Dropbox

LArge corporations cannot be stupid enough to share secrets with strangers. Cloud is for small SME's and individuals.

There is only thing hindering their monetization, streaming media. Once the bandwidth is there, dropbox will have a huge headstart. People won't be sharing their files. I currently use google drive because of its integration, but it's clearly behind dropbox and other upstarts in terms of ease of use.

I'm a little hesitant to entrust my data to a content provider, such as Apple. Terms of service usually allow them to disable an account at their sole discretion, with or without cause, as Amazon has done to Kindle users without explanation.

Content companies seem likely to have a broader set of automatic flags for shutting down accounts than storage-only firms, and at least some of those flags are apparently not obvious to users. I think I'll stick to firms like Dropbox, and remain a little obsessive about backups.

SugarSync does the job for me and I like that I can share any folder, not just one that Dropbox required me to use the last time I tried it.

Storage is very much like a commodity, and it is only good to give business to the likes of Dropbox and Box.net, otherwise the big boys would never lower their prices.

Having used both, plus the traditional "private" storage, I would point at even newer solutions like the Manugistics presented at VMWorld CA recently as a neat means to make yourself a semi-private storage on cloud and include collaboration. Collaboration is way more relevant than just storage.

I partner with another contractor on a project basis. We use Dropbox for our shared files. It's simple and really helpful compared to emailing versions like we did in the past.

Steve Jobs would have made the headline `A nebulous feature'

I agree with Steve Jobs. Cloud-based file sharing is going to become a standard OS feature. I don't really see how DropBox and the rest of its independent competitors are going to last. As we saw in the '90s on desktop OSs, any feature useful to most of a devices users will sooner or later get incorporated into the OS. On top of that, these services are more-or-less interchangeable with their only difference being price and capacity. Both of these can be changed easily and, therefore, do not represent unique features with which to lock-in customers.

icloud as an IT technician is very hard to work with, consider an application which constantly expects itself to be online when someone hands you their PC to be fixed, endless message boxes interfereing with normal operations. The user HAS to log out to stop it, there is no other option to stop the behaviour. Programs that potentially are a problem are windows live which gives an option to have manual starts (Start/computer/manage/services) (), game clients(Steam, Orgin) and most Anti Virus Software. Very bad practice, bad for the user unless its the Anti Virus Software because the users interest is coming last - after all its the users bandwidth, data cap, memory and processing time.

The problem with dropbox is that it is easy to use, share data across platforms and it is based in the US; it does not encrypt data and markets itself towards professionals in Europe who should know better than to use a FREE service hosted outside the EU with confidential data in violation of EU data protection rules - and does not warn the user of this in any way that a non technical person would understand. Cloud services should be served with a privacy health warning. My main example would be a Headmaster storing pupil data from sims pages in Excel documents in Dropbox, to those who know this is an export from SQL database which would have all the pupils home and contact data stored in the document. Because users never encrypt the pages we are relying on chance and goodwill in what has become a major hacking target for the data harvester. But they still do it.

" If you are sharing files with a dozen other people on Dropbox, a move to Google or Microsoft would require all 12 to move with you."

This sentence is factually wrong.
You can share files or folders with anyone even if they are not subscribed.
The truth of the matter is that there isnt any real difference in the functionality of any of them. The winner/s will be the ones with the most reliable cloud.

Prefer Skydrive with free 25 gigs

The neat thing about Dropbox is they've made it very easy to share files across platforms. You can be given access to a dropbox very easily. It actually reminds me of the old "public folder" idea only done better.

A number of my programs and apps - if those are really different things - use Dropbox for synching. For documents of my own, I use iCloud because it translates those into iOS format so I can work on my iPad. The messy bit is I have to download from iCloud to my Mac because the file formats aren't the same. That means I get a version in iCloud and some older version on my Mac and have to worry about confusion there.

It is interesting you don't mention Google Drive until the very end. I'd consider that to be a closer competitor to Dropbox than Microsoft/Apple cloud systems for the proprietary factors you suggest, whereas Google Drive can be installed as an app on an Android device as well as an Apple device.

Earlier this year, we unplugged our network server and went to Dropbox for Teams. It's terrific, not least because any file is now accessible from anywhere on any device. We do pay for the service, but at only 25% of our previous IT costs.