The Battle of the File Sharing and Storage Services and Why So Many Contenders?

It seems like there’s a race going on to become the people’s choice File Sharing and Storage Service. We do already have a good number of strong competitors in this space and still there are more contenders entering in.

We had Dropbox, which was the strongest and has now become a kind of old school after the arrival of other file sharing services like droplr, dropmark, mega.co.nz, Ge.tt, YouSendIt, Cloudapp and Box.

Talking about USPs which actually mean Business:

When it comes to scrutinizing and understanding the real value each service has, the drag and drop can no longer to be counted as an USP, its just one fancy way of uploading a file.

There’s more that needs to be observed and valued apart from the decorative features.

Dropbox: This one still has an edge when it comes to simplicity and pervasiveness. If you think and understand, why it has the edge? it’s because, it has a powerful file synchronizing system, which is much faster and secure.

It doesn’t come in your way, it gets started automatically when you boot your computer, tablet or mobile and as usual you continue using your applications and softwares, and it keeps syncing the files in the background. You won’t even know, you complete your work and the files is already up there in your account.

I use Dropbox and i am watching it happen, as i am writing this post, when i press CTRL+S to save, the dropbox app starts its work, i can see the dropbox icon in the right hand corner with a small blue rotating loader which indicates it is syncing.

Mega.co.nz:  If you are very much concerned about your privacy and want to have full control on the files you share, then this this one is for you. Mega started by Kim Doctcom received its popularity the day it launched. The number of early adopters registering accounts were enormous, never seen such huge number of rapid sign ups for a file storage service.

Mega is very much focused on user privacy, they have built an encryption system called as User Controlled Encryption, in which the encryption and decryption keys both are with the user and can grant or revoke access to a file whenever the user wants.

DropMark: More than file sharing, Dropmark aims to be a file collaborating system. It seems to be targeting more at the Mac using corporate audience rather than individual and it does prove to be fairly useful and beneficial for team members working remotely.

Why so many Contenders? Is there something more than just being a File Sharing & Storage Service?

I just talked about 3 of them which i found, have some seriously valuable and beneficial USPs. But why so much competition in this space? Is this all some where related to Big Data and selling of insights to brands who wants to know more about you and sell you stuffs which they think you are relevantly looking for?

Every file sharing and storage service provider has a freemium model and a large number of signed up users are free users. I don’t think the remaining paid users would constitute up to a good amount of profit.

When looking at this picture, Mega may seem to be a better choice as it claims about privacy completely in control of the user, But again even mega needs to stay in business, will it be able to bring in a good number of paid users or would it also be trading insights.

I am not sure what’s really going behind the scenes? and i am still a loyal dropbox user because of its smooth sync feature that i mentioned above. There are more file sharing and storage services coming up.

Lets watch and scrutinize.

Photo Source: DarkElf Photography