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Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

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

#71

Post by aheilbut »

throwawaypop wrote: post #65
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.

Google Drive is a confusing mess, and still doesn’t work on linux.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by _visgean »

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

Somehow I am doubtful that you can trivially build what dropbox does. I am on their pro plan, I have tried running Syncthing on my own servers but the cost is quite prohibitive.

I have about 300GB of photos there. Some of the files change, sometimes generating quite a lot of space - e.g. I think calculating the deleted files it is quite possible that I have few terabytes of data at any given moment. I looked into getting that space on Digital ocean and it would be way more expensive.

That is not including the price of my own labor, how much time would I spend on managing my own solution? Can I guarantee the same level of safety as Dropbox does? They have people thinking about security, I don't even have time upgrade my servers - beyond automatic update..

We did not even get into weird corner cases... Couple of months ago I was running some machine learning experiments and misconfigured the logging process and ended up with about 15m small log files in my dropbox folder. I had contacted the support and it was dealt with. Had I been using something like SVN I would have to manually purge the history or something like that.

IDK, I am very happy for the value I am getting out of my money. For me the biggest value is that it works and I don't have to do anything about it.

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

#74

Post by nyanpasu64 »

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…

I have a bit over 8 gigabytes of space in my Dropbox. You could get extra space by creating VMs, then inviting your secondary email accounts to Dropbox and installing Dropbox in a VM. I don't know if this still works.

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

#75

Post by boring_twenties »

aheilbut wrote: post #71
throwawaypop wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Drive is a confusing mess, and still doesn’t work on linux.

Maybe not with the official tools, but it works great with rclone [1]. Which to me is far superior to any official tool but hey, to each their own.

1- https://rclone.org/

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

#76

Post by _visgean »

fermienrico wrote: post #45
nvarsj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No fuss. No conflicts, it just works. I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux filesystems bizarrely - forcing me to reimage multiple machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour on non-ext4. I also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason I haven’t swapped to something else is my life is locked into it from the early days. I’d love to drop it at this point. I don’t even need that mu…

Works just fine for windows and mac. I know of that shit storm when they neutered the linux app. I think you're referring to this fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209

It also works on Linux. Specifically on ext4.

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

#77

Post by bane »

Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud.

Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts.

Imagine these scenarios:

- A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account. Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing sites.

- A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services.

- A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services.

- A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on youtube...and video takes up a ton of storage.

Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist.

And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a crowded space competing with companies who are making it necessary to have their file sharing services because they're tying all kinds of productivity applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.

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

#78

Post by rescripting »

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.

I'm curious why this matters? Is dropbox's current failings its inability to scale?

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

#79

Post by fancyfish »

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…

Just wanted to give a shoutout and say Overleaf has been a great product for me and my team so far. Incredibly easy and clear collaboration. And if I need to go look at change history over the last six months, it’s there within 2 clicks.

Not to mention, the UI is easy and (shockingly in this day and age) gets out of my way so I can focus on the content.

And easy pricing tiers. For just $15 a month I get a 10-collaborator project. Thanks Overleaf team!

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

#80

Post by mullingitover »

throwawaypop wrote: post #65
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.

> Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.

I wish it were true, but neither Google nor Apple have the most basic, brain-dead feature: "Give me a link that I can give anyone, and they can download the thing without jumping through any hoops."

They both require people receiving a file to jump through the hoop of having accounts with them in order to do this most basic action. It's the reason I'm still regrettably paying Dropbox. Anything calling itself a cloud drive should have basic feature where you can send anyone a link and they can download the file with no other requirement than an internet-connected browser.

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