For me, I found OneDrive being automatically installed on windows and nagging me to sign on too intrusive. Windows setting the default Document folder to onedrive would be convenient if I hadn't already signed up to dropbox, but it's just annoying if I don't have Onedrive. I like the fact that Dropbox isn't part of google or microsoft, which already have a lot of my info in their email services.
I personally don't have many storage needs so I just email myself important files, back up some things to USB, and sometimes will add things to Google Drive
These days, I wouldn't be surprised if Google sent me an email that said: Hey Widgetco, become a Certified Ad Partner to join our Managed Preferred Storage Solution or else your files on our legacy system will be deleted when it is deprecated in 24 hours. Also please fill out this Google Form (Google.com Account required; get one, it's easy!) and in this Google Form please tell us more about your company, including: how many employees do you have, what is in your product pipeline. Also would you like an investment from GV? No? You have violated our Terms of Service!
(Two weeks later)
We're proud to announce Widgety by Google, launching today!
(Nine weeks later)
Widgetco's website doesn't adhere to Chrome's latest Super Safeweb standards.
You could share a file with your colleagues by simply emailing a URL to the file. No other service was as straightforward at the time.
When that feature was later removed, I stopped using Dropbox.
Because of the rapid growth of Dropbox specifically in regards to sharing it's still used for that so it continues to increase the funnel and reactivate customers, while Google Drive feels more like a personal storage system.
That could be one large factor.
Google Drive might have improved since (and I do use Google Apps for email and documents), but I haven't been able to forget that experience and trust Dropbox.
- It's good enough
- It just works
It solves the problem of sharing files across different devices and does it with no fuss.
I have tried alternatives such as Google Drive and Onedrive and changing terms (looking at you Microsoft), incompatibilities, clunky interfaces always made me drop them.
First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the cheapest upgrade is $100/year. The competition is about $25/year. The $100 doesn't even contain basic features like full text search when searching your Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that. I'm sure most companies don't mind paying the extra cost for a better service, but individual users are much more likely to go with the significantly cheaper option even if that means inferior product.
I totally understand that for the big tech companies it's easier to lower prices and even lose money to gain market share. Dropbox will need to find a way to fight back.
You could see their individual focus for a long time (ex. developing Mailbox and Carousel) and in an ideal (and theoretical) world, it sounds wonderful to have a consumer-SaaS company focused on delivering amazing software to the masses and making money directly from it. But at the end of the day, you can't ignore the real world and the messy side of business.
I (and I'm sure a big chunk of the HN population) would love to support a company like this, but there just aren't enough of us. Drew & team probably found out how difficult getting people to pay for stuff (especially productivity software) really is.
This enterprise shift is necessary for Dropbox's survival.
I have _literally_ looked for an alternative for more than a decade, but nobody can touch Dropbox on a really wide range of metrics and the trend amount competitors seems to move away from the hyper-simple file system abstraction.
I think I have tried most commercial options and practically all open source alternatives. I had high hopes for Syncthing, but I found high load and erratic syncing (was testing with 320 GB). Also no iOS client and no partial sync :(
For all the people that commend Dropbox for supporting Linux, they now treat the Linux client as inferior.
To add insult to injury, they promote the SmartSync feature inside the preferences of the Linux client.
The sheer fragmentation of Linux space makes something as complicated as smart sync not a very financially viable product to support.
A random pick: "The concept that I'm most excited about is that the core technology in Dropbox -- continuous efficient sync with compression and binary diffs"
* Andrew Tridgell of course created rsync (which is referenced elsewhere) and pioneered the binary delta model which has inspired so much progress. Dropbox's sync in clearly directly influenced by this. Outstanding achievement!
* "efficient sync with compression and binary diffs" is key here but astonishingly appears to be a secondary concern for many (most?) competitors which is why they su^H^Haren't as good.
I had several GB of photos shared with me on Dropbox, and it blew right over my free limit, despite the fact that none of them were actually mine. The photos also count towards the quota of the account sharing with me.
