I think the genius he's referring to is the fact that they're trying to get educational institutions and students hooked on Dropbox, who could then go on to deploying Dropbox for the whole university (unlikely, but it could happen one day) and the students can go on to relying on Dropbox for their future projects, potentially upgrading to Pro at some point.
Exactly this. Just looking at my posts in my Facebook newsfeed and Facebook groups, this thing went insanely viral in a matter of minutes and people really are signing up for Dropbox and really noticing it (those who haven't been using it before).
The fact that they have a competition among universities and have the "top students" at each university is a massive plus in getting people excited about Dropbox.
Yep. Microsoft gave away free software for years (Windows, Visual Studio and Office suites) to students in order to get them excited about their technologies and familiarized with their development environment. One day, those students will graduate and be ready to join the .net (or what-have-you) workforce(). There are entire universities that only offer courses with Microsoft technologies (mine was one such school at one point), so it's not unreasonable or unlikely that Dropbox can infiltrate the education market.
() In some cases, though, Microsoft conditioned students to think that all software should be free... oh, the irony!
1. It has a good name and theme. "Space Race" is a genius choice due to its double meaning.
2. This is marketed more as a competition between organizations than a simple referral program. Neither is a new idea, but the combination is interesting.
Also, the references to the Cold War are interesting, though I may be looking into it too much. Personal rewards for referring friends is like capitalism. Group rewards for each school is like communism. With Dropbox, you get both! :)
Most of my friends don't understand what Dropbox is nor why they'd need it. They would rather transfer files by USB drive and email. And these are people that live off Netflix and Pandora and Facebook, so it's not like they're Luddites...
My friends were like that too. Netflix, Grooveshark, Spotify etc but still relied on remembering to bring a USB stick around. Once i showed them the usefulness of Dropbox (and the fact that you can store ebooks on your account and then transfer them to iBooks), they began to adopt it. A few months down the line, i have more friends with Dropbox than without, and we've also set up shared folders with our ebook collections and regularly talk about what we read this week. I could never imagine hooking my friends on to books, but i guess they all had the hunger for it, but not the means.
That's not universally true. I got my parents to use it and through that, my entire extended family uses it as our primary mode of photo-sharing. There are a few people in that group over 70 with paying subscriptions that know how to use dropbox more than almost anything else more complex than a word processor.
