Thursday, February 26th, 2009

New Rule: Don’t Launch a Storage Service if You’re Going to Close Down Within a Year.

By

We’re no stranger to competition at Box.net.  As soon as Amazon S3 launched in 2006, everyone and their college roommate was building a Box.net competitor in some capacity. Every once in a while we see emails like “I’m going to use XYZ-Drive instead of Box because they give me 2,000GB of storage for free.” In fact, I wrote about this 3 years ago. While it’s great that other companies recognize the value of offering storage, we always cringe at the idea of moving important data to these new and unproven companies. Sometimes they’re even from billion-dollar companies like HP. Take for example this email that we received:

” HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009. “

That was hard to predict… Except that it wasn’t.

With the shuttering of three ‘storage’ services in the past 60 days – Yahoo Briefcase, AOL Xdrive, and HP Upline – it’s clear that the big guys are missing the point. “Online Storage” has been so disastrously simplified as a concept, that big companies think all you need are commodity hard drives attached to the internet and you’ll soon be participating in cloud computing. You can just imagine the corporate theses behind launching storage services in the cloud:  “It’s the next big thing, we have lots of hard-drives, and lots of customers… what could go wrong?” Well, everything.

So here’s the secret that the big guys are missing. It’s not about where you put your files, it’s what you can do with them. And at Box.net, we’re razor-focused on creating the best collaboration tool for teams and businesses. Yes, we store your files – and we’ve got years of experience doing that. But what we’ve built on top of that is a platform for collaboration. The cloud isn’t just about connecting me and my files online. It’s about how I can now share and connect with people everywhere. Simple, open, and powerful collaboration.

Post by Aaron Levie, CEO and Co-Founder of Box.net

  • http://chuwe.com Sean Grove

    Meh, not much substance here. A bit of marketing speak, “razor-focused” etc.

    I wouldn’t mind some details about how they excel, why they built those features in, when they realized each feature was the next critical step, etc. That would make for interesting reading, and I assume as co-founder you have knowledge to explain it all.

    I’m looking forward to reading about it :D

  • http://www.adsnational.com Michael

    Great post, Aaron. Found you from Hacker News. Online storage is indeed a simple concept, but you are right, allowing for collaboration and other utilizations of the cloud will bring about great natural selection in this particular market.

    - Michael

    P.S. Just as a sidenote, from your blog here I attempted to click on your “Box” logo in the header to find out more about your company and services and was hit with a page not found error. Turns out your logo is linking to http://blog.box.net/{#http_root#} instead of your homepage. I sent a feedback submission from your contact page, but just wanted to drop a note for you here as well. First impressions really do count for your new visitors.

  • jd

    Point well taken but I have to nitpick regarding Yahoo Briefcase (not familiar with the AOL and HP offerings so I won’t comment on them). Briefcase was available back when you guys were in CS 101 and this makes your headline seem a bit sensationalist.

  • eve

    You might want to fix the URL to your Contact Us page => http://blog.box.net/{#http_root%23}company/contact-us

  • http://www.box.net Sean

    Hello everyone – thanks for reading the blog and letting us know about the incorrect Box link. We’ll get it fixed ASAP!

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  • http://drop.io sam lessin

    - well said, we agree 100% :)

  • Robert

    This service just keeps getting better and better. I have yet to move my stuff. Keep up the great work.