Quick Note: Dropbox – Mailbox Marriage Is A Hail Mary Pass
This morning an acquisition news got techies excited about Dropbox buying the iOS app with lots of buzz but few invites, Mailbox. In short, this is a hail mary pass after Google announced that you can now attach large attachments with Google Drive integration in Gmail. Dropbox had to react and they reacted by buying [...]
Box Answers IT Concerns–Deeper Security Option Roll Out
Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dropbox releasing an entire swathe of new security functionality that sees it firmly mark itself as entering the corporate market and responding to the needs of IT. As I said at the time, Dropbox has long signaled an intention to move up the food chain. In [...]
Celebrity Engineers–Software’s Equivalent of Arts Patronage
Back in the days gone by, if you were part of the landed gentry, lording over your landholdings and the common folk who lived on said land, you’d look to becoming a patron of the arts as a way to ensure your name would live on after your death. While perhaps not a particularly sound [...]
Dropbox Listens to the Criticism–Starts to Mature Corporate Product
I’ve been a harsh critic of Dropbox in the past – mostly because I feel they lack maturity – both as a company and as a product – and this lack of maturity is a real risk for enterprise customers using their product. It seems Dropbox has been listening to the criticism that myself and [...]
More Proof That Shadow IT is a Growing Issue
When talking with organizations about how the cloud can help them, I’m often told that cloud has no place in their organization and they’re not using it in any way, shape or form. They also point to the perceived security risks that cloud brings as their #1 reason for not using any flavor of cloud. [...]
Sure Dropbox is Potentially Insecure, but Does it Matter?
It’s summertime down in my neck of the woods and that’s a good time to go out on a limb with a statement that might get people a little fired up. Bear with me on this one though… Over on GigaOm Barb Darrow has a good write up about the findings of a survey commissioned [...]
When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two
The time is probably going to come when you have to build a sales team in SaaS. It may be Day 1 if you have plenty of capital and are selling to large enterprises. It may be X months down the road, once you close a few deals of large enough size ($x,000 ACV) to [...]
[Some of] what you need to know about the cloud for 2013
Towards the end of last year, David Linthicum and I joined GigaOM’s Adam Lesser on a skype chat to take a look back at cloud successes and failures in 2012, and forward to cloud opportunities in 2013. GigaOM released the conversation as a podcast this morning. Amazon, Rackspace, Google, OpenStack, DropBox, and more get a [...]
Big Data as Core, Big Data as Context, and Big Data as Buzzword Bingo
It’s neither particularly newsworthy nor insightful to suggest that ‘Big Data’ gets everywhere these days, but two recent items reminded me of the gulf between credible execution of a big data play and the more questionable tacking of the big data meme onto an otherwise useful product. Christmas is coming. Which means skating, and pantomimes [...]
Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive; maybe they’re not apples after all?
Cloud storage product Dropbox is one of those tools that users tend to rave about. It’s deceptively simple. It’s pretty reliable. The value proposition is immediately apparent. It has paid tiers of usage that bring additional storage but (like other freemium beacons such as Evernote) the free offering is rich enough to be compelling, engaging, [...]
FileLocker Launches By Taking a Shot at Dropbox and Box
In launching FileLocker, InfraScale CEO Ken Shaw is claiming that both DropBox and Box have been “substantially misrepresenting their capabilities when it comes to security and won’t be adopted by enterprise or Government” because of it. Those are pretty strong words…
On Not Forgetting to be 10x Better
I was struggling what to make of the news that now, AT&T too was jumping into the cloud storage-as-a-commodity business offering 5GB of free online storage. Just like DropBox. And Google Drive. And Box, if you use it that way. And iCloud. And SkyDrive. And. And. And. You could make fun of it, but it [...]
BoxWorks 2012–Predictions and Prognostications
Next week sees me in San Francisco for the annual Box user conference, it’s an interesting time for the company, only a couple of weeks ago Salesforce stole some of their thunder by announcing a file sync and collaboration tool. BoxWorks is an opportunity for the company to fight back, and for CEO Aaron Levie [...]
Salesforce Becomes the First Next Generation Enterprise Platform
Strong words but, as I predicted, the announcements at this years DreamForce point to Salesforce firmly creating for itself the position of first true IT platform of the cloud era – that’s a lofty statement but a justified one I believe. From the release, here are the announcements:
Box Counters Salesforce Smackdown
At TechCrunch Disrupt last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff leaked his own company’s news of a new content collaboration and sharing service dubbed ChatterBox. I’ve actually known about the product for a month or so, my sources who told me of its initial existence said that it was a direct
