What Dropbox can teach us about cloud computing

Dropbox is the most deceptively simple of services.

Place a Dropbox folder on each computer or gadget you own. Drag any file into that folder. A copy of that file automatically appears on every device where you put a Dropbox folder. It’s idiot proof.

But don’t let that simplicity fool you. Dropbox also epitomizes a revolutionary shift that is transforming our relationship to technology and turning the technology industry upside down: cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product — shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network (typically the Internet).

Before services like Dropbox, we moved files between computers using thumb drives for small files, or by logging into a server to transfer really big files. But those are a pain when you have to do it constantly, especially for the increasingly large multimedia files we create.

“Because of cloud computing,” said Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, “we’re basically assuming that everything you’re doing digitally is available somewhere else through the Internet.”

To understand why, I thought it would be helpful to put a single service under the microscope to see what it tells us about cloud computing. I couldn’t think of a better company than Dropbox.

Founded in 2007, the rise of San Francisco-based Dropbox tracks almost perfectly with the cloud’s move from the fringes of tech into its defining trend. Last September, Dropbox scored an astounding $250 million in venture capital and currently has about 50 million users.

The company was created by two MIT grads, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, who were frustrated about having to email each other’s files.

Once, the problem of how to move files between users or gadgets would have been an issue for only the highest end users. But around 2007, this started to become a problem for the average person as many of us now had more than one computing device. As of 2010, 124 million adults in the U.S. had more than one device connected to the Internet, according to IDC, a technology research firm.

In the late 1990s, most of us probably just had one PC running Windows. But now we might have a PC at work, a Mac at home, and a smartphone running Android or IOS, and possibly a tablet. So moving a single file between all those devices, and changing it into different formats quickly, could be a pain. Enter cloud computing. The trends that have given rise to cloud computing are projected to accelerate over the next decade. That’s bad news if you sell disk drives or servers. But it’s going to create a world where virtually every bit of our digital lives are available everywhere instantaneously.

And that, of course, is very good news for Dropbox.