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Dropbox for Business

dropboxatwork.com

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Re: Dropbox for Business

#41

Post by ThomPete »

Dropbox has a scaling problem.

Not from a technical point of view but from a usage point of view especially when we talk enterprise.

Dropbox is great for small teams or personal accounts. As long as there are very few owners of the files stored there.

The problems starts to arise when larger groups of people use it as a place to store files. At that point it basically looses it's value namely because its no longer possible to find what you need simply by going to dropbox.

Instead what you now have to do is to find a given person working on a given project and then ask them where they put their files.

Dropbox will have to solve this problem either by adding some sort of history trail or by providing a better contextual search algorithm (files that James Jameson worked on in 2013 on project X)

From what I have seen in that area they are currently solving the wrong problems (again from a usage point of view)

Re: Dropbox for Business

#42

Post by yid »

up_and_up wrote: post #38

Why use this when there are options like bitcasa - 1TB at $10/month? Another plus is they offer a real external drive that doesnt duplicate data. https://www.bitcasa.com/pricing Disclosure: I am a happy bitcasa customer.

> Why use this when there are options like bitcasa - 1TB at $10/month?

Name brand recognition. Same reason why Tide detergent still exists when others are around half as expensive.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#43

Post by derefr »

aresant wrote: post #33

I understand that nobody likes a race towards the bottom with regard to pricing, but IMO Dropbox is playing their pricing a little over confidently right now given what competitors are offering. In both the comments on HN and the original thread pricing keeps coming up. And the response is that this is a great product and pricing is acceptable. I don't think so. Businesses switching costs are MUCH higher than consume…

> I was an average 100GB user very happy with the product for years. Then I had kids. And BOOM I have a million pictures, videos, etc that are PRICELESS to me.

That sounds more like you need a backup service than a sync-things-conveniently-to-all-your-computers service.

You wouldn't expect a convenience store chain to be competitive in the market Costco operates in; they're two different kinds of business, serving two different kinds of needs. Convenience stores can get away with charging a lot more for e.g. soda than Costco, because Costco won't sell you exactly one bottle of soda.

Just as well, you shouldn't expect Dropbox to be competitive in the consumer digital archival storage market. (Though they could certainly branch out there, it's currently just not the market they serve.)

Re: Dropbox for Business

#44

Post by ditojim »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #24
malanj wrote: post #17

Unless they drop the price soon we're going to move away from them. It sounds silly to argue over $15/user/month, but in comparison to Google Drive it's just started feeling too expensive. I really like the product, but I don't know if any product in a commoditized space can sustain such a price premium.

For Dropbox, it is their core business. For Google, it's a drop in their massive bucket of cash that comes from advertising. If business reliability matters to you, Dropbox seems comparatively better.

How sure are you that Dropbox is more reliable than Google Drive? As sure as you are that Google Drive is just a drop in the bucket for Google?

Re: Dropbox for Business

#45

Post by suprgeek »

DropBox really shines when it comes to the capabilities of their client. I installed Box from few months ago at work, and used it to share a few screencasts that I was working on > 200MBs per file about 10 files. I got home and fired up the home machine...For the next five minutes the internet connection was jammed. Turns out you cannot do a selective sync of only certain folders. This would be a very basic use case in my opinion but is not supported by Box.

So, for all those whinging about the price...it is not really that bad.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#46

Post by baddox »

smackfu wrote: post #7

The unlimited storage is a pretty smart play. It makes it much harder to compare this head-to-head with Google Drive.

I don't make software service purchasing decisions for any companies, but I am always irritated by claims of "unlimited" for things that are very obviously not unlimited. "Unlimited vacation days," "unlimited cell phone data," "unlimited storage space," etc. all seem to me to be precisely what you said they are: ways of obfuscating the limits. You're not going to keep paying me if I take a 2 year vacation, and you're going to cut me off pretty quickly if I start piping /dev/random into Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#47

Post by smackfu »

itafroma wrote: post #21
smackfu wrote: post #7

The unlimited storage is a pretty smart play. It makes it much harder to compare this head-to-head with Google Drive.

While they talk about "unlimited" storage, it's actually set to 1,000 GB: all the quotas throughout the UI are set at 1,000 GB, and you have to contact them if and when you want to go over that amount (they do mention this stipulation on the features page[1]). I've gotten close (~850 GB), but never over so I'm not sure if it's a "no-questions-asked, 1,000-GB-is-just-a-sanity-check" type of conversation, or if they st…

It might be similar to the discussion a few days ago regarding tarsnap. Like, unlimited, but if you're using more than 1 TB, they start asking why you need that much space.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#48

Post by jypepin »

We used dropbox at my prior company, we are now using box. Not sure if it's just because I'm not used to box, or if I'm biased since I use dropbox for personal storage too, but I really wish we used dropbox instead of box. I find the UI + integration way better on dropbox.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#49

Post by icelancer »

ewang1 wrote: post #32
diziet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a business expense it seems like a no-brainer, especially with features oriented around security like remote wiping, account transferring and more detailed logs.

Except the remote wipe doesn't work if the employee disconnects their computer from the internet.

Well, sure. It can't violate the laws of physics, what a shame.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#50

Post by diydsp »

yid wrote: post #42
up_and_up wrote: post #38

Why use this when there are options like bitcasa - 1TB at $10/month? Another plus is they offer a real external drive that doesnt duplicate data. https://www.bitcasa.com/pricing Disclosure: I am a happy bitcasa customer.

> Why use this when there are options like bitcasa - 1TB at $10/month? Name brand recognition. Same reason why Tide detergent still exists when others are around half as expensive.

> Same reason why Tide detergent still exists when others are around half as expensive.

Tide does not "subsist on brand recognition".

"Tide is a perennial powerhouse in Consumer Reports' laundry detergent Ratings." [1] (although as of 2013, other brands are catching up in quality)

[1]http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/06/wisk-kirklan...

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