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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

#181

Post by newsat13 »

EGreg wrote: post #141
blowski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud? And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE. So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?

I think it's most about awareness/marketing. Just go out in the streets and ask people if they know about nextCloud. If they do, ask them if they run it. Most don't because it takes time and effort to run things. nextCloud is squarely in the enterprise space. nextCloud-as-a-service is a supremely hard market to enter because you need investment from day 1 (storage has to be very high and pricing has to be very low since it's the first thing people will compare against).

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

#182

Post by krrrh »

stephenr wrote: post #123
sidlls wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me you're looking at this from a technically proficient developer's perspective. It's easy (trivial) for a technically proficient person to setup any trivial cloud storage system they like on just about any provider's platform they like. It's not so easy for anybody else (read: the vast majority of other users). Dropbox's value proposition isn't commodity storage on somebody else's servers: it's the UI/UX…

Dropbox isn't installed by default on any platform. Apple, Microsoft and Goole all offer 'cloud' storage services (they aren't a product, stop calling it that) and all have a user-facing platform on devices: macOS/iOS, the various Windows, Android/ChromeOS. Dropbox is effectively a feature. That isn't to say they can't remain in the market and possibly even become profitable, but just making a sync client whose bigge…

It's effectively the only cross-platform solution that works very well on all 3 major desktop platforms and both major mobile platforms. It seems like no one else has the incentive to take other platforms seriously. Especially, for anyone who collaborates or shares files with many small groups or clients. Even though it's not first-party it is the lowest-friction option, because you can't count on all your collaborators being on the same ecosystem.

Over several years, my experience of trying to use Google Drive or OneDrive on the Mac has been very frustrating, with significantly more CPU and RAM usage. It's ridiculous that OneDrive still doesn't do differential sync. AFAIK, neither has official clients for Linux.

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

#183

Post by nsm »

EGreg wrote: post #141
blowski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud? And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE. So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?

IMO open source projects need a critical mass of developers to achieve "polish". All the edge cases and so on that isnt' a matter of writing clever code, but sitting there for days writing tests or manually investigating corner cases, or putting in resources for good crash reporting, seamless updates and things like that. I have yet to see an open source project that deals well with this (Firefox doesn't count because they have a lot of $$ and can employ devs to work on all these things.)

When you reach a scale of millions of users, all these tiny details start to affect a sizeable amount of users.

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

#184

Post by archvile »

Infernal wrote: post #93
Karunamon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation. Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS. Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client. Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux…

For iCloud, you actually can use iCloud Drive via a web interface from other OSes - I think the biggest limitation is actually that you can't share arbitrary files, only certain types of files (Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Notes, Photos). I could easily go all in on iCloud Drive if I could make arbitrary files available to other users.

Apple also has a Windows client for iCloud Drive, and you can use standard Word/Excel/PowerPoint files and still edit them through Pages/Numbers/Keynote on a different Mac.

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

#185

Post by cwyers »

johnsea wrote: post #137
maverick_iceman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Google Drive and Google Photos. Google Photos offer unlimited space for high-res photos.

Dropbox won't analyse and sell you left and right. You cannot compare these two services. One is a service, one is an ad machine.

Okay, but that's the sort of tradeoff you have to make when you you won't pay freight on things. Backup is basically a solved problem, you just have to pay for it.

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

#186

Post by mnutt »

EGreg wrote: post #141
blowski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud? And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE. So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?

I think part of the challenge is manufacturing and handing out a distributed system to nontechnical users and then trying to debug their issues without having central control. (Or any control, really)

As someone who built an OSS synced storage server, scratching my own itch was pretty easy but responding to bug reports that are far outside of my use cases can get tedious. And somehow it feels like there are just so many, compared to other areas.

Edit: git-annex supports encryption and webdav remotes (and thus, ownCloud/Nextcloud/others) and it works pretty well.

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

#187

Post by mankash666 »

It appears like Dropbox has ~2X the revenue of box with possibly higher costs in marketing and sales, since their investors are pushing for growth. Assuming these higher costs to be nullified by operating their own datacenters, their (fair) valuation is ~$5B. Anyone still wondering why they aren't hurrying to an IPO, what with a plum $10B private valuation and all

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

#188

Post by majani »

gruglife wrote: post #47

I'm hoping someone can help me with this. DropBox is valued at $10b. Their closest competitor, Box, has a market cap of just over $2b. Does Dropbox really offer that much more than Box?

Not really. The latest crop of unicorns have done a really poor job of managing capital and they're getting slaughtered at the public markets(see twitter and snap). Dropbox has probably set themselves up for a similar fate

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

#189

Post by andyjsong »

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…

If that was a real concern, doesn't Google and Facebook also face this same issue? Isn't like 80% or more of their revenues come from ads?

The other business units and moonshot projects are just rounding errors on their balance sheets.

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

#190

Post by 19eightyfour »

weston wrote: post #15

Lots of negativity in here, but I'll say I really enjoy how incredibly simple Dropbox is and has remained since it launched. It's so easy to explain how it works to my non-techie parents ("It's just another folder on your computer, except it backs up your data automatically"). I hope Dropbox continues to thrive.

I mean, I don't really agree with Dropbox strategy if their goal is to continue growing, but I want to say congrats on the progress toward IPO. I sense it's been a long time coming. I saw Drew Houston talking to Sam Altman and talking about the books he reads and his approach to things. I have something of a new sort of respect for the guy. He strikes me as someone whose best ideas are still ahead of him. Like someone who found himself in a world far beyond his ken, and is now learning and incubating to make the next big move. I certainly hope that's the case, for Dropbox's future strategy to make it long term viable ( if long term viability is a workable goal for the Dropbox stakeholders ).

I don't know how to reconcile the negativity toward Dropbox with how what Dropbox did was very very technical and hacker-ish. Basically they spent 5 years just tracking down obscure operating system bugs and making their app work seamlessly across all platforms. I mean they really did the hard slog. A kind of slog I thought technical people here would respect.

If I really look into it I'd have to say the negativity here toward Dropbox stems from people thinking, "But I could do that! But I do that already!" And sort of having this bitterness that something so "their-territory" was done successfully by someone else. But I think, "don't they realize the hard slog Dropbox did to actually make that work everywhere?" I think in the case of Dropbox, it was that obsession with the details, that is a driving force of their culture and business. If people fail to appreciate that, and are negative based on the impression they get with that obsession omitted, they're not seeing Dropbox clearly, in my opinion.

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