Software giant's SkyDrive boasts over double the amount of users.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that cloud storage service Dropbox is nothing more than a "little startup".
SkyDrive, the software giant's own cloud storage service, has more than 200 million users as of October, 2012, as revealed by former Windows president Steven Sinofsky (who is, incidentally, said to have been fired by Ballmer himself). Dropbox reached the 100 million users milestone back in November.
"Well, you've got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually," Ballmer told BusinessWeek. "We've got a lot more Office users. And actually if you even want to go to the cloud, we have a lot of Hotmail and SkyDrive users. I'm not beating on Dropbox. They're a fine little startup and that's great."
The executive's comments come after Microsoft launched Office 2013, which allows users to save documents to SkyDrive. Ballmer, however, has had a history of bashing the competition. Back in 2007, he stressed that the iPhone will never account for a significant market share. He also criticized Android by stating that Google's mobile platform can only be used by a computer scientist.
If your a live user, your being counted as a Skydrive user whether you like it or not!
No wonder MS is crashing....
Yes, I do. IBM has or had a strict policy against disparaging the competition.
It's known as class, a word which does not appear to be in Mr. Ballmer's dictionary.
Dominating a market, and being the most profitable entity in a market are two different things. Dropbox is awesome but they're currently burning through investor capital without taking in a ton of revenue. They're going to be in a tough spot if they aren't financially stable when the VCs want to pull out. Other more established companies have also taken notice of Dropbox's success and created product plans that are either more affordable than Dropbox, or more varied than Dropbox.
Their marketing team has some serious work to do if they don't want to get pushed out of the market that they helped create.
Till i see another cloud storage solution as simple, unobtrusive and error free Dropbox will be the only cloud solution for me. I used to use Skydrive... i don't anymore.
And just how many Windows 8 users are we at now Mr. Ballmer? Not licenses shipped and sitting on a shelf but actual users.
100 million sounds like a pretty big number now doesn't it?
hmm... Mr. Ballmer you're not even a startup by your definition when it comes to mobile devices.
Back when apple was creating iCloud they offered dropbox a very large amount of money to be a significant part of the new service (I think it was around a billion $ offered?). Dropbox refused, which I respect, they want to pave their own way in the world, which they already have done to a certain extent.
However, since they started up pretty much everyone offers cloud storage natively. MS has Skydrive, Apple has iCloud, Google has Google Drive, etc. In the future I can't see to many people bothering to install dropbox when their device already has native support for a different cloud storage system.
I think dropbox does things the best currently, but it's potential customers are becoming narrower everyday. Mega just started up and his offering 50 GB for free. I've worked on my dropbox account for years (free version) and have grown it from 2 GB to 22.4 GB currently.
tl;dr: dropbox is a great service, but with every major company offering native cloud storage now, I can't see dropbox having nearly as many customers in the future, even if they do offer some of the best features.