Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011) • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by jackcosgrove » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 1:55 AM UTC

55555 wrote: post #69

santoshalper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably because the product suite components integrate much more easily than a bunch of separate tools from different vendors. And there are fewer particulars to know if you stay in one ecosystem. Maybe there is even a unified administration console.

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

#82

Post by saghm » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:02 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #77

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 sit…

> 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

I recently dumped my music collection that previously was on Google Music on Dropbox; I'd easily pay twice what I'm paying for space to get a music app from them that played my stuff on there.

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

#83

Post by danbmil99 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:04 AM UTC

I was beta user number 50. I saw no value in something I could do easily with SFTP or SCP etcetera. I'm not an investor I guess

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

#84

Post by miked85 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:12 AM UTC

I switched to Resilio (formerly BitTorrent) Sync [1] years ago and never looked back. It does have the restriction that at least one of your machines must be online to sync with others, but aside from that, it has been a solid replacement.

[1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

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

#85

Post by august125 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

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…

What really irritated me was the suddenly imposed three device sync limit. Being forced to pay for 2 TB when I didn't need any more space than I already had just to get my files on all my computers really rubbed me the wrong way. Like you, I wish there was a 5 GB / $3/month plan.

On top of that, they're losing sight of the deep OS integration that made them so appealing to Steve Jobs. When a screenshot is automatically saved to Dropbox I'm no longer presented with the option to "Show in Finder" but instead "Show in Dropbox" which instead of snapping open a Finder window slowly launches their kludgy app that isn't at all visually or functionally harmonious with macOS.

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

#86

Post by PedroBatista » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

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

Dropbox is successful because 90% of their users have no idea of what you just said and the other ~9% can't be bothered with all that stuff and just want to pass files around.

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

#87

Post by whymauri » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

rescripting wrote: post #78

jeffbee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think Zoom has proven that they have exceptionally good product vision. I'm not sure Dropbox has over the past few years.

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

#88

Post by ImTheMaddest » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #80

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.

> 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 reas…

Google Drive has this feature, right click the file > get shareable link > Anyone on the Internet with this link can view

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

#89

Post by soneca » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:33 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #77

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 sit…

I am a fairly happy paying user of Dropbox for what it is, and I do not share most of complaints in the thread. But I think your suggestions are excellent! Please apply to Head of Product there!

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

#90

Post by maxdata » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 2:38 AM UTC

My company was largely run on dropbox as a crucial piece of infrastructure for many years before my arrival. As of a couple months ago, it has been cut out of our production pipeline entirely, but for many years, if you saw a digital out-of-home ad in certain places, it only got there because someone had added a media file and schedule to a dropbox folder. Looking back on it, it's pretty wild how much of their business relied on dropbox working reliably. Thankfully, that's all gone now.