1) they developed a technology that in theory should be easy to duplicate, but in practice is extremely hard. Large teams always mess this up (even world-class teams, e.g. at Microsoft, which has had several stabs at this), and small teams often don't have the skills to work with so many orthogonal elements at the high competence level required.
2) They have supportive users signed up on yearly contracts. That makes them very resistant to competition.
A Dropbox competitor would ahve to be 10x better for people to switch. That's hard to achieve.
I've been thinking about this lately as I use Dropbox more and transition from working at home to an office and find myself using 2 computers more.
A Dropbox competitor just needs to sync my app settings and stuff on top of what Dropbox does. I am gone the instant someone offers me a way to turn on my laptop and have an almost-replica of my workstation. Or upgrade phones, tablets or anything else.
Sync my <breed of device> is a lot better than just syncing some files across them.
I've been thinking the same thing recently. If the OS itself just lived on the cloud and had local copies it just updated, then your stuff would always be in 'sync' (including settings/apps).
Moreover, you could access the same OS using different platforms (mobile vs laptop) and it could behave appropriately. We're already moving towards this to some extent with more and more sync and push services.
NB Just to be clear, I'm not talking about a pure web-based OS and thin client (e.g all of google's products are like this). I mean being able connect to something in the sky that keeps it all in sync whenever you have a data connection.
I would hope rather than a single competitor there would be an open standard for this kind of file replication and then multiple implementations and service providers.
1) they developed a technology that in theory should be easy to duplicate, but in practice is extremely hard. Large teams always mess this up (even world-class teams, e.g. at Microsoft, which has had several stabs at this), and small teams often don't have the skills to work with so many orthogonal elements at the high competence level required.
2) They have supportive users signed up on yearly contracts. That makes them very resistant to competition.
A Dropbox competitor would ahve to be 10x better for people to switch. That's hard to achieve.