Ralph Windsor – Dropbox Launches Carousel Photo Sharing App – A Game Changer For DAM?:

“Budget or low-end applications like Dropbox's Carousel are going to place further upward pressure on the scope of what existing DAM market participants are expected to provide. Anything that looks like 'low hanging fruit' will increasingly be picked by these more generic products.

[…] That will slice away anyone who just wants to put a DAM product out there with and let end users get on with it themselves, unless they plan to do so for little or no cost applied to the end user.”

This is getting interesting: (We) DAM vendors are increasingly focusing on user experience, especially on ease of use for new or casual users. This is a good thing, and enforced by the “consumerization” trend (“make it as simple as Dropbox or Google search”). In the process, a few power user features are even stripped from the UI.

Now combine this with the German trend to ignore metadata experts or even fire them (as the German newspaper and magazine industry has been doing for years):

Is the end result something that’s as polished and easy to use as Dropbox or Box, with very few additional features (since customers neglect their metadata, which would have made most of the difference) but at a higher price? Sounds like “specialize or die” to me…

Related – Klaus Sonnenleiter in Guru Talk on DAM as a commodity: “[DAM in 5 years] will be fully embedded. […] Digital assets will continue to be managed, but they will be managed inside a larger solution that handles marketing activities, sales platforms, publishing channels or whatever the primary activity of the company is.”

Update – Laurence Hart in Content Management Step One, Capture that Information: “No system where people actively store Content is ever considered a failure. […] If [Box and Dropbox] can get a strong foothold, show consistent high adoption, and while gradually increasing value organizations derive from using them, they are going to be major players. […] My money is on the companies that are innovating and trying new things while not losing sight of the fact that every organization is staffed by Consumers.”

Update II – must read: David Diamond’s Is Dropbox a Digital Asset Management Game-changer?