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Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

fortune.com

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Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#111

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #78
akg_67 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's their value proposition in 2017? I have been paid user of Dropbox for now 4+ years. The reason I have stuck with it because "It works! plain and simple." I have tried other storage services like Google, iCloud and Box. But none match the simplicity, consistency, invisibility, cross-platform, seamless features of Dropbox. Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They h…

>I still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and iPhone. On Mac I just open the iCloud folder and the files are there, just like Dropbox On iPhone I open the iCloud Drive app and the files are there just like on Mac, much like in Dropbox pp expect Dropbox uses list format. Personally I like iCloud currently more, but as you said it only works in Apple ecosystem (which I'm currently fine with).…

FYI, there's also iCloud for Windows [0], and some people claim to have gotten it to work with Wine [1] on Ubuntu.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/195603/are-there-any-ways-to...

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#112

Post by briandear »

ryanlol wrote: post #15
imron wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the original comments "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."

All you need is a nice quick python wrapper for that and you've got a business :)

Yes.. a a quick python script to market and sell it!

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#113

Post by jug »

jakubp wrote: post #83
vecter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? People use it as a form of communication. It makes people feel closer to their friends. That has enormous value.

So this is interesting. You may feel closer to people you haven't seen for a while when they are always "with" you on Snapchat -- I have certainly experienced that with people I don't talk to often or people who live on another continent. But then again, I can't shake the feeling that this is more about fun than really being close. I remember having close friends in high school and at the university. We spent many ho…

I think there are disadvantages from social networks in the long term as people isolate themselves and allow them to take the place of physical connections, which they don't. But that their advantages from bringing friends to each other is at the same time often without a doubt beneficial. A virtual connection is better than none at all, and I know I would not have the lasting friendships I would have had today if it were not for social networks.

I guess in a perfect world, people would understand the benefits but also fallacies and balance their use of these networks. That's the way I think we could get the most value out of them without exposing ourselves to their issues too much.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#114

Post by pletnes »

lprd wrote: post #110
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #40

I used Dropbox for a few years, but ultimately switched to another big-name company service. Consumers now have great options available from all the big-name companies: Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating. Given this, I think it's reasonable to ask: what's their value proposition in 2017? I hadn't been following them for…

Dropbox user since 2010 here. Although I haven't 'thoroughly' compared Dropbox to other cloud based storage providers, the reason I've stuck with Dropbox this long is: 1. Backups all the photos I take with my iPhone automatically. 2. Service integration (E.g. Slack, 1Password, Alfred prefs). 3. Paper is pretty nice, I've been using it lately. 4. User interface is nice and clean. 5. Photo album creation/sharing is nic…

8 and 9 would be "faster" and linux support. Not insignificant for me, at least.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#115

Post by askvictor »

akg_67 wrote: post #66
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #40

I used Dropbox for a few years, but ultimately switched to another big-name company service. Consumers now have great options available from all the big-name companies: Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating. Given this, I think it's reasonable to ask: what's their value proposition in 2017? I hadn't been following them for…

> what's their value proposition in 2017? I have been paid user of Dropbox for now 4+ years. The reason I have stuck with it because "It works! plain and simple." I have tried other storage services like Google, iCloud and Box. But none match the simplicity, consistency, invisibility, cross-platform, seamless features of Dropbox. Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They h…

While it does 'just work' (i.e. the best product currently in the space) it's more a factor of how much better it is than its competitors, and how much the price premium is.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#116

Post by Etheryte »

While one of Dropbox's strengths is its simplicity, one thing that I think is currently keeping many enterprise customers away is detailed configurability – currently you only have manual folder-level control over what to sync. However, a very common use case is to autosync everything except certain types of files (certificates, keystores etc). They would probably see some quick adoptions if they covered detailed configuration and enterprise-level management in a good manner.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#117

Post by flurdy »

GordonS wrote: post #79
mdm_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar thing happened at MPOW. We've been Dropbox for Business subscribers for several years and all of a sudden they informed us of some astronomical price increase. We're migrating everyone's data before the end of the year and moving to a locally hosted Seafile-based storage solution.

Another Seafile user here, also moved from Dropbox. I moved before the big price hike, and I did so for a few reasons: 1. It kills machines on startup. My machine had the CPU and HDD maxxed out for 30 minutes every time I started it, rendering it unusable 2. You can only sync a single folder, which is really limiting 3. The syncing algorithm is crap (well, it was for me anyway) - I was constantly resolving conflicts…

> 2. You can only sync a single folder, which is really limiting

That is easily worked around as Dropbox follows symlinks.

E.g on my desktop ~/Dropbox is on a small SSD so on that machine ~/Dropbox/Photos is a symlink to a folder on my large capacity HDD.

> 4.

Perhaps you already aware of the symlink solution :) It works for me, but is a little hacky. And you need to make sure dropbox is not running when moving and soft linking folders.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#118

Post by msh »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #101
krzrak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They have no concept of customer service. They might well be running by robots. With Dropbox is the same. Some time ago a weird bug occured on my Dropbox account and I reported it. Being paying customer (3 accounts) I expected my issue to be handled professionally, as with most of other services that I use. Unfortunately, I was disapp…

> is introducing Nah, they've always been good at not listening to what they don't want to hear. People were asking about client-side encryption back in 2009, and they've been mishearing for all these years. Top notch.

Well I guess they don't want to pay for the extra storage when they can't dedup files.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#119

Post by flurdy »

Etheryte wrote: post #116

While one of Dropbox's strengths is its simplicity, one thing that I think is currently keeping many enterprise customers away is detailed configurability – currently you only have manual folder-level control over what to sync. However, a very common use case is to autosync everything except certain types of files (certificates, keystores etc). They would probably see some quick adoptions if they covered detailed con…

The day dropbox can read and follow .gitignore in my folders I would be happy.

If I don't want version control over it I also don't need to back it up.

Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

#120

Post by flurdy »

flurdy wrote: post #119
Etheryte wrote: post #116

While one of Dropbox's strengths is its simplicity, one thing that I think is currently keeping many enterprise customers away is detailed configurability – currently you only have manual folder-level control over what to sync. However, a very common use case is to autosync everything except certain types of files (certificates, keystores etc). They would probably see some quick adoptions if they covered detailed con…

The day dropbox can read and follow .gitignore in my folders I would be happy. If I don't want version control over it I also don't need to back it up.

Continuously manually disabling syncing of e.g. binary build files, temporary log files etc from my projects. But you can not do it before they exist, only afterwards whilst dropbox is busy syncing megabytes of unneccesary files...

Though the linux client has a CLI that helps a little with disabling certain patterns but no mac equivalent.

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