Thoughts on Dropbox Carousel
…from someone that’s spent a decade in the consumer photo space.
Earlier this year I wrote about our transition away from the consumer photo space and into the business photo space. While this news doesn’t affect Trovebox much I wanted to share my views about its impact on consumer photo sites.
Dropbox announced Carousel today. I don’t believe the effects of Carousel on the wider consumer photo space have been actualized yet. My gut reaction is that they’ve dropped a bomb; from a very high altitude. It’ll take time to hit the ground but you’d be foolish to bet against gravity.
Here’s why. Carousel is a photo app for iOS and Android. It’s one part photo archiving and another part photo sharing. That’s worth repeating. It leverages the archiving attributes of Dropbox and layers viewing, sharing and conversing on top of it.
There are only a few companies I can think of who could pull this off. Probably not the usual suspects you‘re thinking.
Most photo sites share the same set of problems which make them unsuitable candidates for photo archiving. Building an archiving service is more than storing photos in the cloud. Consumers, for example, have a hard time differentiating why their photos might be safer on Flickr than on Facebook. The cloud is a black box to them.
The beauty of Dropbox has always been that it stores your files locally and a copy in the cloud. Photos stored on Dropbox are reasonably safe. More importantly they’re safe in a way consumers understand; by having photos on their laptop backed up in the cloud. Catch the subtlety there? A photo from your phone ends up on your laptop and a copy is stored on Dropbox. Consumers understand that; the cloud is a copy of a file they can see exists on their laptop. As an engineer who understands the way Dropbox works it seems like a convoluted and sometimes backwards description. Consider this a friendly reminder that perception is reality.
Now Layer Carousel on top of that and you have the glue consumers have been waiting for but couldn’t envision. An elegant way to browse, share and converse right from your canonical photo collection. I don’t expect consumers to realize it right away but they will. Whether or not someone else can scrape together all these pieces in time to compete is another question. It’s more involved than Google launching Drive and integrating G+ Photos with it. Consumers don’t view Google as the company they want to entrust the safe keeping of their photos to.
As I mentioned earlier I believe there are other companies better positioned. I hope they’ve been working on something because Dropbox is in the lead; we just don’t know by how far.
There’s plenty of room for innovation and I hope Carousel acts as a multiplier for the consumer photo space.
What Dropbox has going against it is pricing. A consumer’s perception of how much storage should cost is impacted with Google’s recent price reductions for Drive. Even prior I wasn’t convinced many consumers were willing to spend $100 per year to store 100GB of photos. Dropbox knows that photos are a holy grail but they need to revisit what they charge for; it can’t be GBs.
In the long run I believe the storage model Dropbox has chosen could be its Achilles’ heel. Bitcasa’s Infinite Drive is a more modern solution. I’m curious how easily Dropbox could transition their 6 year old product into something similar or if someone like Bitcasa could do a better job starting from scratch.
The thing I love about technology is that winners are temporary. There will always be opponents trying to outdo the leaders. I don’t expect any different here.
