We’re no stranger to competition at Box.net.  As soon as Amazon S3 launched in 2006, everyone and their college roommate was building a Box.net competitor in some capacity.  Every once in a while we see emails like “I’m going to use XYZ-Drive instead of Box because they give me 2,000GB of storage for free.” In fact, I wrote about this 3 years ago.  While it’s great that other companies recognize the value of offering storage, we always cringe at the idea of moving important data to these new and unproven companies.  Sometimes they’re even from billion-dollar companies like HP. Take for example this email that we received:

” HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009. “

That was hard to predict… Except that it wasn’t.

With the shuttering of three ’storage’ services in the past 60 days - Yahoo Briefcase, AOL Xdrive, and HP Upline - it’s clear that the big guys are missing the point. “Online Storage” has been so disastrously simplified as a concept, that big companies think all you need are commodity hard drives attached to the internet and you’ll soon be participating in cloud computing.  You can just imagine the corporate theses behind launching storage services in the cloud:  “It’s the next big thing, we have lots of hard-drives, and lots of customers… what could go wrong?” Well, everything.

So here’s the secret that the big guys are missing. It’s not about where you put your files, it’s what you can do with them.  And at Box.net, we’re razor-focused on creating the best collaboration tool for teams and businesses. Yes, we store your files - and we’ve got years of experience doing that. But what we’ve built on top of that is a platform for collaboration. The cloud isn’t just about connecting me and my files online. It’s about how I can now share and connect with people everywhere.  Simple, open, and powerful collaboration.

Post by Aaron Levie, CEO and Co-Founder of Box.net