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Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

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

#61

Post by lern_too_spel »

user5994461 wrote: post #47
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…

It's funny you'd say that when there are so many companies doing chat and video software and they're all billion dollar companies. Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation). And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is or…

That's assuming there is a monopoly. The cost of providing a chat service is low and dropping. If Microsoft or Google can provide it for free on top of the communications services companies are already buying, why would anyone pay an additional $8 per user per month for chat?

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

#62

Post by jeffbee »

recursivecaveat wrote: post #18

Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite with whatever chat service comes af…

The difference with Zoom is it was created by a person with decades of experience engineering video conferencing at scale.

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

#63

Post by Whinner »

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’m at the same point too. My Dropbox personal expires in a week and I’m not going to renew for $120/year. They’ve really priced themselves way too high for me. I just need a 100-200gb for photo backups from my phone. With Amazon, Google and even MS offering better pricing I really have not reason to stay.

MS in particular has great pricing. $99/year for 5 copies of Office and 1tb of storage. I can’t see the value of Dropbox any more.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

jeffbee wrote: post #62
recursivecaveat wrote: post #18

Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite with whatever chat service comes af…

The difference with Zoom is it was created by a person with decades of experience engineering video conferencing at scale.

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by throwawaypop »

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…

I think people just wanted a cloud solution to store and retrive files.

Dropbox was one of the products that grew during the PC and digital wave. Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.

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

#66

Post by sowbug »

wheels wrote: post #56
claviska wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SyncTh…

Same here. I used it to sync my Keepass database, currently 1.6 MB, across a sliding window of about 10 devices (sliding because I like trying new OSes and phones). That ground to a halt with the 3-device limitation, so I migrated to Syncthing.

I would have loved to pay for Dropbox; in fact, in 2008 I did upgrade to 50GB for one year because I liked the company and wanted to help it survive the downturn. But if I had kept that up, I'd have paid $1,200 by now to sync less than 5 MB.

Interesting you mention $3/month. I pay almost exactly that at vultr.com to keep an IPv6 Syncthing instance running so that a copy of my stuff is globally available.

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

#67

Post by giantrobot »

bsder wrote: post #54
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.

E-mail attachments are one of the worst ways to share large documents. For one, it pushes the hosting requirements for the files to their e-mail provider/recipient. Large attachments will count against a user's mailbox storage limits and can DoS their inbox. The management of that space then falls to the recipient. I also don't know if any e-mail servers that actively dedup attachments. So unless the underlying file system is doing block level dedup a large attachment lives in each recipient's inbox on the server(s). These are reasons pretty much every ISP and e-mail provider has pretty strict limits on attachment sizes.

I certainly do not want anyone sending me attachments that are a couple hundred megabytes. I don't want to have to prune my mailbox or choke my mail client downloading the attachment. IMAP and POP3 suck for downloading a lot of data. I'd much rather have a resumable HTTPS link I can download whenever I want. Better yet would be a service that let me preview the document before downloading it. Some sort of dropbox-like service maybe.

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

#68

Post by jelling »

boultonmark wrote: post #17
Havoc wrote: post #12

Recently saw an appealing -40% discount on amex for dropbox. That could be cool - esp if stacked with a promo. Headed over to their subreddit in search of a special...literally an entire subreddit of complaints. Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.

Steve Jobs called them ‘a feature’. Methinks you are right, that they will be gone in 5

Dropbox is the new Novell. OSs eventually catch up and even quicker when it creates a new recurring revenue stream.

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

#69

Post by 55555 »

santoshalper wrote: post #57
lliamander wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why do they like product suites? This is alien to me.
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