Like Ezra, I find this explanation for Dropbox’s success intellectually attractive. Minimalism! Of course! It’s so simple! It’s exactly the kind of thing that software developers get off on. For one thing, it legitimizes our lust for Apple products — despite the fact that Apple UI betrays the idea more often than we admit — because most of us can’t or don’t want to distinguish between good aesthetics and simplicity. It’s sort of zen. It makes us feel wise. But in this case I don’t buy it.
Here’s what I think happened. Amazon launched its S3 service. Suddenly you could buy Big Storage services at essentially marginal cost, immediately. No physical capital expenses, and human capital expenses were dramatically reduced (now you need a programmer who can work with AWS, but not someone who can source, install and manage huge RAID arrays in a datacenter somewhere).
That happened, and then a bunch of people tried to resell this service with some paper-thin rebranding/UI work. Kevin Rose and Leah Culver with Pownce, and some Flickr clone with too many O’s in its name, and whatever, a bunch of people. Dropbox was the first — as far as I know — to come up with a funded business model that could provide a useful amount of synced storage for free.
Also — and this is something that the Quora answer completely underplays — Dropbox is quite technically sophisticated. It’s not just rsync on a minute cron, you know. It’s hooking into filesystem interrupts to notice when stuff changes in the synced folder, and doing it natively on every major OS. It’s got quiet but powerful ways of dealing with versioning conflicts. It’s also doing all of this with a high degree of polish (I mean: Growl notifications, c’mon). Plus it’s smart enough to do things like notice when it needs to sync within a LAN instead of over the net, avoiding complexities you might not have considered like NAT traversal. It’s not that it’s so simple; it’s actually a very sophisticated execution. It’s just that those parts aren’t necessarily visible (and no, many of its competitors were not as clever).
Now, this is minimalism, in a sense. But it’s not the sort of minimalism pointed to in the Quora answer, which amounts to “Let’s offer fewer features than those other jerks and we’ll all get rich!” It’s more about doing things that are sophisticated and difficult, and not wasting time on UI afterthoughts.
It was 2006 when S3 launched, but a few years isn’t THAT long for a specialized market to shake out. Besides, S3 prices have been falling since its launch, so it could’ve either been a lack of investment in the synced-storage space or just the need to wait for a cheaper equilibrium point that delayed the rise of a winner in the space. At some point a critical mass was reached and brand recognition took over.
Anyway, Amazon’s contribution to web infrastructure is the key here. Its transformative field-leveling effect on the industry (and the web’s increasing reliance on it) is a story that ought to be explored more in the popular press. AWS deserves a bit more of the concern that Google commonly attracts for its market power.
The Syncplicity guy does say that “File synchronization is incredibly difficult.”, but I do think that most people who aren’t co-founders of competing products don’t realize how tough Dropbox’s job is.
I have an answer on that thread as well though, regarding Ubuntu One, which is also similar to a Dropbox founder’s one-link response on that thread — basically, Dropbox works, and others don’t. It’s kind of weird that people would launch file syncing services that don’t work; but it also makes your point that these things are incredi-hard.
I do think, though, that it’s not just first-mover advantage and the ability to quickly recognize cloud-based storage as powerful. It’s also a quality product.
Yeah — I don’t mean to undercut that point. I mention the cloud storage angle primarily to note how little time there’s been for this market to really develop (I just don’t think the model was nearly as viable before S3) and to note that Dropbox’s success probably has more to do with quality than being pared down.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rory Sutherland and Peel Taggart, Michael Islip. Michael Islip said: RT @rorysutherland: sometimes minimalism’s too simple http://bit.ly/f2ZewQ great explanation of Dropbox's popularity. [...]
Great points well made. But… simplicity isn’t simple. And minimalism has been key to DropBox’s success.
DropBox’s strength is that it delivers a user experience that’s so simple the user doesn’t have to think about it. That’s crucial because it enabled anyone who could use a computer to use DropBox.
I agree, Amazon was an enabler. But you point out that ‘paper thin’ UIs on top of S3 weren’t enough to deliver successful products.
And you’re right that having a ‘funded business model that could come up with a useful amount of storage for free’ was another piece of the jigsaw. But what good is free storage if you can’t figure out how to use it?
A simple user experience was crucial. You need all the elements (enabling technology, viable business model, simple experience) if you’re going to deliver mainstream success.
Secondly, saying DropBox isn’t simple because it relies on sophisticated technology is a spurious argument. Simplicity depends on your point of view. You can make anything appear complex if you choose the right point of view. As you point out, a lot of complex technology goes into DropBox. But all that technology is focussed on making the experience simple, not on adding features. It’s a minimalist approach to user experience, not an absence of technology.
Viewed like that, DropBox *is* a great example of why minimalism works. All the resources go into solving one important problem so well that anyone can use it.
So it’s great that you opened up the scope of the discussion. But minimalism’s crucial in this case.