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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.
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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).
That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now. Change a bit and it tries only sync a bit. Now imagine how difficult that would be to serve with multiple layers of caching.
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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).
The mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content. Youtube/Flickr pretty much operate on full replacement, when you're done fiddling with your files you publish them and they never change. This makes it easier to serve the content cheaper through caching and CDNs. That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now. Change a bit and it tries only sync a bit. Now imagine how diffic…
True, good point.
>That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now
I think OneDrive can do that as well now.
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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…
Amex is offering $40 credit in Dropbox; targeted offer.
And it could: Dropbox Paper is still the best editing experience I've ever had. If it allowed for better organization and search, it would blow Notion out of the water.
I am a happy user of paid Dropbox, and I think many person are the same as me. For me, OneDrive and Google Drive are not enough simply because of their terrible sync system. Back then when OneDrive was just launched the speed for me was absolutely horrible (like I currently have >600,000 files in my Dropbox. I don't know if other system can reliably deal with this many files, Dropbox has proved it to me that it can d…
much cheaper
works great
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I've defaulted to making s3 buckets public for that. Admittedly, the s3 console isn't the easiest thing to navigate if you aren't used to it, but I don't really need to do it very often.
Use Cyberduck or Filezilla instead?
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 respe…
How the hell is slack more complicated than dropbox?? I didn't see Slack Paper, or Slack photos which they then comoletely and annoyingly dropped support for!
Slack used to be simple, now it’s a mess of different teams, with a thousand channels, each with threads and document tools and integrations and slash commands to remember.
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.
Find me a technical saas product of tyat scale that doesn’t have support forums that are on fire? Checkout gdrive or iclouds.
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…
While you are correct that there are technical challenges with delivering lots of media to lot of consumers, these challenges have been handily addressed many times by many companies. In addition Dropbox relies on people installing clients on their devices. For people who are "in their network", why not just use a bittorrent-style method to move the files between users directly?
Most media that people put online isn't consumed. It's a power law distribution. So most of the vacation photos or cover-band songs aren't going to really use any egress bandwidth. But putting those things up consumes space, which pushes users over tiers, which encourages them to upgrade.
When the latest dropbox-tube influencer's videos get watched by 100 million people, that's all 100% advertising to viewers that this person is a "dropboxer", some percentage of which will feel inclined to also start using the service, creating a virtuous cycle of customers who then go and make reaction videos to the first person's reaction videos, which mostly likely will get 10 views but will consume that user's storage -- which sells dropbox's primary service offering.
Finally, why wouldn't dropbox turn a network of people's shareable media into an advertising network?And generate more revenue? It seems hilariously obvious to me that they would do that. After all, isn't that how Google funds 98.999% of all of their offerings?