Comments on: Dell’s Mini is Mega for Box.net

By: Bilal Hameed

Bilal Hameed — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:38:15 +0000

@ JayatDell. You are right to point out about the insight, I thought of mentioning this in the post, but I omitted it to concentrate more on the fact, that how this is going to be a big win for Box.net. I also think that instead of relying upon other services and startups to come up with providing infrastructure to Dell, Dell should rather do it on their own.

To me it doesnt makes sense to put your users into others pockets. Just like the OS, storage would be more stickier than a box of hardware. A Dell user could easily shift to any competitive product, but it wont be that easy to shift your entire data hosted in a cloud to some place else.

Thats just my 2 cents, of course one might argue that going into storage would be a far stretch for Dell and at the moment the company is concentrating on consolidating its core business.

By: JayatDell

JayatDell — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:57:07 +0000

You hit on an important insight: The Mini was purpose-built to take advantage of cloud computing, hence the relatively limited amount of built-in storage and the tie-in with Box.net. It is also why we are not marketing the Mini as a laptop. It is a companion device optimized for Web-centric applications. Even with XP, the user experience will be different from that of a laptop PC.

To follow up on UzEE’s comment, we believe the Mini’s value proposition resides comfortably between smart phones and laptops.

By: UzEE

UzEE — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:36:26 +0000

It appears that this new web toy is going to compete in the advanced smartphone market with the likes of iPhone and Windows Mobile 6 based devices.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:34:00 +0000

This is surely a win for Box. I hope they’re ready for the influx of traffic to their servers though. I’m personally a user of Dropbox and can’t find a better alternative so far. Let’s see what Box can offer us next.