The Dropbox downward spiral. Or is it their biggest chance?

In recent weeks, there has been a lot written and discussed about cloud-hosting company Dropbox. First, we discovered that Dropbox employees can decrypt and see our stuff, although the company said the opposite all along (which, some claim, gave them an unfair competitive advantage). Then, they had a security bug, which allowed anyone to log into any account, with the wrong password. Dropbox waited too long to communicate about this with their users, who learned about it on third party websites. Finally, they updated their Terms Of Use to include some very controversial Facebook-like copyright ownership granting them some rights, which could potentially be abused into, say, publishing your content publicly.

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Facebook is dead. Everything’s gonna be OK.

Pointing out Facebook slip-ups is like shooting fish in a barrel, except the fish is actually a dead horse. Facebook has replaced Microsoft as the dream target of everyone looking for a good rant on unethical business behaviour. But while Microsoft is like a vampire who can’t ever die, Facebook could easily pull a Hendrix (or worse, a Tony Soprano) any day if it’s not more careful. Read between the lines of recent headlines and ask yourself who will benefit from Facebook’s collapse.

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Please mobile me already!

Foreword — Jobs has spoken

In case you missed it, you should know that everyone has been talking about Steve Job’s “Thoughts On Flash” in the last couple of weeks. This is an important read, not because it talks about what’s currently happening (i.e., the lack of Adobe’s Flash technology in the iPhone, and now the iPad), but rather because Jobs is writing about how Apple (and other Internet big players) are going to position themselves in years to come. Sure, the iPad is sexy, but the changes ahead go much deeper, and announce where Internet business is heading.

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© 2023 Yves Bennaïm