Jay Eye Sea

Recently DropBox introduced an innovative storage solution which makes data backup and collaboration very simple. One of the differentiating features is a client which syncs between the online cloud storage and local (offline) storage. My initial impression is very favourable, but I’m still trying to understand what I might be charged for the service.

DropBox provides a good backup solution for a single or multiple computers. Pricing is simple - you get charged for your storage requirements – 1Gb Free, 10Gb for $20 etc.

It will be a bit more complicated when you start to share files – which is actively encouraged and works really well. One of the features which is promoted on the website is photo sharing. As a father of three I have a large photo collection. Furthermore, being Irish I have a particularly large family who are always keen to stay in touch.

Let’s say I have a 10Gb collection of photos. Reasonably I would be charged for the storage – say $20. But what if I share the collection with 10 other members of my family? Do each of my family also get charged $20? Presumably not - like Flickr, Picasa, etc. I would expect that only the owner pays.

So far, so good. But what if my family and I start putting pictures of a family event in one DropBox folder? Who pays then? The owner of the folder or the person who shared the pictures? Let’s say it’s the latter. What happens if I decide I don’t want to own some of the family photos because I’m running out of space in my current quota but the rest of the family wants to keep them? Do I have to assign ownership to one new person like you can do with Google Docs. I think what I’d really want is the option to have the files (and therefore the cost) to owned by the group of people who have access to it. That way we all contribute to what we have access to.

This approach does add complexity though and could encourage negative behaviors - the more people in a group that drop out of having access to a file, the greater the burden on each of the remaining members - encouraging more to drop out, increasing the individual costs still further, until the image is deleted: this is not the kind of spiral that service providers would want to see (unless, the dispense with direct charging and do gmail-style ads, based on the contents of the docs, or in the case of photos, by analysing the photo and providing wedding, holiday, or EXIF location based advertising)

This this might not be such a problem for families sharing photos, but it could easily be one for businesses, particularly where several businesses are working together. Despite the complexity, it does solve one joint venture problem nicely: when the joint venture is disolved, amicably or otherwise, if one business no longer wants access to a file, they can drop out of having on-line access (perhaps after archiving it off-line, or moving it to a private folder) and they no longer bear any cost.

With the growing popularity social networking and collaboration, I can envisage sharing different files with different people, and vica versa others sharing with me. This creates a spider’s web of storage – being a multiple of what any single individual can generate. So what will happen: do we keep paying and do we get charged when others inadvertently increase our storage requirements? Will the cost of storage continue to fall faster than the generation of content, or will this type of service also move to an advertising model? There’s certainly more to on-line file sharing than first meets the eye.