111–120 of 199 posts
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> when files go away. Can you expand on that? What do you see replacing files?
Everything is shifting to mobile and web, and we don't have files on mobile or web.
Iphone user spotted.
On my Android I have a full file system, with files, and I intend to keep it that way.
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Building something is hard. Writing a check is easy. Apple could easily make the payout contingent on a smooth integration. Apple could even have a foreign subsidiary purchase Dropbox, thereby allowing for full use of its external profits it hasn't brought back to the US due to taxes. That's the benefit of cash. It solves almost every problem.
I'm not a tax expert, but I think dropbox would have to be a foreign company in order for them to purchase it with foreign cash and avoid tax problems.
Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge…
I think you're underestimating the complexity of building scalable file syncing across multiple platforms that pretty much just works from the end users' perspectives.
> Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. Honest question: WTF are they doing?
> Honest question: WTF are they doing? Have an actual profitable syncing business with several pricing tiers and tons of hooks to third party apps? I mean, unlike tons of billion-valued "unicorns" that not only don't have an income plan (apart from "some day we'll maybe sell ads") but are also losing money. You'd be surprised with how many 1000+ people companies are there, profitable and fine in all kinds of sectors,…
I wish they had more choice regarding purchasing more space. I'm not interested in 1TB and find 10$ per month too much if I wont even use 10% of it. Although if there is a cloud provider I'd trust that sync would never fuck up, I'd be Dropbox. Google Drive still thinks it's normal to re-download the cloud folder instead of letting me install Drive in the same location after a system reinstall, where all the files alr…
It's not that Dropbox can't offer less space, it's that they're not interested in making the baseline price anything lower than $10. Put another way, Dropbox is perfectly happy to get along without customers who think the difference between $5 and $10 is something to care about.
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The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into customer acquisition at a loss? Probably a few of them, but I'm guessing some other company with a similar business model would have come along with VC backing and eaten their lunch (sure, that company might then be in the exact same place as the current over-valued lat…
> The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into customer acquisition at a loss? The problem isn't with early VC money. Dropbox's early backers would have still made a gigantic return on Dropbox setting at a $1bn valuation. Really, it's not even a problem with their series B ($250M at $4bn). $4bn is a reasonable eve…
So it makes sense why companies would want to stay private if someone is willing to give them the cash they think they need. Problem is, those investors also want to make a huge return, so a 20B valuation is going to come with some nasty liquidation preferences/ratchets etc. to protect the money.
My dropbox scenario is I have a 2TB HD and 2TB dropbox storage with the 1year packrat service. I record and edit music on the HD and dropbox is always syncing my changes. The next day, when I'm at work, I can pull up the website and listen to the stuff I worked on the previous night. If I go into a studio I connect to dropbox and sync whatever folder(s) that contains the song(s) I'm working on. When I get home the fi…
The only annoyance with dropbox I have is there are certain scenarios where you can't play audio from the website and are forced to download it, which is annoying when sharing links.
Agreed.... and once they really get their media and file rendering act together, that multi-billion dollar valuation is going to make a lot more sense. Despite what I said earlier about renaming the company, they're not in the "storage" business, but rather the "delivery" business.
The latter category has an unbounded upside.
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Nail on the head right here. The only thing Dropbox has these days is consumer confidence in it's syncing process. Beyond that, they trail every competitor feature-wise and frankly, they are succeeding despite their management, not because of it. Recent product enhancements have been, let's be honest, mediocre at best across the board and show no signs of that changing anytime soon. They exist now solely due to brand…
What if -- hold your breath! -- Dropbox is simply a medium-sized, privately held, profit-generating company that will end up satisfying a certain customer segment and paying dividends to investors? The horror!
Regardless, once investors pay for growth, they require it, in order to be paid out on their bets and remain profitable.
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If Microsoft and Apple weren't able to build good alternatives, what makes people think that they won't fuck up an acquisition? Clearly storage for them isn't a priority. So I don't get it. But then I wasn't much into sports either.
Building something is hard. Writing a check is easy. Apple could easily make the payout contingent on a smooth integration. Apple could even have a foreign subsidiary purchase Dropbox, thereby allowing for full use of its external profits it hasn't brought back to the US due to taxes. That's the benefit of cash. It solves almost every problem.
> Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. Honest question: WTF are they doing?
Nail on the head right here. The only thing Dropbox has these days is consumer confidence in it's syncing process. Beyond that, they trail every competitor feature-wise and frankly, they are succeeding despite their management, not because of it. Recent product enhancements have been, let's be honest, mediocre at best across the board and show no signs of that changing anytime soon. They exist now solely due to brand…
But my dropbox was super slow in Japan, MS Office products keep spawning conflicting copies, Photoshop randomly pauses batch processing because of sync file locking, and they are shutting down Carousel.
So I am moving to Google Drive. All the frustrations above are not unique to me. Dropbox even has a Japanese web site. But this is what destroys consumer confidence. There were trivial complaints on their support site regarding speed issues and Carousel issues with pages of responses. It is the loyal customers that bother to post, yet the impression everyone is getting is seriously, WTF are they doing?
You can't have it known that you are healthily funded, have hundreds of engineers, not free, and NOT care.