That's soured me quite a lot on Dropbox.
Makes it quite easy to migrate to a new computer, or do a fresh install if I want to clean up the OS.
The only hassle is that Dropbox doesn't let you link an already existing Dropbox folder in Linux. Which is fixed by renaming the folder, "creating" a new one, moving all hidden files to the renamed folder and renaming it back.
I'm considering moving to another service, but it's just so convenient and the price is OK.
Funny. I (and I guess countless people before) would have come up with a remote login via dyndns to my home computer or using ftp to some server. The idea of dropbox seems so obvious in hindsight but we were all blind.
Dropbox was originally scorned on HN because they took a different approach yet history has now proven they had a good idea.
So I wouldn't say it was obvious at all.
I'm surprised she's still there: https://www.dropbox.com/about
and this page still exists: http://www.drop-dropbox.com
I have to say, I've not heard any mention of her in relation to dropbox since she was appointed tho'.
Seems like if I had this option I would have dropped out at least once.
I'm studying a MCompSci for 7 years now and it only costs me 11€ when I don't do any courses in a semester.
I got all courses done, just need time for the thesis, hehe
(Hey, it's been only nine or ten years evading that question ...)
The answer, of course, is to make client-side encryption an option.
If there is still potential for growth, it is irrational to declare profits; by doing so you're foregoing the opportunity for bigger revenues (and gross profits) in the future and leaving the way open for a hungrier competitor.
It's a valid question to ask whether they could be profitable if they ceased all investment in growth, and I would encourage you to explore that question. They're a listed company so their financials are public.
FWIW their share price is above the IPO price, so the markets seem comfortable.
Explain FTP to your Aunt Edna. Get FTP working where everything on all devices is in sync automatically. Comment on a file via FTP. Send a link to a file they can consume on a mobile device — including playing audio or video without downloading the file. Create access lists for folders.
Sure you could do it using FTP. Now do it cheaply at scale and make it work everywhere and then convince your non tech friends to use it.
Why bother with GPS when we could all use a map and compass? Dropbox made file syncing accessible to everyone cheaply and securely.
A massive part of the success of such startups are connections, connections, connections.
The product itself doesn't matter that much, considering all the pivoting. Nor does making a profit, considering all the startups still burning VC money.
Yes, there is certainly an amount of skill necessary, but the scrappy startup that suceeds against all odds is a fairytale. Luck, connections and moral flexibility play an equally or more important part.
I'd much rather set up an FTP server, manually download my files, make changes, then re-upload, then manually download the new versions onto my other devices!
When you think back, cars were a silly invention. They have the same functionality as a horse-drawn wagon!
If they didn't have this limitation, I would 100% have made tens of accounts and shared folders across all of them owned by just one of them, each device running a different dropbox account, effectively quadrupling my space for free.
She only needs Dropbox for a bunch of documents, so paying an extra €10 per month is not something we can do.
Dropbox is a fairly expensive service. I’ve used it for years however I can no longer defend my choice.
Extended versioning is gone. Expiring sharing links are gone from Plus, so I have to pay €20 per month for it ... yes they grandfathered old accounts, however I made the mistake of trying out Pro and their Support refused to reinstate my old Plus account.
Want to search your documents? Pay €20 for Pro. Which wouldn’t be bad, except that their search is terrible. And I could not get their support to admit that they aren’t indexing all my documents.
Just to get an idea, they aren’t indexing all PDFs (that Google Drive is indexing just fine) and they aren’t indexing text files with a .log extension either. A comparison with Google Drive isn’t even funny as GDrive does text recognition on images, indexing everything.
Speaking of Dropbox’s support, I’ve never been more frustrated in my life as the only issue they’ve ever solved for me was a refund, which they had to provide by law due to me being an EU citizen.
All in all, I ended up paying €20 per month for link sharing I had in Plus, broken full text indexing and piss poor support.
