71–80 of 215 posts
I'll never understand why a company has to keep growing. Obviously I don't have a degree in economics, but why can't a company do well and then continue being so without having the need to innovate all the time? Sorry if I'm missing something big.
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It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.
Does anything stop you from uploading 10s or 100s of TB? I recently crossed 1TB of storage use on S3 (which costs around $20/month) and am in the process of exploring alternatives. I've never really understood how companies can offer "unlimited" storage at low prices.
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A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well. A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.
Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?
One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition i…
Companies need to stop trying to take over the world, and focus on product/service mastery
Lots of negativity in here, but I'll say I really enjoy how incredibly simple Dropbox is and has remained since it launched. It's so easy to explain how it works to my non-techie parents ("It's just another folder on your computer, except it backs up your data automatically"). I hope Dropbox continues to thrive.
But, at least on Windows, only being able to sync 1 folder is a serious limitation.
Again at least on Windows, CPU and disk utilisation goes through the roofnon start-up, rendering your machine all but useless for half an hour.
And the final nail in my Dropbox coffin - it seemed to quite often choose the wrong file when there were conflicts, and at times it mistakenly deleted a lot if files. I just couldn't trust it.
Oh, and support via their forums was rubbish. Dozens of people would report the same problems, and they'd be ignored for years.
Lots of negativity in here, but I'll say I really enjoy how incredibly simple Dropbox is and has remained since it launched. It's so easy to explain how it works to my non-techie parents ("It's just another folder on your computer, except it backs up your data automatically"). I hope Dropbox continues to thrive.
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Does anything stop you from uploading 10s or 100s of TB? I recently crossed 1TB of storage use on S3 (which costs around $20/month) and am in the process of exploring alternatives. I've never really understood how companies can offer "unlimited" storage at low prices.
"Unlimited" space in any online service almost always means "there is a soft cap where we start threatening to shut down your service, but we won't tell you what it is ahead of time".
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The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.
Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the c…
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The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of user…
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems erro…