Omnidrive better damn hurry…
Posted: March 29th, 2006 | Author: jonto | Filed under: Management, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »I love the concept behind online storage. As noted in the “Online Storage Gang” blog entry by Michael Armstrong at Techcrunch, this is an idea who’s time has come.
Please keep in mind that I’m attempting to make a point, and not criticize. Web 2.0 companies do need to launch if they are going to compete with the majors (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) What’s the point of being small and nimble, if you can’t get out in front? 37signals have some ideas about how to stay nimble and are having tremendous success.
What Nik’s writeup entitled the “Economics of online storage” fails to capture is the opportunity cost of not being first or early to market in terms of cash flow and market share. Without doing comprehensive research, this is a very difficult figure to hammer down.
At first glance, Omnidrive appears to be a supped up version of Gmail Drive Shell Extension. Those of us in the know, use or have used the gmail drive shell extension. While I’m sure that Omnidrive will have more features and offer a better value proposition, one is available today and the other is not. Ok..the time argument is not entirely fair since the Gmail drive extension has been around for quite some time. (The real reason is that the environment is controlled in Omnidrive’s case. Last I checked, the “Gmail service” was not endorsed by Google).
Speaking of time, let’s see how Nik Cubrilovic is spending his: Blogging while buddy Michael was on vacation and podcasting with, you guessed it, Michael at Techcrunch.
Let’s see how the rest of the Online Storage Gang are doing. The guys at Stronspace have no shortage of customers since beginning their “Mixed Grill” offering. Ryan Carson’s DropSend hit 15,000 users in 4 months. They are on to bigger and better things, i.e. “Web App #2“. Box.net has been integrated with fellow Web 2.0′er Netvibes.com and Goowy. It appears as though Box.net is attempting to be the backend storage to other Web 2.0 offerings through the use of its API. Will this strategy work? Who’s to say?
Omnidrive’s features had better be kick ass if it is going to catch up some of that lost market share. Hopefully it will launch before Gmail drive does. All hope is lost otherwise. If you don’t believe me, try researching how tough it is for Yahoo to get users to switch from Hotmail to Yahoo mail. This is going to be even more difficult when you end up competing with “lifetime” accounts. You guessed it, I’m a Strongspace lifer. Please pardon the horrible grammer and profanity in the title, but “Omnidrive better damn hurry”.
Update: I’m using SFTPDrive and Strongspace in a similar fashion to this screenshot. XDrive is also offering a Windows Explorer styled interface.
This is actually Nik’s second shot at an online storage product. His first, known as “My Virtual Drive” faltered badly when he decided he needed to take holidays, multiple, and disappeared for weeks at a time during the final development, leaving his developers with little work lined up.
One thing he was always good at though was generating hype, this seems to be working for Omnidrive also. I guess we’ll have to wait and see whether this one gets past the “vapourware” stage.