Why didn't / doesn't Amazon create a service like DropBox?

DropBox's entire business is using Amazon's S3 service to provide distributed storage. Wouldn't it be easy for Amazon to offer such a service directly?

It seems like an obvious choice since DropBox, in the most basic sense, is just a wrapper around Amazon S3.

Competition Amazon Dropbox

asked Apr 17 '14 at 18:30

Mark Bartley
2 points

Multiple-master file synchronization is a hard problem. Even Google can't get it right (as their Drive client keeps crashing every day). Read here for theory behind master-master replication (specific to databases) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff650702.aspx – Starrychloe S. 10 years ago

1 Answer

You're assuming that storage is the main component of what Dropbox is, but that's not the case. The sync, bandwidth management, version control, and extensive integrations are what make Dropbox Dropbox.

Even if Amazon could reproduce all of the tech behind Dropbox, Amazon wouldn't gain much from competing with them. They'd lose Dropbox as a customer and be sending a signal that big users of their AWS platform are a potential target. They'd be competing against Google, Apple, and Microsoft in yet another market, and unlike those companies, they don't yet have a large consumer platform that integrated cloud storage is a strategic benefit to -- Kindles just aren't that large of a base.

answered Apr 28 '14 at 17:10

Jay Neely
6,050 points