Also they keep pushing collaboration features but I wonder for whom. I don’t think they’ve thought this through. If Dropbox is no longer a good place to keep my photos then it stops being a good service for sharing work items with colleagues.
Do they hope for Dropbox to become a service imposed by management? Probably, however in that space they are competing with the likes of GSuite and we already have GSuite for email. And Extending that to the Business edition that gives you Unlimited space is much cheaper than going with Dropbox.
I’ll grant that Dropbox’s desktop sync is the best in business. But I can deal with the warts of the others.
That particular approach does have some other issues though.
I can imagine their investor deck. “62% of people are total chumps, that’s our target market”
Dropbox, being a public traded company, must declare their financials. If they wanted to keep their financials a secret, they should have stayed private.
However, I don't get why you see growth (or potential growth) is tied to profit declaration. Can you explain a bit more? TIA.
Losses last three years are: ~300m, ~200m, ~100m.
They are going to be profitable by 2020 and their margin is growing, so I don't get this negativity.
Such a feature was a pretty bad phishing and social engineering vector, particularly when you could render html out of that folder, but even when html was dropped that there were social engineering attacks a bad actor could pull relying on the user's trust of a dropbox url. You could also guess other files in the public folder based on the url, which was a privacy concern.
Multiple years before support was dropped, shared links were added, which fix these concerns. You can set ?dl=1 to get a raw link. `curl/wget` (set to follow redirects) still get you the raw contents even if you don't set ?dl=1.
It was a scrappy start up with a good product.
In Australia you can often find 1 year x 5 accounts (1TB Onedrive space, Office, Skype minutes) for ~$70.
In the consumer market, they are competing with Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Would you really want to compete against the three most valuable companies in the US where as Steve Jobs said “you’re not a product you’re a feature”?
[0] https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/how-two-guys-that-barel...
"The pair worked tirelessly for three months in a cramped office in Cambridge, waking up everyday at noon and working till dawn the next day. “I think we started like most of these tech companies begin. Just a couple of guys in their boxers coding in a dark room,” Houston says. “We just kept our heads down and built.”"
While on a GAAP basis, Dropbox is losing money, the company generated $0.18 of non-GAAP earnings per share in 2017, an incredible feat for a software business of their size and growth.
Their GAAP operating margin was (10)% in 2017, but the non-GAAP margin was 5%. Their free cash flow margin has been improving dramatically over the past few years, and was at 28% in 2017, up from 16% in 2016 and (11)% in 2015. [1]
I wouldn't say the same thing about Uber, because they seem to have a negative operating margin, unlike Dropbox.
This is the whole point. Anyone can look at the final result and sneer "unprofitable", but it's meaningless without actually looking at the figures and understanding what their cashflows are.
[1] https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/dropbox-ipo-s-1-breakdown-3...
I’d sign up for Dropbox if they had feature parity on Linux.
Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.
Very much this. I was using Dropbox, and the 2 gig free plan wasn't enough, but I sure as hell didn't need a whopping 1 TB, so I switched to Google Drive. The 15 gig free plan is enough for me, and I can rest easy knowing that if I end up needing only a little more, I can get 100 gig for $2.
That said, I definitely preferred Dropbox's client more. Google Drive for some reason is frequently showing an X on it's sync folder indicating it isn't syncing even though it's working fine. Google Drive's client also seems to be really slow to start.
No, it’s not the same thing and no, it does not work on Linux.
If people believe there's room for growth, then earning profit implies you're wasting money. The money kept as profit could have been spent on growth. Money spent on growth is not included in profits.
To put it another way...
If you have a factory and produce 10,000 widgets that cost $10 to make and you sell them all for $100 each, then you've made $900,000. But if you spend all $900,000 on factory expansion because you know there's a demand for at least 1 million widgets, then you've made $0 in profit.
These numbers cause constant bickering when it comes to stocks. When people were talking about Amazon not being profitable, it's really because all the money they made was being re-invested back into the company.
