Once DOS became the de facto PC desktop standard in the 1980s, Microsoft perfected a technique called “embrace and extend” and sometimes “embrace, extend, and extinguish.” The idea was to adopt outside technologies, extend DOS to include them, then eliminate as a competitor the original developer of the technology. This was before Microsoft figured out that it actually needed third-party developers.
Lots of utilities became part of DOS and later Windows this way (remember Stac electronics?). They were initially provided for free to Redmond by their authors with the idea that users would upgrade to a paid version, only users mainly didn’t upgrade because good enough was, well, good enough. So the originating companies then tended to die.
Microsoft wasn’t alone in using this technique. Apple uses it still in OS X. And the most recent adherent of “embrace and extend” looks to be Amazon.com, which may be starting to embrace some of the more successful technologies based on its Amazon Web Services (AWS). Watch out!
AWS, which most people think of as EC2 computing and S3 storage but actually contains a dozen or more cloud-based services, has become a quick and easy way to bring new Internet services to market with little or no capital by launching them on AWS and paying with a credit card. But given that Amazon is hosting all these new companies it shouldn’t be at all surprising that the company has learned a lot from that hosting experience and may covet some of these new businesses.
The AWS-based business I have in mind today is DropBox, the incredibly successful data storage and synchronization service that runs on AWS. Amazon’s Kindle group in Cupertino is apparently readying their own DropBox clone. This makes sense for a couple reasons: 1) Amazon is already supplying (and being paid for) 90 percent of what we think of as DropBox, and; 2) the Kindle platform could use a better store-and-sync capability.
It’s sync that DropBox has right now and Kindle/Amazon does not, but how hard can it be to add that capability? Not very. And how hard is it to imagine expanding a Kindle-specific syncing service to supporting in the near future any Internet-connected device. It’s not hard at all.
In its role as DropBox host, Amazon must know nearly as much about that business as DropBox does. Amazon might well know more than DropBox, actually, since it sees those numbers in the context of all AWS customers — information that I doubt DropBox gets to see.
So there’s a potential downside to being able to start a global data service with just a credit card. But I doubt this will dissuade many startups because AWS still has many advantages and it’s flattering in a way to be considered good enough to steal.
“Not very” hard to add sync, the man says. Heh heh heh… that all depends on just how many different things you have to sync and whether the system was built to make sync easy in the first place. rsync is easy. Merging databases is hard.
It sure is. Dropbox makes things easier by syncing tablets only one-way–something I learned when the content I had laboriously created on mine was obliterated in favor of an earlier version on the cloud during a sync. That, obviously, won’t fly for Kindle.
“rsync is easy. Merging databases is hard.”
That should be printed out and hung in every cube around here…
“rsync is easy.” That’s why Andrew Tridgell earned a PhD inventing that program.
Okay, so, the PhD was actually for the delta-encoding algorithm that lets you synchronize files without using a lot of bandwidth and without keeping a list of changes since the last sync, like Apple’s Time Machine does. (By the way, the rsync delta-copy algorithm wouldn’t really help with Time Machine.)
But I see your point. Rsync copies whole files in one direction, but people want to copy files in both directions, merging changes when both copies have been modified. This is another difficult concurrency problem.
This is a very misleading description of Time Machine.
Time Machine and rsync are set up to solve different problems.
In particular the delta-blocks rsync stuff assumes the problem is replicating the state of one hard drive on a similar (but not identical) hard drive that is CONNECTED BY A VERY SLOW LINK. It is irrelevant and slows things down if this condition does not hold. So, for example, rsync to another hard drive on the same machine, or to another machine connected via gig ethernet makes no use of the delta-blocks.
Time Machine, on the other hand, is built on top of OSX, and the OSX file system maintains an ongoing log of changes that are made to the file system. This log can be utilized by any app on the computer. Time Machine is an obvious client, but other clients include things like the Finder (so it can update windows when things change) or the various pieces of Spotlight. And let’s not pretend this doesn’t have advantages. I run BOTH Time Machine and rsync backups, and Time Machine backups are vastly faster — the bottleneck in rsync backup is usually the scanning of both drives to see what has changed, not the copying over of the files.
