Box CEO Talks European Plans, Warns About Meeting BlackBerry's Fate 44
mattydread23 writes "Earlier this week in London, Box CEO Aaron Levie gave other enterprise software companies a warning: If they continue to ignore what users want and how they work, they could easily end up like BlackBerry. The shift to cloud computing makes easy for companies to abandon you: 'This shift means the onus more than ever is on the vendor. If we don't stay competitive, if we don't build whatever that that next thing is the user wants to do and build it in as simple a way as they expect from the consumer tools they are using, then we will get swapped out.'"
Not like Blackberry (Score:3)
because most people have heard of Blackberry and know what it is.
Not necessarily true ... (Score:1)
" If we don't stay competitive, if we don't build whatever that that next thing is the user wants to do and build it in as simple a way as they expect from the consumer tools they are using, then we will get swapped out "
The above quote might happen only if ...
... there are many direct competitors offering similar products in the market
On the other hand, if your company offers the only product there is, or you are one of the very few providing similar goods and/or services, you have nothing to worry.
You will still be in the playing field even after you repeatedly fuck up your customers.
Examples:
Microsoft
Nvdia/ATI
Seagate/WD
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Microsoft was the first ever company to produce an OS, or where there companies before that went bust despite at one point being market leader?
Similar for the other companies you name.
Even Facebook and Google will one day be a thing of the past.
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Microsoft was the first ever company to produce an OS, or where there companies before that went bust despite at one point being market leader?
Similar for the other companies you name.
Before Microsoft there were many companies producing OS, such as CP/M, Atari-TOS, and so on.
Most of those firms went bust because the computer platforms that their OS ran on no longer exist.
And then there were competitors such as IBM - which shot themselves in the foot once too many times (much more than Microsoft did to their own feet).
Even Facebook and Google will one day be a thing of the past.
I agree that nothing will last forever.
IBM was one time the almighty of all things technology, and look where are they now ?
But my point being, as long as your product is
Re:Not necessarily true ... (Score:4, Interesting)
2012 Net income $17.6bn on $104.5bn sales. Not that shabby.
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But my point being, as long as your product is THE ONLY ONE IN THE MARKET, and as long as the market still exists, you have nothing to worry about.
If you think you are the only one in the market, there is a good chance that you have completely misdefined your market. History is littered with companies that thought they had their market down pat and that they were the only major dominate player in it. But there are always products that are just tangential to your market that make a good enough replace
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> If you think you are the only one in the market, there is a good chance that you have completely misdefined your market
I believe this pretty much defines RIM/BlackBerry...
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Microsoft was the first ever company to produce an OS, or where there companies before that went bust despite at one point being market leader?
Microsoft was the first (I think, certainly one of the first) company to sell an OS as a commodity off-the-shelf product. Previously, operating systems had been sold to computer manufacturers, tailored specifically to their system, and developed in-house with the computer. IBM was the first company to develop an OS (OS/360) that ran on multiple computers and allowed userspace software to be trivially ported between them. Microsoft recognised this trend (almost 20 years later) and realised that the OS, no
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Holy crap, who modded that garbage up? Is slashdot giving mod points to ten year olds who know nothing of computer history? Micosoft the first one to write an OS??? That's just retardedly ignorant (as well as nearly incomprehensible, "or where there companies before"... probably meant "were" but is smoking crack while drinking rotgut whiskey.
You know what's really gone downhill at slashdot in the last year or two? MODERATORS. Slashdot's giving points to morons.
Someone with points who ISN'T a moron, please m
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You should continue reading to the end of the post before replying.
Or atleast try to keep reading upto the first period (though you've probably already hit the submit button on your reply by now).
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If the first sentence is utter garbage, why should I read further?
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Because then you'd understand that the complete post may imply the first sentence was meant sarcastic?
Actually, you should have been able to understand this if you've read the complete first sentence, but apparently you stopped at the first punctuation mark you encountered.
Don't you think it's odd that several others have replied and all of them seems to have understood the sarcasm? They might not agree with the statement, but atleast they took the trouble to actually read it.
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I am a firm believer of the theory that suggests oracle is either washing dirty money for very influential people, or has somehow managed to conceal their billing with customers so well that the customers don't know they are actually paying oracle. The company seems to do nothing, yet they have money.
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Home Depot and Lowe's is another. However, the way those two compete is that one is slightly cheaper, the other is slightly more upscale. This allows them to have the same market, but yet still be slightly different.
The problem is that Box seems to be falling behind Dropbox when it comes to acceptance. On most iOS apps, if there is a cloud provider, it will be Dropbox, then iCloud. On Android, it is Dropbox.
What Box could do to keep up is have some method on Android phones to do data transfers similar t
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>For example, when I use an app to move some large documents into iCloud, the app returns automatically. The actual transfer on the device is then handled in the background. If Box could do this, it would keep them up to speed.
I use Box as a davfs filesystem.
It does exactly this.
--
BMO
what is "Box" (Score:4, Informative)
Box Inc. is an online file sharing and cloud content management service for businesses. The company adopted a freemium business model, and provides up to 10 GB of free storage for personal accounts.
it seems like articles have started assuming we know what every product and corporation is and does.
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I had never heard of them until Root File Manager (Android file manager) asked me to connect to it.
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Well, try getting 50GB of space for free from Dropbox or Google Drive. Box runs those promos so often it's almost impossible to NOT get 50GB...
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Their enterprise security and controls are better than either DropBox or Google.
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Too bad the usability is worse than both combined.
Really Box is just a way for lazy corporate IT departments to spend money instead of do their jobs providing secure, functional file access services. The only people who like it are CIO type morons who don't know what their users need but are sure everything has to be outsourced.
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it seems like articles have started assuming we know what every product and corporation is and does.
Articles have started assuming that you're capable of using wikipedia and google. For bonus points, you might also want to try to stay aware and informed. All the people who are know what box is.
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In an environment resplendent with sources of news and information, you'd think that a "news" site (and their advertisers) would prefer people to stay on their website, rather than go gallivanting off getting distracted elsewhere.
Today you can usually count on people to come back later when they close the tabs related to their diversion, because the other tabs will still be there because their browser hasn't managed to eat them. I mean, I can't be the only one who had that problem a lot, and isn't having it a lot any more.
i-products are over rated (Score:1)
vastly.
Laptops (Score:2)
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The bottom-feeder laptop slingers are in a bind; because people really do care about price, and they listened; but now they've put out enough shoddy stuff that, for the most part, nobody trusts any unique quality or feature claims that they make(not enough to pay much extra, at least), and so they have to keep squeezing the BoM even harder than the other guy. Only
Boxes (Score:3)