is much more in line with the value I ascribe to that data: it’s available everywhere. This is the niche Dropbox, which just raised $250 million at a $10 billion valuation, seeks to fill. Thus, over the last few years as the number of fat clients has multiplied – phones, tablets, along with traditional computers – the idea of a thin client with processing on the server seems positively quaint however, in the context of our data, that is the exact model more and more of us are using: centralized data easily accessible to multiple “fat” devices distinguished by their user experience: It’s precious, and it’s worthless, all at the same time. To be precise, I’m referring to personal data – my data, if you will – the opposite of “big data.” Were I to no longer have access to my various documents, pictures, emails, etc., I couldn’t simply walk into the store and pick up some more, and you couldn’t loan me yours. In fact, Moore’s Law and the rise of ARM has made the exact opposite the case – processing is abundant.ĭata, on the other hand, is scarce – indeed, it is the scarcest resource in technology. The problem with the old thin client model was the assumption that processing power was scarce.
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