It’s also worth noting that rsync on OSX 10.7 is substantially faster (like 30% faster) than on 10.6 and earlier — same app code, just OS changes. Apple is still hard at work improving low level pieces of the OS like the file system primitives, even though people constantly whine that they’re doing nothing to improve the OS.
Perhaps Bob means the two-way sync problem has been sloved with deltasync: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeltaSync .
And indeed why can’t iCloud be as useful as drop box which is clear concise provides true cross platform support.
I suspect amazon will have the same problem apple does , trying to abstract my data to suit a specific device first, then worry about others.
At the moment, Dropbox has a huge lead in the OS-specific client software (it really is excellent, by the way). Obviously there is no reason that Amazon can’t duplicate that in a year or so of work by some talented developers, but it’s still something to consider.
And how difficult will it be to get Dropbox customers to shift over? I suppose Amazon could undercut Dropbox rates, at least for the short term. Can they run a more efficient operation than Dropbox in the long term? Has Amazon entered the Dilbert Zone yet and become arthritically bureaucratic?
A better question is why hasn’t Google spawned a Dropbox clone yet? There are so many reasons for it, and no reasons against it…
Roy,
They (Google) have, and all will be revealed very soon. While DropBox is awesome (I use it extensively), I don’t believe it holds a long term defensible position. While its adoption is very wide, I don’t think it’s quite wide enough to remove the short to medium threat of someone else getting mass uptake for a similar product.
It’s easy for the “in crowd” to say that DropBox has already achieved mass adoption but this is patently absurd on the more global scale.
More here – http://lnkd.in/fSfrCq
Ben
“It’s sync that DropBox has right now and Kindle/Amazon does not, but how hard can it be to add that capability? Not very.”
Because it’s been done so well and so seamlessly so many times before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchronization_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services
The above don’t even mention PDA data syncing as attempted by Apple’s Newton, General Magic’s MagicCap, Palm’s Palm Desktop, and whatever was used by Symbian, RIM BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, etc.
Also not mentioned in the links above is the number of times Apple has failed at it with iTools, dotMac, and MobileMe. The jury’s still out on iCloud, but it might fare better due to taking more of a “cloud-version-of-iTunes” approach.
What gooses your new business forward in the early stages may turn you later into a cooked goose. That’s why you should always be positively excited and ready to be eaten when a shark approaches. Pride and stubbornness always costs money.
If you’re talking about DropBox, what’s the backstory? I don’t always keep up to date on these things, but I don’t remember any news about somebody trying to buy them.
Apparently Apple tried to buy them: https://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-indeed-balked-at-major-acquisition-offer-from-apple/
iCloud is not suppose to be Dropbox. Dropbox is about syncing files. iCloud is about syncing your life. This isn’t about one service is better than the other. It’s about two services taking different views on handling their data.
At one time Apple wanted to buy Dropbox and were willing to pay a pretty penny. Dropbox didn’t go for it because being owned by Apple would lose Dropbox’s big selling point: Dropbox treats all devices equally. Being owned by Apple would at least make it appear that this was no longer the case.
The genius of Dropbox isn’t the software. Remote syncing is not all that difficult. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of months to duplicate the few features that Dropbox offers. I’m sure Amazon has enough people to create a duplicate service before the end of April. What Amazon won’t have is ubiquity. Dropbox is everywhere, and Amazon’s service won’t be. It’s what Google found out about Google+: You can easily create a social network software with neater features than Facebook. What you can’t create is the social network. People don’t join Facebook because they life the software. They join Facebook because that’s where their friends are.
So, Amazon just creating another Dropbox isn’t enough to compete. Yet, adding more features will just make it more complex. Dropbox is all about simplicity. You just save a file, and you don’t even have to think about it. Amazon is going to find competing directly against Dropbox more daunting than they realize.
