
Steve Jobs famously called Dropbox “a feature, not a product.” And, if you look at the Mobile Hierarchy of Needs, he was right Dropbox sits firmly in “Services,” one piece of the overall device value stack.
It applies to Apple too, and there’s no better example than iCloud versus Dropbox. But that doesn’t mean they’re everything. There’s lots of data showing the high proportion of online time that people spend using Facebook, and the high volume of web searches that they do using Google. This applies even to Google or Facebook (which brings me to the title of this post). And they probably have their own ideas about how they want to engage with you (though they wouldn’t put it in those words) – assuming they think about you at all. But you’re one of a thousand things your customer thinks about in a week, and one of dozens of businesses. Your customers’ relationships with you are the only relationships you have as a business and you think a lot about them. Benedict Evans, in Glass, Home and solipsism, one of the most insightful posts I’ve read in some time:
