A lot of them will be products critical to business, like design and engineering apps. The whole idea of needing to manage local storage is dying. Videos will be the last data type to tie consumers to local file systems, but I wouldn't bet against falling storage and bandwidth costs for very long. Apple doesn't provide archival storage for photos yet, but give it a few years. Again, Apple's leading the way for consumers: Take a photo on your iPhone, and it's synced automatically to all your Apple devices. Photos, then? Yes, you need local storage to keep a photo library. Furthermore, more users are moving to leasing access to streaming music libraries (look at Spotify and its competitors). Apple's iTunes Match (when it finally launches) will go a long way towards freeing users from having to worry about storing their music. Buy a Kindle, connect it to your account, and it downloads your books as you need them. The last data types to need local storage are media: books, music, photos, and videos. Other traditional apps, like Quicken, are aging out, being replaced by cloud-based services like Mint (from the same company, no less).
These apps-there are others-inherently store user data in Web servers, replicating it to local storage when needed. Many great new productivity apps, like Evernote, don't even expose their local file storage to users at all (unless you dig). For new files, who needs local storage for anything but cache and occasional disconnected use? Even Microsoft's Office apps (like Word) can save to SkyDrive, and Microsoft's new Office 365 is a direct competitor to the Web-based Google Docs.
Look at productivity apps: Apple's apps (like Pages) sync via iCloud. More of the apps we use store their data in the cloud, so it can be retrieved by a user as he or she moves between computers and mobile devices.
#Bitcasa pitch software
Because the whole concept of using software to create and store files on a local machine is becoming anachronistic. In a short time, I'd guess two years, the world won't need file sync software at all.
#Bitcasa pitch android
iPhone and Android versions are forthcoming.īut Dropbox, SugarSync, CX, and all the rest are zombies.
#Bitcasa pitch windows
Personally, I'm SugarSync user because I think it's a superior product, but there are times I seriously consider moving to Dropbox because other developers are doing so many interesting things with it.ĬX runs on Windows (shown), OS X, and the iPad. Dropbox is spreading throughout the Web because it's so elemental. That love is paying rich dividends: Developers are using the Dropbox APIs to hook the product into all sorts of interesting new Web 2.0 products. In that order.ĭropbox does that, it does it reliably and easily, and its users love it. But it's so blindingly simple and so laser-focused on the one single thing its users want that's its outstripping competitors.Īnd what users want is not a bunch of marketing doublespeak like "Content's greatest value is when it's shared," and "All media is social." What they want is to drop files in a folder on one computer and to have them show up on another. It's not very flexible and its mobile app is not strong. Look, there are a bunch of technically outstanding products in this field, and the worst of them, from a features perspective, is winning all the accolades. "The real value in content is to collaborate and share to create new ideas faster on any device, at any time," CX's chief marketing officer, Keith Pardy, told me, after CEO Bradley Robertson handed my interview over to him. And I say that as the biggest user and promoter of file sync software that I know.īefore I get into why I think every product in this category is doomed, let's look at CX pitch in some more detail. That's because while the market for sync products is going to keep growing for a while, it's a dead concept. It looks like a strong offering, with unique tools for sharing. CX is another cloud storage and sync product, like DropBox, SugarSync, Box.net, Bitcasa.
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