People make noise about Tesla not being profitable, claiming it's stock is extremely overvalued. Well, if they completely eliminated R&D, stopped trying to improve batteries, automation, self-driving capabilities, etc., they'd probably be quite profitable.
Hence why people claim you shouldn't be declaring profits if there's still growth potential. If you're a publicly traded company, yeah your finances are declared publicly, but in this case, "declaring profits" means that your financial reports should be showing very little profit. If you're showing profit, it means growth is being limited.
Dropbox is not in any kind of nosedive. They have positive free cash flow margins that have grown steadily for three years [1]. That is precisely the opposite of a nosedive.
You'd have a point if we were talking about Uber, but we're not, we're talking about Dropbox, a company that has solid and improving financials, which is why it's trading at a healthy premium on its IPO price.
[1] https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/dropbox-ipo-s-1-breakdown-3...
Not sure if that helps them artificially boost their numbers (by claiming more installed devices), or if they try to get your contacts to get more accounts.
Incentivizing users to add their first file and install it on their phone (where it will likely want to slurp up photos, videos, etc. to back them up there) isn't a bad thing IMHO. It drives immediate engagement with the core product experience, and I'd be shocked if they didn't have data saying that people who upload at least one file and have the app installed on their phone convert to paid at some rate above people who don't. Thus, by incentivizing that behavior, they can likely boost conversion rates AND make users happier by getting more familiar with the service. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me. I wonder how many users sign up but don't ever use Dropbox.
You could call it growth hacking I guess. I think it's an interesting alternative to idk, a weekly "did you know that?" e-mail (e.g. Evernote) or a tooltips-driven tutorial, or Clippy.
They should have a Droppy though
I have a 30 mbit fiber connection. The only time I ever notice is when I'm downloading a new game. Otherwise, my wife can be watching Netflix while I'm gaming and there's no difference in my latency.
In contrast to a video recorded even by phones today a gigabyte is consumed in no time. Accidentally (without realizing how big it is or how much quota you have left) uploading a short clip is not something you put a lot of thought into.
It's not like they instantly block receipt of mail [...]
Well true, but it sucks having to rely on googles good will for that, you don't know the hard limits and they can change at any time without notice. It is still unacceptable UX.
I fancy myself as someone who supports "the little guy", and the Dropbox team's story is an example of how "the big guys" totally and completely fell asleep in a pool of their own money while Dropbox built something that people wanted before other bigger players.
I therefore find it ironic that I don't support them with even just a little bit of money per month, when a big portion of the pitch for the job I currently work and the small project is "but we're different because we're smaller and therefore client focused!"
I hope everyone can reflect on who their money supports. But I'll tell you two large corporations I'm very happy to support: Bozzuto, my apartment company, and Bank of America, my bank.
I would never trust a small landlord to take care of me for the right price (I've been burned so many times by private owners). And well, I store my money in a place that is FDIC and regulated... Ok I have a credit union too :)
In addition to that, their fraud resolution department has always been nice to me and their branches are nearby my house if I'm ever required to go in there. Still, right now, I trust my credit union more. But, my credit union wasn't founded by "two dudes" like Dropbox was, is the analogy I'm trying to make here.
Corporations I trust with my business - BOA, Google, LG, Walmart
Corporations I don't trust with my business - Comcast, Chipotle, McDonalds
"Two Guys" I trust with my business- My local mechanic, my local electrician (it took years of searching and relationship building).
My biggest complaint is how slow syncing is some times. I have a desktop and laptop at work and I can save something in my OneDrive folder on my desktop and it'll take over an hour for it to appear on my laptop unless I manually pause syncing and then unpause it to force a refresh from the OneDrive server.
I've never had that with Dropbox. It's been damn near instant every time.
Dropbox will gladly take money from consumers but the money is in the Enterprise and that’s what they are chasing.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/01/dropbox-to-add-native-g-su...