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Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

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

#131

Post by mormegil »

kenhwang wrote: post #125
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…

The problem with all those things are: bandwidth. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. Dropbox wants you to stick stuff with them and then never touch it. Then they would only need slow disks and slow networks. Once Dropbox tries to become Flickr/Soundcloud/Youtube, they have the same problem those services have: massive money loss. Playing media at scale is hard and expensive. Especially when Dropbox's niche is…

They even had (almost) this feature and disabled it, right? Originally, your Dropbox folder came with a Public folder which had content accessible (directly) from the web. You could host your website there. Some time later they found people are hosting their websites there which costs them bandwidth, and removed this ability. (Now you can share individual files using special links.)

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

#132

Post by fauigerzigerk »

kenhwang wrote: post #125
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…

The problem with all those things are: bandwidth. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. Dropbox wants you to stick stuff with them and then never touch it. Then they would only need slow disks and slow networks. Once Dropbox tries to become Flickr/Soundcloud/Youtube, they have the same problem those services have: massive money loss. Playing media at scale is hard and expensive. Especially when Dropbox's niche is…

Dropbox customers are clearly willing to pay more than the absolute minimum possible. Dropbox is relatively expensive. So instead of not offering a service that customers want they could simply charge for bandwidth.

Also, Dropbox does support partially syncing large files, so mutability is not necessarily that big of a problem (depending on the file format I guess).

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

#134

Post by KozmoNau7 »

aprdm wrote: post #26

I just recently was shopping for a solution for myself and considered google drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud . What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on Dropbox which I have been (a free ) user for 8 years. I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the worse, I also got super confused about their site which didn’t try to sell to people but instead to enterprise only. As a person…

Did you look at pCloud? Their pricing is decent, they have great link sharing functionality and rudimentary but workable media streaming. Their Linux client is miles ahead of Dropbox and any of the third-party GDrive sync applications.

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

#135

Post by KozmoNau7 »

I used Dropbox for a while, but their Linux client was a mess that randomly spiraled into 100% CPU usage for long periods of time.

Google Drive with Insync was better, but had absolutely no bandwidth limiting, so it ate all of my meager upload speed a lot of the time.

There are also the obvious issues of hosting your files with American companies, if you're not fond of various three letter agencies looking through your stuff. I do t have anything even remotely incriminating, but I am opposed to widespread secret surveillance on principle.

So I use pCloud, which is hosted in Switzerland. Their Linux client is great, their pricing is decent, they have reasonable media streaming built in (supports FLAC, too) and their sharing links are easy to use and don't require people to register accounts. They also have good undelete features (30 days standard, up to a year for an additional fee).

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

#136

Post by MikusR »

aprdm wrote: post #26

I just recently was shopping for a solution for myself and considered google drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud . What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on Dropbox which I have been (a free ) user for 8 years. I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the worse, I also got super confused about their site which didn’t try to sell to people but instead to enterprise only. As a person…

OneDrive is fully supported on Mac including cloud only files. It also comes with free Office suite.

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

#137

Post by user5994461 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #61
user5994461 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Companies are paying as much as $25 per month per employee for minor tools. It's not uncommon that a company has 3 different tools doing the same thing. Enterprise are not rational actors trying to save money. Vendors don't go below $5 a month because they know enterprise will bear the cost.

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

#138

Post by ryanbrunner »

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 don't think this is all that different from Dropbox. For years, Dropbox was able to outperform all the big players who tried to compete because their core sync technology was rock-solid.

Still to this day, I find my ICloud sync folders can be fairly unreliable (files will take a mysteriously long time to appear once in a while) - I've never had anything like that sort of an issue with Dropbox (although I haven't used it in a while).

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

#139

Post by krzyk »

I resigned from Dropbox recently because they don't have a subscription that is right for me (I'm not a data hoarder who needs 1TB of synced space, I just need 50 or 100 GB max) and because (most importantly) added an artificial limit of max 3 devices sync for free tier.

I switched to syncthing and so far I love it. Now my data lives on 2 always online servers plus few laptops, vms.

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

#140

Post by krzyk »

harryh wrote: post #95
august125 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 automatical…

How many people do you think there are that would be willing to pay $3/month but not $10/month? How many people who currently pay $10/month would drop down to a $3/month plan if given the option? I'm fairly certain the math on this paints a clear picture: Offering a $3/month plan would cost them more than it makes them.

How many people need 2TB or even 1TB / 500GB of St orange on Dropbox? Mostly companies and persons that use it for profit.

For me 100 GB or even 50 GB and no device limit (!) is enough. Give me that for $12 a year and I won't look for alternatives.

How many people would use that? I think more than the $10/month plan.

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