Before your comment I don't think I'd heard of Xdrive. People know Amazon, Amazon already has a lot of users, and Amazon knows how to get people to buy things.
Odds are someone is going to have an account at Amazon rather than Dropbox, and when they go to the Cloud Drive site they see a massive button to upload files and get going immediately. As compared to Dropbox where the user has to download and install something first, and then go from there.
So yeah, I think Dropbox just lost a lot of potential users — sure, they may not have been the type of users who would pay Dropbox at first, but Amazon's service is only going to get better, and they're less likely to grow into a Dropbox paying user.
Entirely possible. Currently I am a dropbox customer and see no benefit in switching to Amazon. The only thing that would make me switch is if they came out with a Linux ARM client. It's the only hardware I have that doesn't have a native client and as more and more ARM devices are coming to market, more people will be wanting that.
As a Linux developer, it does feel as if Linux is a third world citizen and the company I work for has offered to do the work for them in porting it to ARM but with no response. If Amazon were to make the ARM client they would definitely see uptake in clients on the devices.
THats the funny thing about technology -- there isnt too much that is new -- its just that all the underlying factors for success are more mature, thus products today can succeed where ten years ago they failed.
Odds are someone is going to have an account at Amazon rather than Dropbox, and when they go to the Cloud Drive site they see a massive button to upload files and get going immediately. As compared to Dropbox where the user has to download and install something first, and then go from there.
So yeah, I think Dropbox just lost a lot of potential users — sure, they may not have been the type of users who would pay Dropbox at first, but Amazon's service is only going to get better, and they're less likely to grow into a Dropbox paying user.