The most disconcerting aspect of the competitive environment for YouSendIt/Hightail must have been the realisation that their arms length service was a remarkable disincentive for customer retention. Hightail acknowledge in their recent blog the need to keep pace with competitive change and the reality that their YouSendIt name constrains the perception of their service offering. Every additional step they need to take to share a file or minute they have to wait for a file to upload hampers the efficiency with which they can clear their inbox. This type of added value competitive offering has left YouSendIt/Hightail customers out in the cold somewhat. Their services are designed to be very simple and very clean – it’s a model which has proven incredibly popular with millions of tech savvy consumers.Īs the popularity of services like Dropbox grew, their public relations / online marketing capability grew as well – every customer using their service became an email advocate and advertising to their colleagues, friends and family. Services like Dropbox and SugarSync offer the ability to quickly share files and, also act as your virtual hard drive/online back up at the same time. Like any innovation in the fast paced cloud technology world of today, competitors began to emerge who could do that and a lot more. YouSendIt offers plugins to email clients such as Outlook which proved a significant innovation for its time. This prevents desktop based inboxes from self-destructing send and receiving large files. YouSendIt’s core service provision gives customers the capability to share files via downloadable email links.

I can certainly understand why they did this it is yet to be seen whether they have done it in time.Ībout a year ago I began to notice less and less YouSendIt email links coming through my inbox and more links from competitor services such as Dropbox. In what can only be described as a bold marketing move by file sharing service formerly known as YouSendIt, the company has announced it is dropping the brand name by which their 43 million customers know them across the globe in favour of a new brand- Hightail.

Hightail desktop