How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions • Hacker News Board

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#121

Post by tbrock » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:43 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #109

tbrock wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except smart sync only works on mac and windows. Linux is a second class citizen. I’d sign up for Dropbox if they had feature parity on Linux. Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

I'm not sure what you mean by "smart sync", but selective sync does work on Linux last I checked (a few months ago)

https://www.dropbox.com/smartsync

No, it’s not the same thing and no, it does not work on Linux.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#122

Post by k__ » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:51 PM UTC

sebastienrocks wrote: post #81

k__ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some remote universities, I guess. I'm studying a MCompSci for 7 years now and it only costs me 11€ when I don't do any courses in a semester. I got all courses done, just need time for the thesis, hehe

Is your university remote? Can you provide a link by chance?

sure

https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/english/

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#123

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

tbrock wrote: post #102

_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive is like "I guess you can use the desktop client instead of the web one". One Drive is like "I guess you can use a Mac". iCloud is like "I guess you can have non-Apple devices". Dropbox just syncs your files from and to anything you have, equally well. I'm pretty sure none of the others even have a Linux client at all, but Dropbox does.

Except smart sync only works on mac and windows. Linux is a second class citizen. I’d sign up for Dropbox if they had feature parity on Linux. Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

> Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

Very much this. I was using Dropbox, and the 2 gig free plan wasn't enough, but I sure as hell didn't need a whopping 1 TB, so I switched to Google Drive. The 15 gig free plan is enough for me, and I can rest easy knowing that if I end up needing only a little more, I can get 100 gig for $2.

That said, I definitely preferred Dropbox's client more. Google Drive for some reason is frequently showing an X on it's sync folder indicating it isn't syncing even though it's working fine. Google Drive's client also seems to be really slow to start.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#124

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

abrookewood wrote: post #68

scarface74 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t see myself paying $10/month for Dropbox when I can get Office365 for the same price with 1tb apiece for up to five users, plus office for 5 computers, and 5 iPads.

There are lots of things wrong with OneDrive which is what you will be using. Off the top of my head: no delta sync; no LAN sync. End result was that every single file change will result in your the entire file being uploaded to the web and your ENTIRE team downloading it again ... Can't remember the others, but it was enough for me to continue with DropBox despite the rising cost when recently compared to OneDrive.

We use OneDrive at work and I think it's awful.

My biggest complaint is how slow syncing is some times. I have a desktop and laptop at work and I can save something in my OneDrive folder on my desktop and it'll take over an hour for it to appear on my laptop unless I manually pause syncing and then unpause it to force a refresh from the OneDrive server.

I've never had that with Dropbox. It's been damn near instant every time.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#125

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

ggg9990 wrote: post #70

telchar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? And I thought Dropbox was slow. I find myself asking what's the point of gigabit internet when I haven't found a service that users more than 50Mb.

Gigabit Internet is largely pointless for home use. Unless you have a Mormon family all watching different 4K shows at the same time or something.

Seriously.

I have a 30 mbit fiber connection. The only time I ever notice is when I'm downloading a new game. Otherwise, my wife can be watching Netflix while I'm gaming and there's no difference in my latency.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#126

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

yitchelle wrote: post #112

tomhoward wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gr…

Assume growth costs money.

If people believe there's room for growth, then earning profit implies you're wasting money. The money kept as profit could have been spent on growth. Money spent on growth is not included in profits.

To put it another way...

If you have a factory and produce 10,000 widgets that cost $10 to make and you sell them all for $100 each, then you've made $900,000. But if you spend all $900,000 on factory expansion because you know there's a demand for at least 1 million widgets, then you've made $0 in profit.

These numbers cause constant bickering when it comes to stocks. When people were talking about Amazon not being profitable, it's really because all the money they made was being re-invested back into the company.

People make noise about Tesla not being profitable, claiming it's stock is extremely overvalued. Well, if they completely eliminated R&D, stopped trying to improve batteries, automation, self-driving capabilities, etc., they'd probably be quite profitable.

Hence why people claim you shouldn't be declaring profits if there's still growth potential. If you're a publicly traded company, yeah your finances are declared publicly, but in this case, "declaring profits" means that your financial reports should be showing very little profit. If you're showing profit, it means growth is being limited.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#127

Post by ebikelaw » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #126

yitchelle wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 gr…

Assume growth costs money. If people believe there's room for growth, then earning profit implies you're wasting money. The money kept as profit could have been spent on growth. Money spent on growth is not included in profits. To put it another way... If you have a factory and produce 10,000 widgets that cost $10 to make and you sell them all for $100 each, then you've made $900,000. But if you spend all $900,000 on…

Pulling out of a nosedive is a neat trick at an airshow, but it's less fun when the plane slams into the ground. Maybe you think Dropbox is on a trajectory to turn a profit, but we won't know for a few more quarters. It also remains to be seen how resilient their business might be against macroeconomic downturns.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#128

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

madengr wrote: post #31

Still fathoms me that Dropbox is worth billions of $ for the same functionality as FTP.

I know, right? Why would I want a directory that transparently keeps files in sync with multiple devices?

I'd much rather set up an FTP server, manually download my files, make changes, then re-upload, then manually download the new versions onto my other devices!

When you think back, cars were a silly invention. They have the same functionality as a horse-drawn wagon!

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#129

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #28

ebikelaw wrote: post #21

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

Also, will they ever encrypt files on the client side? (Hey, it's been only nine or ten years evading that question ...)

For every user wanting client-side encryption so that Dropbox can't see the content of the files you're storing, there's another user wanting server-side text searching, which isn't possible with client-side encryption.

The answer, of course, is to make client-side encryption an option.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#130

Post by tomhoward » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 1:05 AM UTC

ebikelaw wrote: post #127

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume growth costs money. If people believe there's room for growth, then earning profit implies you're wasting money. The money kept as profit could have been spent on growth. Money spent on growth is not included in profits. To put it another way... If you have a factory and produce 10,000 widgets that cost $10 to make and you sell them all for $100 each, then you've made $900,000. But if you spend all $900,000 on…

Pulling out of a nosedive is a neat trick at an airshow, but it's less fun when the plane slams into the ground. Maybe you think Dropbox is on a trajectory to turn a profit, but we won't know for a few more quarters. It also remains to be seen how resilient their business might be against macroeconomic downturns.

Such determination to sneer!

Dropbox is not in any kind of nosedive. They have positive free cash flow margins that have grown steadily for three years [1]. That is precisely the opposite of a nosedive.

You'd have a point if we were talking about Uber, but we're not, we're talking about Dropbox, a company that has solid and improving financials, which is why it's trading at a healthy premium on its IPO price.

[1] https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/dropbox-ipo-s-1-breakdown-3...