Cubby

» see cubby.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ how it landed ~

logmein had been a remote-desktop company since 2003. by 2011 dropbox was eating consumer file sync and box was eating the smb tier, and logmein wanted in. cubby was the answer. the beta opened on 12 april 2012 and general availability followed on 6 february 2013 with a clean pitch: 5 GB free, no required "magic folder" location, any directory on your disk could become a sync target by right-click.

the second pitch was peer-to-peer direct sync. if you wanted a folder mirrored between your laptop and your home desktop without touching the cloud, cubby would do it. dropbox could not. that made cubby useful for video editors and people with large libraries who paid attention to bandwidth. the cloud copy was optional. that was the angle. it was a good angle in 2012.

by 2014 the angle was eroding. dropbox added shared folders on top of its inbox model. onedrive came preinstalled on windows. google drive folded into google accounts everyone already had. logmein responded by moving cubby upmarket with cubby enterprise in march 2014, an it-friendly variant with active directory and admin controls. the enterprise pivot was a signal: the consumer fight was over and logmein was not winning it.

i tried cubby in 2013 for about two weeks on a ttnet line in ankara. the direct-sync feature was the only reason to pick it over dropbox, and my laptop and desktop were both behind the same router most of the time anyway, so the dropbox cloud copy worked fine. i went back to dropbox the way most people did.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

by mid-2015 logmein's cubby team had stopped shipping consumer features. the product hung on with periodic maintenance updates. the company was preparing to merge with citrix's goto division (that merger closed in january 2017) and consumer sync was not on the post-merger roadmap.

~ the postmortem ~

on 17 october 2016 logmein published a blog post titled "plans to retire cubby." free accounts were given thirty days. on 16 november 2016 free cubby was switched off and the data was scheduled for permanent deletion. paid pro and enterprise accounts kept running through the end of their subscription terms plus a thirty-day grace period, so the last cubby customer lost service sometime in 2017. logmein pointed migration traffic at dropbox and onedrive.

~ what it left ~

cubby is a marker for the moment in 2012-2016 when "let any folder be a sync folder" lost to "use the inbox." dropbox had decided the ui pattern, onedrive came bundled, and the right-click-anywhere model died with cubby. sits next to [[microsoft-live-mesh]] (same idea, killed earlier), [[wuala]] (sympathetic dead european peer), and the long line of dropbox alternatives that never caught up. logmein became goto, and the consumer file-sync business never came back to its product lineup.

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