Dropbox is like twitter. An over-engineered solution for a very narrowed use case. Don't get me wrong, the product works very well. I actually use it everyday, but from an investor/growth perspective, I fall back into what Jobs said - "it's just a feature".
Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
161–170 of 192 posts
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#162The only comment I will say about Dropbox is the price, I wish they would do a 100GB tier or something for £1.99 a month. I really cannot justify paying £7.99 a month for 1TB of storage, especially when I'll most likely use less than 10% of that space
I also pay dropbox, but I never checked the size. I think when I started it was like 50 GB for the same amount of money. You pay for the service and softwaredevelopment. The storage is just what they can give you cheaply.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I understand what you are saying, and that is a somewhat plausible story. Another one is that search is more difficult.
But the reality is I think for any company with serious security policy will have to pass on a service that only "sort of" secures their files.
There are a lot of people also who will not ever consider going with dropbox because they have on their board (Rice) someone who has a sordid track record when it comes to warrantless wiretapping, torture, and so forth.
In my opinion dropbox is OK for sharing docs between 2 people as long as the doc is not something you consider private. If you want privacy though (business files/docs/artifacts), best to pick something else.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#164I love Dropbox, but where's the growth potential? They do an amazing job of storage and syncing, and as a user I'd love for them to focus on that. Can they use their early success in sync to bootstrap other products? "Evernote" by Dropbox? EDIT> This is an honest question, and I'd appreciate informative replies.
Nowadays I think IPO means "We honestly don't know how get any more money. Let's just let the public pay us a little more, then move on to other businesses."
The strange thing is, that there are still people paying for IPO shares. But as long as they do, why not use it to squeeze the last penny out of the business before starting the next.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#165So what's the advantage of Dropbox over FTP? Seriously. I have only used it for sharing large files. What else good is it?
I don't know why people downvote such a reasonable question.
Reasons are:
1. You just install the client and it works.
2. The files are backed up, while your ftp solution might not be.
3. Your space can grow depending on disk prices without you doing anything for it.
4. A lot of possible merge conflicts between different computers are automatically merged by their smart tooling.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#166Earlier 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…
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.
Better is a relative term, some argue that iCloud is VASTLY superior since you can set it up with your own private key that apple does not have access to.
Dropbox can always view your files without you knowing.
I do agree that as far as usability and cross platform support, dropbox is better. For security though I would say it's middle of the pack at best.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
ICOs will evolve with more realistic offerings. The DAO disaster only happened one year ago and the community recovered very fast. The main point is the difficulty to access good deals early on and that is what is happening with new IPOs.
"The community" didn't "recover" because it wasn't broken in the first place. Sure ETH:USD declined, but then went up because everyone and their dog buy or mine cryptocurrencies in hope of getting rich fast (extensive media coverage helps). It's not a sign of a sound economic system, it's a sign of a bubble.
Not saying it is not a bubble. Amazon was part of the dot com era bubble and look at what they are now. When you lower the barrier of entry you have all kind of community members, including the few good ones who don't want to follow a more classical funding approach. In the worst case, all this is an interesting experiment.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating. Any idea why?
Box has the admin controls, customizations, APIs and workflow tools that big enterprises actually want and need. Dropbox didnt even have Groups to manage users until just 18 months ago and had silly things like invites for group folders which are all holdovers from their consumer roots.
Customer managed encryption keys are supported by Box, so they also have a much more compelling security story than dropbox.
Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#169Re: Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO
#170Dropbox is like twitter. An over-engineered solution for a very narrowed use case. Don't get me wrong, the product works very well. I actually use it everyday, but from an investor/growth perspective, I fall back into what Jobs said - "it's just a feature".
Also many platforms are adding storage as add-in (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) which decreases available market.