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Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

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Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#51

Post by claviska »

daveoc64 wrote: post #22

I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus plan, and that does everything I want - albeit at a higher price than I'd like, but it always seems like their marketing is so heavily geared towards business use. Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan. I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".

I was a loyal Dropbox customer early on. At some point, they stopped caring about individuals and put all of their effort (especially marketing) into businesses. As a paid user, it was annoying to see upgrade nags in the app and on the website. I just wanted a damn folder that would sync properly.

That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need pushed me away. After their horrible rebranding, I got sick of looking at the ugly new icon on my iPhone. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I now pay something like $10/mo for iCloud storage which works pretty good. Maybe Dropbox no longer needs (or wants) me as a customer, but it’s something I would’ve happily continued to pay for potentially decades to come.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#52

Post by jjeaff »

echelon wrote: post #38
askafriend wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built…

That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade. Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise. Or sup…

If they are like me, they use chatOps as a way to consolidate and shortcut different commands and dashboards. But by no means are operations dependent on our chat. If chat goes down, then you will simply need to login to our ci/cd service to initiate deployments, rollbacks, etc.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#53

Post by aabhay »

I’m a huge fan of dropbox, partially because I’m an enterprise user of all their features (including paper and transfer!). In addition to Discord, I feel that it is one of the few companies that has kept their product simple and streamlined. Even modern tools like Airtable, Notion, Miro and of course Slack feel bloated and complicated. It’s a genuine challenge for large organizations to maintain simplicity so I respect what they were able to do.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#54

Post by bsder »

ativzzz wrote: post #25

Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. ... Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> Never understood Dropbox

Dropbox is a result of Google and Microsoft breaking email attachments. It was clear that was the problem even back then.

There's no bloody technical reason why you can't send a couple hundred megabyte attachment nowadays.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#55

Post by santoshalper »

askafriend wrote: post #31
echelon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have garg…

> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built…

How often are you rolling back production deployments that you need a Slack command to do it? Perhaps I am missing something but this does not seem like a good use of time for whoever put it together.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#56

Post by wheels »

claviska wrote: post #51
daveoc64 wrote: post #22

I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus plan, and that does everything I want - albeit at a higher price than I'd like, but it always seems like their marketing is so heavily geared towards business use. Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan. I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".

I was a loyal Dropbox customer early on. At some point, they stopped caring about individuals and put all of their effort (especially marketing) into businesses. As a paid user, it was annoying to see upgrade nags in the app and on the website. I just wanted a damn folder that would sync properly. That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need pushed me away. After their horrible rebrandin…

I recently uninstalled Dropbox after years of use. The upgrade nags were over the top, and the number-of-device limitations on the free plan made it no longer usable for me.

I like the app, and would happily have paid something for it, but as a mostly private user, the lack of a plan between 2 GB / free and 2 TB / $10/month just didn't make sense. $3/month for 5 GB would have been an easy choice.

Now I'm using SyncThing, which I don't love, but gets the job done, is free, and doesn't limit me to a couple devices. I have a folder that syncs to my web server that replaces me sharing things on Dropbox, which works, but is a little cumbersome. (That said, sharing links might be a fun thing to hack into SyncThing.)

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#57

Post by santoshalper »

lliamander wrote: post #49
echelon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have garg…

> The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while. Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.

It is 100% going to be Microsoft. Google is laughably bad at enterprise software and Microsoft really has no meaningful competition at this point. Teams is now crushing Slack in market share for the exact reason he mentioned - enterprise IT managers do not like the Unix approach of small targeted tools. They like product suites. Office 365 is as every bit as dominant today as Windows was 20 years ago.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#59

Post by [deleted] »

tim_sw wrote: post #30
mehrdada wrote: post #15

Dropbox feels more bearucratic internally than Google, a company two orders of magnitude its size. I feel like it is a perfect case of all the “VC-style” advice of “CEO job changes every 6 months and you should adapt” going haywire; mistaking the focus to be building an abstract hierarchical HR org, while completely losing the ability, vision, or desire to build a product that people love. Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ q…

In what ways is it bureaucratic? Is there a lot of process to get things done across teams or to ship new features?

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#60

Post by gammarator »

JohnHammersley wrote: post #28
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> [pg] That does count for a lot with us. It's surprising how many of the groups who apply have a cofounder who's not willing to quit his or her job. It's a worrying sign when someone who knows the company a lot better than we do isn't willing to bet on it. But again, there are always exceptions. The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job to wok on dropbox part-time. The problem I see with pg's l…

I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might struggle to be successful. I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much e…

Overleaf has been the most positive day-to-day change in academic science I can think of in the last five years!
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