It’s what Microsoft found out with the Zune. At that time, Apple was a tiny little company compared to the nautilus that was Microsoft. Microsoft was sure they could put together enough money and manpower to put Apple in its place, and they were sure the Zune would do just that. Zunes could play the radio and iPods didn’t. Zunes could “squirt” and iPods couldn’t. Zunes came in brown and iPods only came in white. What the Zune didn’t have is the ecosystem the iPod had developed, and in the end, that’s what really mattered.
A lot of people have problems with squirrels. Squirrels eat up the food that people put out for the birds. Squirrels get into people’s roofs. However, I warn my firends that they should never try to outsmart a squirrel. If you succeed, well, your opponent was just a squirrel. You don’t get any credit. But, if you don’t succeed, you’ve been outsmarted by an animal with a brain the size of a walnut. It doesn’t look good, and unfortunately, the later outcome happens more often than it should.
There’s no real way for Amazon to win by going head-to-head against Dropbox. No one is going to be impressed by a company that’s 100 times larger driving the smaller one out of business. And, more likely, it might end up being an epic failure for Amazon. Microsoft tried to go toe-to-toe against the iPod and failed miserably. The Zune marked the turning point in Microsoft’s reputation. Before, Microsoft was an unstoppable force that would soon take over the world. Afterwards, it was simply another clueless, overgrown corporate entity.
Maybe that’s why Apple didn’t duplicate Dropbox, but instead created iCloud. After all, Apple didn’t become the world’s largest company by doing stupid stuff — like trying to outsmart a squirrel.
I’m gonna pick a nit here. When the Zune came out, Apple was a $100 billion company, and Microsoft was about a $200 billion company. So, yeah, Microsoft was worth more, but Apple was hardly “a tiny little company compared to the nautilus that was Microsoft” (and I’m going to guess you meant “juggernaut” or “leviathan” instead of “nautilus”
Probably the main reason that the Zune failed was that Microsoft was entering a mature market (MP3 players) with a product that wasn’t a significant improvement over the existing ones. iPods were “good enough” and Apple was continually obsoleting it’s own models with new, improved ones. To switch to Zune would have required existing users to do some major work. And the market was already saturated. In the past, Microsoft has entered markets that were expanding (operating systems and desktop software) or markets where there was a complete product turnover every few years (video games). If they’d entered the MP3 market in 2002, things may have been different.
And, Steve Jobs tried to buy Dropbox, but they wouldn’t sell. He told them that they were a “feature not a product” so we’ll see what happens next…
Love the Squirrel analogy! 😀
Yes, it’s a cute analogy. But it can also be used as an excuse for laziness. Why try to do anything since there exists a specialist (with a small brain but the needed skill) to do it better than you)?
… and wasn’t it always thus? “Sigh!” 😉
“Nautilus”? You mean like big empty shell?
Well, that’s cute but actually pretty dumb. Small companies generally do all the innovating. If big companies didn’t copy them, they’d soon die out.
“Maybe that’s why Apple didn’t duplicate Dropbox, but instead created iCloud. After all, Apple didn’t become the world’s largest company by doing stupid stuff — like trying to outsmart a squirrel.” I suspect Dropbox or the future version of Sky Drive will be able to “sync your life” at least as well as iCloud. Note that Apple’s servers could not keep up with the demand for updates when the new iPad came out. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft don’t have that problem since they spent the money on servers instead of keeping in in the bank. BTW, Apple isn’t the largest company but just the one hoarding the most cash.
Cringely wrote a few weeks or months ago about a huge server farm Apple was building in [the Carolinas?].
Or was it Amazon, or one of the big telecoms? My bad memory doesn’t matter, what does matter is that somebody, or maybe several somebodies, is looking at the huge server infrastructure Google has and wants to compete.
I have a feeling that the ability to serve bits is going to become a very important metric of business health for Net-centric companies in the near future.
If I weren’t feeling so lazy right now, I’d go look up the data about the relative “farm” sizes of the above referenced companies, and also expand that research worldwide. Add in China, Japan, India, the Eurozone, offshore data havens a la Stephenson, and the always interesting “Other.” And who is expanding the fastest?
