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Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

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Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#161

Post by 5_minutes »

Actually box.com has several nice features by which they totally outperform Dropbox. One is for example the complete mess many Dropbox folders become, because you can drag an drop them around yourself, rename them etc. Look at anyone's Dropbox folder and things get quite messy rather quickly.

The problem with box.com is that there's no business support at all (nobody answers any emails). And in that regard Dropbox has been doing a really good job and put some effort into it. The product itself is not superior to box.com, quite in contrary actually, but the support is much better. (it's also quite easy since with box.com it's non-existent).

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#162

Post by smpetrey »

shubhamjain wrote: post #10

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition i…

That's exactly why I cancelled my account.

There were rumors they were going to launch an email service, then a basecamp competitor, then it was a race against iCloud and Google drive...

Honestly after cancelling my account I've never looked back. I get more storage per dollar with google and iCloud and the Dropbox macOS integration is a joke.

With all the acquisitions Dropbox has made in the past decade, they couldn't have created a more useful macOS app? Read a blog post by any former dropbox employee and you'll hear the same thing over and over:

Dropbox is littered with management problems and their leadership has no idea what the future of the company and will look like because cloud storage is a race to zero.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#163

Post by rampage101 »

rogerbinns wrote: post #136
brightball wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this point, Dropbox does an excellent job of what they set out to do. I haven't seen anybody do it better and I'm a happy paid user. Being able to pay $10 / month for 1TB of fast, instantly synced and versioned online storage integrated directly into the filesystem is hard to beat.

The place where Dropbox is spectacularly bad is multiple account support. Google does a good job of multiple account support - you log in to the relevant multiple accounts and things work. Dropbox expects you to pseudo-merge exactly one personal account with exactly one business account. You end up with a mess. It gets even worse when trying to unmerge them. And is not useful should you have more accounts than exactl…

Same thing for me. I think I have 2 or 3 accounts (by accident) that I created over the years. When I login I never know what files to expect... that being said I don't use DropBox that much, but occasionally someone shares something via DropBox and I almost inevitably have a login issue.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#164

Post by hinkley »

smpetrey wrote: post #162
shubhamjain wrote: post #10

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition i…

That's exactly why I cancelled my account. There were rumors they were going to launch an email service, then a basecamp competitor, then it was a race against iCloud and Google drive... Honestly after cancelling my account I've never looked back. I get more storage per dollar with google and iCloud and the Dropbox macOS integration is a joke. With all the acquisitions Dropbox has made in the past decade, they couldn…

> a race to zero

That's a much nicer phrase than the one I used to use: "complicit in your own destruction". One is too bland, the other too strong. Certainly there's got to be one in the middle.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#165

Post by dboreham »

Retric wrote: post #160
dboreham wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, wher…

That's not how investing works. People don't invest because they think a company is worth X, they invest because they think it will be worth X at some point in the future adjusted for the risk of not being worth X. Further, they don't necessarily buy stock from the company. In other words startups have a small chance of being worth a much larger X, and Exxon has a very large chance of being worth a slightly larger X.…

Um, it certainly is how investing works. They think the company will be worth >X in the future ( >>X in the case of pre-IPO investing).

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#166

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

dublinben wrote: post #87
akurilin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bummer. I have a sizeable chunk of raw image files I'd love to back up somewhere without having to have it on my machine, Dropbox would be a good fit if it wasn't for the 1TB limit on individuals. Ended up uploading directly to S3 and archiving to Glacier.

Amazon Prime Photos allows unlimited photo storage (RAW included) with any $100/yr subscription to Amazon Prime. If you're already paying this for the other benefits, then it is free.

At the risk of "ruining" it for some users, Amazon doesn't appear to validate nor re-compress uploaded images. I uploaded some bits from /dev/random as a .png, and it counted towards photo storage, and I got the same bits back re-downloading the test file. So you don't even have to resort to stuffing metadata or steganography.

For the record, I don't exploit this loophole and only tested to satisfy my curiosity. At $60/yr. it's already very cheap for unlimited -- it's my tertiary backup so I'll accept the risk that "unlimited" is qualified -- generic file storage.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#167

Post by hinkley »

hkmurakami wrote: post #142
tomc1985 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must these things always be looked at through the eyes of business? Why can't Dropbox just do file sync really effing well? Companies need to stop trying to take over the world, and focus on product/service mastery

Because when you raise VC, you have made a pact with the devil to take over the world. Your customers aren't just your customers, but also your financial backers at that point.

One of the hardest at things my teams have struggled with is the fact that for large parts of the software world, the user is not the person with the checkbook.

Getting both of them what they want is a constant challenge, full of compromises.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#168

Post by PeterisP »

alphapapa wrote: post #112
Afton wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't involved in these design discussions early on, and Skydrive certainly didn't use rsync, this was just meant as an example of "this is essentially a solved problem, we just need some UI". It isn't, and presenting it as such just gets you into a bad situation.

But Dropbox doesn't handle any merging of changes; any conflicts are left for the user to resolve. In this way it's basically an automatic version of Unison, which is exactly "some UI" around a "solved problem." Right?

It doesn't handle merging of changes within files, however, if you take a step back, consider that you're essentially merging lists of metadata (with hashes of blobs), not just uploading these blobs; and because the systems that need to be synced are distributed, not always connected, and users want to read/write all of them you get the limitations of the classic CAP theorem.

E.g. the quite feasible scenario with two computers, both partially synced, and both getting files changed/added/removed/moved while the sync is happening. Consider applications creating temporary files while a document is being edited, and expecting to be able to create those files... and then it results in some app being unable to open the same document because it's "already open" on another machine. There are all kinds of interesting conflicts and race conditions possible, and you need to resolve them all in some way that doesn't weird out the users.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#169

Post by post_break »

marcusr wrote: post #39

Dropbox for Business has really changed my view of Dropbox the company. With AzureAD SSO integration, and the new Smart Sync feature, it's now possible to run a small company completely in the cloud, with terabytes of data in the cloud accessible to everyone without them synching it all to their laptop. Smart Sync is their game changer.

Used to use Dropbox for Business. Shared tons of files. A glitch happened on syncing and it deleted over 60,000 files. I had to restore them a folder at a time. We stopped using it the next week.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#170

Post by goldenkey »

szermer wrote: post #129
shubhamjain wrote: post #10

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition i…

I just presented a deck on this topic today. The 30 year evolution of the document goes something like: Paper > Word Processing > Email Attachment > Collaborative (Google Docs) > Cloud Storage > Meta Information The last part, Meta Information, is the ‘conversation about the document’ and represents the evolution from a physical piece of paper that I hold in my hand to having a conversation around a document that I m…

I don't mean to offend or be crass but I couldn't help but laugh. I think you are overanalyzing documents. What you said could be word for word out of the Silicon Valley show script.
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