Not to mention the top reason I dropped Dropbox: with Condolezza Rice on the board I feel they are a bit too chummy with the government and the NSA.
Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
171–180 of 199 posts
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the first I'm hearing about Sync. Any comparison with SpiderOak?
Ever since drop-dropbox happened due to Rice, I've been happily using SpiderOak on Windows/OSX/Android/iOS systems. Fine interface with customizable options that I need.
In reading about Sync, I was surprised to see their claim that they never hold the encryption keys, even when signing in from mobile devices. This is in contrast to SpiderOak, which says that if one signs in from a mobile device or on the website, they hold keys in RAM for the session.
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#173> Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. Honest question: WTF are they doing?
They are in the catering industry and serve some of the best food in SOMA!
This is true. Best lunch ever.
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#174I use rdiff as an open source, simpler alternative to Dropbox for syncing files across a network. Dropbox uses the same library of functions as rdiff: librsync.
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#175> Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. Honest question: WTF are they doing?
Dropbox is playing catch up with Box in the enterprise so they're hiring salespeople like crazy in San Francisco, Australia, New York and Europe.
Why you ask? Obviously because storage will be infinite and free in the future. Google Drive for education is already completely free.
https://www.google.com/edu/products/productivity-tools/
What that means is that Dropbox is shifting from a consumer to an enterprise company. We all know for consumers they're way too expensive - 1TB for $100 is way to much free space for the average person.
The problem is they've screwed up other things. Google owned Carousel with Google Photos. Mailbox turned out to be an overly expensive acqui-hire. Luckily that doesn't affect them that much because they raised a boatload of cash and have lots of customers.
Now will Dropbox go away or die? Probably not but they'll always be behind Box when it comes to enterprise features.
It's too bad Box and Dropbox can't merge. Box has crap sync and Dropbox lacks a lot of Enterprise features Box has.
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#176Dropbox really proved out how valuable "it just works" in the cloud can be. Their first few years of execution were phenomenal and the product provided a real value. I remember discovering that I could mock up iPhone apps in photoshop on my desktop, save jpgs to dropbox and open in the app to see what the screens would look like immediately on my phone. Delightful. And then... none of their acquisitions or product in…
It's not often that companies nail one thing really well ... and then nail a second and third thing. Dropbox is amazing at cloud storage and syncing. Why do people expect them to develop great products beyond that?
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#177> Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. Honest question: WTF are they doing?
> Honest question: WTF are they doing? Have an actual profitable syncing business with several pricing tiers and tons of hooks to third party apps? I mean, unlike tons of billion-valued "unicorns" that not only don't have an income plan (apart from "some day we'll maybe sell ads") but are also losing money. You'd be surprised with how many 1000+ people companies are there, profitable and fine in all kinds of sectors,…
> Have an actual profitable syncing business
Source? Everything I've seen says Dropbox isn't even close to being "profitable" -- the vast majority of their customers don't pay a dime according to their CEO.
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#178As an otherwise-happy Dropbox customer, it does concern me somewhat that there has been very little innovation in the core product for several years. They seem focused on building a halo of lock-in services instead.
I don't know, their core product is so solid. It's one of those things I can install and never think about again, it just works. Maybe there's no need to innovate there?
There's need for innovation because Google/MS/Apple and such are integrating cloud-sync right into the operating system (and its only a matter of time before their sync tech is good enough or better than DB's sync tech).
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nail on the head right here. The only thing Dropbox has these days is consumer confidence in it's syncing process. Beyond that, they trail every competitor feature-wise and frankly, they are succeeding despite their management, not because of it. Recent product enhancements have been, let's be honest, mediocre at best across the board and show no signs of that changing anytime soon. They exist now solely due to brand…
What if -- hold your breath! -- Dropbox is simply a medium-sized, privately held, profit-generating company that will end up satisfying a certain customer segment and paying dividends to investors? The horror!
Let's say I am a dividend investor looking for a steady cashflow stream.
Why would an asset class like medium-size technology companies pursuing highly competitive cut-throat markets, requiring long lock-ups of capital (Dropbox was founded in 2007, so someone has been sitting on those shares for 9 years already) be more attractive than similar dividend-flowing asset classes like real estate or energy MLPs?
Are the dividends so outsized that Dropbox is basically swimming in cash and the yield is much better than I can get with similar asset classes? Do they have a stronger foothold in the market with expected longevity to out-survive an office tower, apartment complex or gas pipeline? Is it likely to attract better talent than Valley's established public companies (GOOG, AAPL, FB) or Valley's hyper-growth startups with IPO potential (Uber), and that better talent will out-compete the rivals on products, execution and market share (and, as corollary, fall under "dividend growth" umbrella, in theory allowing me to buy larger yields at substantial discount)?
Dropbox would have to compensate investors for (a) lack of liquidity and (b) for being in technology software market, known to be particularly unforgiving with its "winner takes all" mentality. Its peers would be highly risky single purpose private REITs (think casinos and fracking companies in North Dakota).
To accommodate that compensation the yields would likely have to be in the double-digits range, so let's say with profits of $20 mln of which $10 mln is allocated to dividends the expected valuation would be in the range of $60-100 mil (10-15% expected yield which seems reasonable in this rate environment with the type of risk described).
Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
#180In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board ( http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ ). I don't know what their future holds. But personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service. I'd hope their customers are also looking at the security of their data in…
I think in a twisted way it's sort of beneficial as outright there's no promise of encryption or security, implying you should take care of it yourself, client-side.
This follows the Unix philosophy where a utility does one thing and does it well, and if you need two jobs done, you pipe one through another.