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Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

nytimes.com

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Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#191

Post by new299 »

ljk wrote: post #47
new299 wrote: post #31

In 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…

what's your take on this? - https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2016/01/future-of-diversit...

It's off topic but... Personally I'm the guy who ticks "prefer not to say" when a form requests my "ethnic origin" so I don't particularly like that method of measuring diversity.

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#192

Post by appleflaxen »

isaiahg wrote: post #159
rikkus wrote: post #97

Reasons it's still in the game: 1. It works, with fewer problems than any other sync / cloud storage that I've used. 2. It has enough people using it outside of work that it's getting paying business customers (the Linux effect?) If either of these falters (if 1 falters, 2 does too) then they'll be gone. There are plenty of competitors and some even do sync well enough that people will use them. I'm rather upset that…

I agree. I actually use Dropbox, Drive, and OneDrive. I've only used OneDrive once to share some download links once. The only real reason I use Drive is because of Google Docs. For everything else I use DropBox because I trust them more. I've never ever had a problem with it. Also DropBox hasn't had major scandals and for the most part stays out of the news. When a company is basically holding your private stuff for…

Hiring Condeleza Rice was scandalous to me, since I care about privacy.

Obviously, this is a non-issue for the general public, but it's a bit tone-deaf for "power users".

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#193

Post by coldtea »

nacs wrote: post #177
coldtea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>the vast majority of their customers don't pay a dime according to their CEO.

That doesn't matter as long as those who do pay subsidy the others. From what they said, they have 100,000+ paying businesses and smart ways (like hash-based de-duplication) for minimizing their storage costs.

Their CEO also said that they have enough cash to not need new financing.

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#194

Post by nacs »

coldtea wrote: post #193
nacs wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the vast majority of their customers don't pay a dime according to their CEO. That doesn't matter as long as those who do pay subsidy the others. From what they said, they have 100,000+ paying businesses and smart ways (like hash-based de-duplication) for minimizing their storage costs. Their CEO also said that they have enough cash to not need new financing.

Yes I've seen the 100K estimate on paying users but that isn't that significant considering how many millions of free users they have (and how many full-time employees they need to pay for).

And "not need new financing" is no indication of profitability either.

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#195

Post by NumberCruncher »

Spooky23 wrote: post #68

> 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?

Building an API for Palantir? They sit on a pile of not encrypted data...

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#196

Post by noir-york »

smt88 wrote: post #60
InvisibleCities wrote: post #28

Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge…

There is currently no way that 50 people (roughly the number of employees at Basecamp) could support a Dropbox-like product at scale. It's just impossible. At their scale, the technical challenges of maintaining a decent user experience (good transfer speeds, little downtime, no lost data, etc.) are enormous.

Why?

Why do you need more people when you grow past a certain size? At Drop box's scale they surely must manage their backend at scale and not have people babysit servers. If DBX are using Amazon's S3 for storage then that's one less massive headache to take care of.

Just for comparison, Instagram had 13 employees when they sold to FBK and they sure had scale at that point.

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#197

Post by dontblink »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #183
unabst wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Dropbox for its simplicity, the fact that it has MIT in its genes, it not being Microsoft or Google, and for Carousel. But my dropbox was super slow in Japan, MS Office products keep spawning conflicting copies, Photoshop randomly pauses batch processing because of sync file locking, and they are shutting down Carousel. So I am moving to Google Drive. All the frustrations above are not unique to me. Dropbox e…

I've had ridiculous sync issues with Google Drive. Can't remember the details, but it had something to do with switching accounts and then having to re-download tens of gigs of data. Left my system in a confused state where it wouldn't sync any more. I had quit Dropbox, but went back to it.

These issues have mostly since been fixed.

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#198

Post by shasta »

diogenescynic wrote: post #105
mangeletti wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting; what made you think of this? Also, will I be able to sync my locker with my desk drawer? :)

It's not that far-fetched. Omni and MakeSpace are both already selling 'on-demand' physical storage and have similar business models to what shasta outlined. They pick up your stuff and store it somewhere, like Iron Mountain does for documents.

Further confirmation of Poe's law...

Re: Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

#199

Post by malchow »

prostoalex wrote: post #179
malchow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

All of what you say is well taken. But there's absolutely a place for what amounts to a "data REIT." Investors prize dividends, and they prize having diverse sources for those dividends. Nothing new about that.

If Dropbox is delighting its customers and no longer interested in the lightning-fast one-uppsmanship of enterprise software/storage, then it can trim costs and pay an attractive dividend, sure.

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