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

April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 181 posts

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#141

Post by throwaway15 »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #136
throwaway15 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine" For your own sake, I hope you get more real-world experience before making investment decisions or building technology to sell. To you, somehow the existence of a massively profitable, multi-billion dollar company must be evidence of people's irrationality and not an unmet need.

Are they "massively profitable" though? I haven't really heard anything regarding their financials. They're well funded, but that doesn't really mean anything these days. There's certainly a need, don't get me wrong. It's just that for most people (paid) dropbox is the wrong solution. And at some point the right solution will present itself and suddenly dropbox will see its market disappear.

As a private company the financials are private of course, but take this as you will:

"Dropbox’s ascent has been just as stunning. The 50-million-user figure is up threefold from a year ago, and it has solved the “freemium” riddle, with revenue on track to hit $240 million in 2011 despite the fact that 96% of those users pay nothing. With only 70 staffers, mostly engineers, Dropbox grosses nearly three times more per employee than even the darling of business models, Google. Houston claims it’s already profitable but won’t reveal margins."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...

That's from 2 years ago, with 50M users. They now have 175M users. Extrapolate as you will.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#142

Post by hackinthebochs »

throwaway15 wrote: post #141
hackinthebochs wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they "massively profitable" though? I haven't really heard anything regarding their financials. They're well funded, but that doesn't really mean anything these days. There's certainly a need, don't get me wrong. It's just that for most people (paid) dropbox is the wrong solution. And at some point the right solution will present itself and suddenly dropbox will see its market disappear.

As a private company the financials are private of course, but take this as you will: "Dropbox’s ascent has been just as stunning. The 50-million-user figure is up threefold from a year ago, and it has solved the “freemium” riddle, with revenue on track to hit $240 million in 2011 despite the fact that 96% of those users pay nothing. With only 70 staffers, mostly engineers, Dropbox grosses nearly three times more per…

But has the percentage of premium users stayed constant as they grew? I wonder what percentage of users must be premium for dropbox to be/stay profitable. Or perhaps what percentage of traffic must be "premium traffic". Either way, there are a lot of unknowns, but I don't think this market is sustainable. Like Jobs said, dropbox is a feature, not a product. They are able to exploit a market inefficiency for the time being. I don't see that lasting for much longer.

Dropbox's long term future rests on them evolving into something that isn't easy to duplicate or pre-bundle. And even then, unless dropbox pivots massively, the market just won't be as big. File sharing simply is not a multi-billion dollar market.

(I can't help but wonder who I'm talking to seeing as you whipped out a throwaway for a dropbox discussion thread)

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#143

Post by chrislipa »

novum wrote: post #140

Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA. I was a happy paying Dropbox customer since 2008 but downgraded my account to the free tier a few months ago. I no longer consider Dropbox trustworthy for anything except (1) trivial files and (2) files encrypted client-side before they're put into Dropbox. Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases tha…

I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#144

Post by cdcarter »

fit2rule wrote: post #65
ErsatzVerkehr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage? Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?

Umm .. because accessing such resources as files in a shared way is a duty of the OS, after all. Or, to put it another way, lets rephrase your question: "Why should OS vendors supply drivers for filesystem _X_?" "Why should OS vendors provide a way for users to share files, at all?" The answer: because it is the duty of the OS to provide such features. Another thing: who says we need a Cloud model in order to deliver…

The thing that helped Dropbox take off (at least in my circles) was that it is on the cloud. I don't have to have a computer somewhere running all the time. In fact, I don't. Almost nobody I chat with regularly does.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#145

Post by pmorici »

Shank wrote: post #137
MichaelGG wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?

How exactly could you "transfer" files that way? You could just upload something to Dropbox and share your logon credentials and any form of dedup or DMCA won't help.

See the StakOverflow question for more details but the basics of it is that in order to optimize uploads the DB client calculates the hash of a file before uploading it and if the hash along with other attributes about the file like size etc... match then they assume it is the same. So you used to be able to trick the service into letting you download a file you never actually had if you knew the hash and other attributes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-f... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software)

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#147

Post by _dark_matter_ »

chrislipa wrote: post #143
novum wrote: post #140

Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA. I was a happy paying Dropbox customer since 2008 but downgraded my account to the free tier a few months ago. I no longer consider Dropbox trustworthy for anything except (1) trivial files and (2) files encrypted client-side before they're put into Dropbox. Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases tha…

I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.

I think he's saying that he's replacing his free-tier use with other alternatives. In this case, he doesn't care that it's not safe from the NSA.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#148

Post by lmm »

levlandau wrote: post #33

Sharp criticism from know-it-alls is often a sign that an idea is good. It's amazing to me how, even though this is common knowledge, good ideas continue to polarize. I'd hate for you guys to convince everyone to be so nice that we skew this long-trusted signal :)

Have you any examples of bad ideas that received less sharp criticism? I think it's more that HN looks at every idea critically.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#149

Post by ddebernardy »

singular wrote: post #74

Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might want to use them. After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using 100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files. Ok, fair enoug…

> indexing >300k files is tough (very easy to get to that count if you're keeping open source codebases on DB … Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.)

To their credit, it sounds like you should have been using source control all along.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#150

Post by BlackDeath3 »

bluedino wrote: post #98
soneca wrote: post #89

FWIW, Dropbox actually DID replace my USB drive (99% of the times at least).

Dropbox doesn't replace USB drives for me. I still use them for sneakernet. Installing the newest version of Ubuntu or OS X. Copying a 2GB file to another computer because downloading it again, even over local wifi, would take too long. What Dropbox replaced for me is the 'My Documents' folder. It allows me to access my files on my work PC, my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, or anyone else's computer that has an internet…

There certainly are USB use cases which Dropbox flat-out doesn't account for.

At one point during the setup of my new gaming PC, I somehow hosed things to the point where I couldn't install Windows (motherboard BIOS update, maybe?). I was getting driver detection failures during the install process, my peripherals (keyboard + mouse) wouldn't work, no NIC functionality, my CD drive was unusable. I ran out to Walmart at 1AM to buy a 16GB USB drive/16GB SD card, tethered my phone (my only functional computer at the time) to my PC, downloaded the required ISO to my phone's new SD card, moved the ISO to a USB via a live instance of Ubuntu running off of another USB, and installed Windows via USB (and things magically worked from there).

Dropbox is fantastic, but USBs aren't dead.

Post reply on HN