Cloud storage provider Dropbox is weathering a stormy month of May as Korean cloud competitors hope to make up ground.
Dropbox this week lost its Head of Product, Business, and Mobile, Ilya Fushman, to Index Ventures, a company that has invested heavily in Dropbox in the past. Fushman is thought to have been among the first 75 employees hired by Dropbox, and led the cloud server’s Dropbox for Business service.
Index said Fushman would become a general partner, and that he “is one of the most insightful individuals we have ever met.” The move comes weeks after influential German app developer Ralf Rottmann delivered a scathing attack on Dropbox, saying, “It’s a mess and when it comes to your data, it’s one you can hardly stand.” Rottmann also added, “It’s such a flawed design,” and noted, “[There is] literally no innovation at its core.”
Media outlet Business Insider’s Eugene Kim also levelled criticism at Dropbox in an article published on May 21, saying that the “clock is ticking for Dropbox.” Kim also added, “Dropbox in 2007 looks and feels almost the same as the product does in 2015. Although Dropbox added 75 new features in the fourth quarter of 2014 alone, they're not showing up as big, obvious improvements.”
Should Dropbox falter, startups from Korea are poised to strike, despite complaints by many software developers that Korean law currently handicaps cloud server developers. Under the terms of the Electronic Government Act of 2005, cloud service providers are liable to report to the National Intelligence Service should “infringements” occur in public cloud computing services.
The Korean government had hoped to make amendments to the 2005 ruling in 2014, but was derailed in its attempts by a scandal involving the minister charged with making amends to the legislation. Regardless, many analysts say that they have seen a silver lining, pointing to the government’s plans to move 15 percent of the public sector to cloud servers by 2017. Analysts said the move could represent a timely boost for developers and investors alike.
Other Korean startups are looking to move into the overseas cloud server market while at the same time trying to work with Korean and overseas IT giants in a combined effort to break into emerging cloud server markets in South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and India.
One such company is Cloudlike, a service launched by Korean-Russian venture ASDTech, which was tipped by media analysts last year to “crush Dropbox.”
The advantages of using a Korean cloud server in Korea rather than an overseas service are not insubstantial. An .mp3 file upload to Dropbox can take up to one minute, while an upload in Korea to mobile carrier KT’s cloud server could take just three seconds, meaning that there may be rich pickings ahead for Korean cloud servers should Dropbox continue to flounder.
Earlier this month, Dropbox also faced criticism over its decision to use the HTTP POST method with an API design endpoint, with fruux and Rooftop Solutions’ Evert Pot claiming that Dropbox’s decision reflected poor “API design,” and that the moved would see Dropbox “discard a number of very useful features.”
By Timothy Daniel