If anyone knows a good link, that’d be nice…
It’s also fun to speculate on the when the social crossover point between the environmentalists and the carbon footprint of the Internet will be reached. Duplication of effort is one of the glories of Capitalism; also possibly its Achilles Heel.
This is a major point. How USA centric are these various consumer cloud services and who is doing it better?
All my major forward leaning upper management friends are into Dropbox. None of my sub-urban, soccer parent, non-profit contacts have the bandwidth to make it function for them.
Thus far, all that MobileMe and iCloud have done for me is erased and obliterated or idiotically duplicated my data, costing me untold hours of recovering, editing and cursing. My spouse’s name, in every Address Book/Contact iteration, has disappeared from all of my Apple devices and has been replaced by listings under her employers name. When I want to call home, I get to sort through everyone she works with, to select my own home number. Oh thank you all great Apple iCloud morons!
Now that’s one reason I dislike(d) Dot-Mac and Mobile Me. Being based in Europe I found the overall speed of the service appalling. There I was (am) with all this lovely Apple technology linked to a sluggish online mill-stone. For someone living next door to the server-centre it might have been awesome, just not for me.
For some reason iCloud seems different although speed of access and usage is no quicker. Perhaps my expectations of a free cloud service are lower than one I paid for.
From my memories of working as a product manager in IT, the ” extend” part of “embrace and extend” meant Microsoft adding their own functionality into an already existing industry standard, which meant of course that it would work best on the MS platform.
“good enough was, well, good enough”!
What a breath of fresh air on a technology website! It’s usually “everyone must upgrade to a” 100M pixel camera, a 1000″ Hyper definition 8D TV, a 100 core processor with 10Tbytes of RAM – insert your own extravagance here.
The best thing about “good enough” is that it is relative to individual needs. It’s not “everyone must” follow fashion so that we can make money out of them.
But, in a world of increasing demands and dwindling resources, “good enough” may soon be a luxury so stop “upgrading” and enjoy it while you can.
There is really one reason that Dropbox became a success. In the beginning of iPhone development it was the best way to persist your data. It was simple, clean and reliable. Everyone I know got a Dropbox account because of an iPhone app. It took quite a while for Amazon to even come out with an SDK for that platform. The success with iPhone migrated to Android then on to the desktop.
Not a single third-party iPhone/iPad app I’ve looked at uses Amazon, Google or any other cloud storage provider.
Dropbox isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s great *because* it’s vendor, browser and OS neutral – it works fine on iOS, Android, Win, Lin, and OSX.
With Dropbox+1Password, I am password-keychain-enabled on almost any computer, phone or device, using almost any browser.
Dropbox isn’t a feature or service, it’s pretty much a platform (much like Gmail – with plugins like Rapportive, some folks would never move to another provider).
IMO the only reason Dropbox isn’t ubiquitous is because a) the gap between free and subscription is too big a jump for many, $0 to $100/yr for 50gb (double that if Significant Other needs it too[*]. And then there’s the kids), and b) the 2GB free quota fills up pretty quickly.
All Amazon or Google would have to do marginalize Dropbox is to provide a roughly equivalent client and move the decimals over one or two places, which they can both easily do for both price and available storage.
Unfortunately there’s very little Dropbox can do about it because they don’t own the storage they’re selling (which Cringely said above accounts for 90% of the fees).The only glimmer of light I see for them is if they can somehow make the backend storage system provider-agnostic.
I love dropbox, it’s one of the very few programs I use “that just works”. I just think they’re in a precarious situation and I hope they’re thinking of what cool service they could try next if/when they get squeezed out.
If you pester the sales department directly at Dropbox, they will sell you a non-standard account. I have a 10GB account that suits me perfectly (and yes, I have never used more than half that storage, but it’s nice to know it’s there).
thanks for that note Roy. I just might do that. Do you mind my asking what deal you managed to strike?
Can I say that I like Box.net instead? Maybe it’s rooting for the small guy, I’m not sure. The software I use to backup my phone has the option to use DropBox or Box.net and works equally well with either.
