Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 133 posts

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#111

Post by _bxg1 »

telchar wrote: post #106
_bxg1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is cheap enough these days that each of my computers has more HDD space than I need for my whole Dropbox, so I don't have a need for a "true" external drive. I primarily use it as a backup and secondarily use it to sync across machines. Every file of importance lives in my Dropbox directory, so when I'm working on a project or something I don't even have to think about backups. If my apartment building burned…

For backups I understand. What I'm curious about is what is your setup that involves multiple computers. Is it one personal computer and one at work? Do you have multiple personal computers for some reason? Just curious about usage patterns that differ from my own.

I have a Windows/Linux desktop and a Macbook, both personal. Also and Android phone. If you truly have ample storage you can also use Dropbox as a way of syncing between OSes on the same machine, in a VM or on separate partitions. Duplicates a bunch of data, but you don't have to mess with mounting and differing file systems and everything.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#112

Post by yitchelle »

tomhoward wrote: post #93
ebikelaw wrote: post #21

I noticed the word "profit" doesn't appear anywhere in the article. Will Dropbox ever make money?

This is the wrong question to ask about a company that still has growth potential. If there is still potential for growth, it is irrational to declare profits; by doing so you're foregoing the opportunity for bigger revenues (and gross profits) in the future and leaving the way open for a hungrier competitor. It's a valid question to ask whether they could be profitable if they ceased all investment in growth, and I…

>> If there is still potential for growth, it is irrational to declare profits; by doing so you're foregoing the opportunity for bigger revenues (and gross profits) in the future and leaving the way open for a hungrier competitor.

Dropbox, being a public traded company, must declare their financials. If they wanted to keep their financials a secret, they should have stayed private.

However, I don't get why you see growth (or potential growth) is tied to profit declaration. Can you explain a bit more? TIA.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#113

Post by anoncoward111 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #25
anoncoward111 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your quick and honest reply! I fancy myself as someone who supports "the little guy", and the Dropbox team's story is an example of how "the big guys" totally and completely fell asleep in a pool of their own money while Dropbox built something that people wanted before other bigger players. I therefore find it ironic that I don't support them with even just a little bit of money per month, when a big p…

Why do you like B of A?

Before they introduced Zelle, it was a free and relatively trustworthy way for me to exchange money with no fee between most of my friends. It just so happened we all had B of A.

In addition to that, their fraud resolution department has always been nice to me and their branches are nearby my house if I'm ever required to go in there. Still, right now, I trust my credit union more. But, my credit union wasn't founded by "two dudes" like Dropbox was, is the analogy I'm trying to make here.

Corporations I trust with my business - BOA, Google, LG, Walmart

Corporations I don't trust with my business - Comcast, Chipotle, McDonalds

"Two Guys" I trust with my business- My local mechanic, my local electrician (it took years of searching and relationship building).

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#115

Post by microdrum »

tinyhouse wrote: post #105

I like Dropbox but I think they now focus more on enterprise and forgot individual users which led them to where they are today. First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the cheapest upgrade is $100/year. The competition is about $25/year. The $100 doesn't even contain basic features like full text search when searching your Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that…

Regular paying user here. I agree that it's overpriced. They need to fight back on features. They'll never win on price alone.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#116

Post by kbyatnal »

tinyhouse wrote: post #105

I like Dropbox but I think they now focus more on enterprise and forgot individual users which led them to where they are today. First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the cheapest upgrade is $100/year. The competition is about $25/year. The $100 doesn't even contain basic features like full text search when searching your Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that…

Individual users are definitely no longer their focus, and it makes sense why.

You could see their individual focus for a long time (ex. developing Mailbox and Carousel) and in an ideal (and theoretical) world, it sounds wonderful to have a consumer-SaaS company focused on delivering amazing software to the masses and making money directly from it. But at the end of the day, you can't ignore the real world and the messy side of business.

I (and I'm sure a big chunk of the HN population) would love to support a company like this, but there just aren't enough of us. Drew & team probably found out how difficult getting people to pay for stuff (especially productivity software) really is.

This enterprise shift is necessary for Dropbox's survival.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#117

Post by anoncoward111 »

microdrum wrote: post #38
anoncoward111 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiousity, what does Dropbox do for you that they don't? Have you stayed because of price, service, features, laziness to switch? :) I personally don't have many storage needs so I just email myself important files, back up some things to USB, and sometimes will add things to Google Drive

Good comment. Dropbox is like how companies used to be: offer an amazing service and stay in your lane. These days, I wouldn't be surprised if Google sent me an email that said: Hey Widgetco, become a Certified Ad Partner to join our Managed Preferred Storage Solution or else your files on our legacy system will be deleted when it is deprecated in 24 hours. Also please fill out this Google Form (Google.com Account re…

Haha, this is extremely true. I endeavor to keep my needs so small that I'm never in the crosshairs of BigCo's "PLATINUM PARTNER NETWORK (TM)". That's a Kafka-esque place to be!

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#118

Post by simonebrunozzi »

kornish wrote: post #40
toomanybeersies wrote: post #33

Slightly off topic, but I discovered the other day that shared folders count towards the disk quota for each account it's shared to. I had several GB of photos shared with me on Dropbox, and it blew right over my free limit, despite the fact that none of them were actually mine. The photos also count towards the quota of the account sharing with me. That's soured me quite a lot on Dropbox.

That's probably done to prevent people from creating many free accounts and sharing folders with each other to simulate having more storage space.

True; however, this bad behavior could be easily countered with a very simple algorithm. Dropbox could do better here.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#119

Post by FullyFunctional »

kbyatnal wrote: post #116
tinyhouse wrote: post #105

I like Dropbox but I think they now focus more on enterprise and forgot individual users which led them to where they are today. First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the cheapest upgrade is $100/year. The competition is about $25/year. The $100 doesn't even contain basic features like full text search when searching your Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that…

Individual users are definitely no longer their focus, and it makes sense why. You could see their individual focus for a long time (ex. developing Mailbox and Carousel) and in an ideal (and theoretical) world, it sounds wonderful to have a consumer-SaaS company focused on delivering amazing software to the masses and making money directly from it. But at the end of the day, you can't ignore the real world and the me…

Annecdata, but I would gladly pay iff they were a zero-knowledge company (they should never see cleartext), but they aren't and I must assume that will limit enterprise adoption as well.

I have _literally_ looked for an alternative for more than a decade, but nobody can touch Dropbox on a really wide range of metrics and the trend amount competitors seems to move away from the hyper-simple file system abstraction.

I think I have tried most commercial options and practically all open source alternatives. I had high hopes for Syncthing, but I found high load and erratic syncing (was testing with 320 GB). Also no iOS client and no partial sync :(

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#120

Post by FullyFunctional »

joering2 wrote: post #13

Still available online :) https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox/

There is so much gold in that link, thank you!

A random pick: "The concept that I'm most excited about is that the core technology in Dropbox -- continuous efficient sync with compression and binary diffs"

* Andrew Tridgell of course created rsync (which is referenced elsewhere) and pioneered the binary delta model which has inspired so much progress. Dropbox's sync in clearly directly influenced by this. Outstanding achievement!

* "efficient sync with compression and binary diffs" is key here but astonishingly appears to be a secondary concern for many (most?) competitors which is why they su^H^Haren't as good.

Post reply on HN