No point using a steam-roller to crack a nut when a hammer will do.
This then beggars the question as to what the majority of subscribers (free or paid) actually use the services for? With even banks now claiming they are embracing the Cloud the concept is becoming suspect. After all they just mean they are farming their storage to distant servers owned by someone else rather than their own data-centres. Not much difference except perhaps in a form of sub-contracting out. I don’t accept that we can all access our data easier in the Cloud because relying on a third-party for anything is a gamble.
Keeping data safe was always a priority of the Internet, using packet-switching to route data over a robust and self-healing network. Great in concept and in the beginning, but now the world is littered with nodes and pipes we see nothing of as users. We don’t actually know where our data goes and via what routes. Storing sensitive or valuable information on someone else’s real-estate might seem a clever bet but the reality is a loss of control in the name of a slightly higher profit.
From Amazon’s point of view, their AWS must give them a valuable insight into the usage metrics of all these smaller companies. Whether they should analyse it enough to spot a business opportunity or weakness – and let the world see them doing it – is surely a no-no. As with any Cloud service, if the customer thinks you’re peeking they might be tempted to take their business elsewhere.
Is it just me, or is SugarSync the most under-appreciated sync service out there? It’s totally changed the way I approach backups (meaning that I never ever have to bring my work PC laptop home because my work files are always automatically sync’d with my home Mac).
I’ve tried both SugarSync and Dropbox, and found Dropbox to be significantly more reliable and effective. SS synched files more slowly and more erratically than Dropbox, and has caused problems by needlessly duplicating multiple copies of identical files. It also pegged my PC’s CPU at 50% load constantly, and after a few emails back and forth, nobody there had any idea why. Eventually they apparently gave up. Admittedly, it seems somewhat churlish to complain about a free service, but it was not impressive.
Interesting. I have had the exact opposite experience with SS.
Yep, a cloud provider is like a data center. If you really care about availability, you need more than one.
Technology of a company like Dropbox is very easy to replicate, but it’s user base is not. It has the first innovator / mover advantage.
You are repeating MS sanitized spin of their strategy – ’embrace, extend & innovate’ sounds much more appealing (& legal) than ’embrace, extend then extinguish’.
The former strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of MS desire to incorporate new products that customers want.
The later strategy involves adopting widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities – like a cancer.
I don’t know if Amazon wants to go into the data storage and synchronization business, but I agree with Bob’s analogy to Microsoft. Incorporating new technologies into DOS/Windows has certainly helped it achieve and maintain dominance for nigh on to 30 years.
As for all those who say Amazon can’t do it any cheaper than DropBox, I work in the book industry, and I will point out that Amazon has no problem taking a huge loss by engaging in long, drawn out price wars with its competition. For instance, when one of the latter Harry Potter books came out, they priced it below cost, taking the loss just to attract and keep customers. That is just one relatively insignificant example; they’ve been doing stuff like that for a decade or more, and now they are the dominant player in the book industry. Observing what they do with DropBox and others may give some insight into how badly they want to dominate cloud services industry.
>”Microsoft. Incorporating new technologies into DOS/Windows has certainly helped it achieve and maintain dominance”
That’s like saying that good customer surface allowed Tony S. To contol the recycling market in New Jersey.
I found it amusing when Microsoft stopped Google from publishing out of print orphaned books…
Speaking of anti competitive behavior-ebook price fixing is a new concern:
https://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/justice-dept-threatens-apple-publishers-with-price-fixing-lawsuits-report/
I though “embrace and extend” applied mainly to standards (e.g. HTML and java). Take a standard, add DOS or Windows only features to it (often useful features) and then make the MS extensions th defecto standard ruiningh standard for everyone else.
Certainly Microsoft did steal competitor’s ideas and build them into its offerings, bu that wasn’t part of microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy just Microsoft eing Microsoft.
I also wonder if some amazons and Apples got switched.
I don’t believe I will be going to cloud music just yet, for all the reasons you mention in the cons sections. For me that list contains too many deal breakers.bodynsoil recently posted..How Virtumonde helped kill my Blog
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