I predict the quality of free Dropbox service will go down (or not significantly improve) after they become publicly-traded, similar to what happened to Facebook, since the stockholders will force them to monetize the free accounts. They why I avoid using free but proprietary services.
Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
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Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#72Dropbox is one of those products that is just a pleasure to use (like Stripe). Sync works seamlessly. I've tried all other alternatives and gotten back to being a paid customer of Dropbox. I think it also boils down to most of your employees being passionate, smart folks from MIT, CMU and the like. Good luck to them with the IPO.
I generally like Dropbox, but they made a change which has really annoyed me and made me like them much less. You used to be able to have a folder of html files in your public folder, index them with another html file, and then generate a bit.ly URL pointing to the index file. Boom, instant website for sharing things with a handful of people. They deprecated that funcionality and now several sites I made like that do…
This is the main reason I'm considering my Pro subscription. As a power user not using the collaboration or business features, having a very easy way to get a public, no web takeover link via the public folder was worth the cost (in addition to symlink syncing folders across computers). It truly was a killer feature.
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#73I talked to a friend just before Christmas whose firm made a good portion of their returns on the insight that VC firms, IPO participants and the market in general all have gaps in how they evaluate the worth of a company and the fact that this gap has grown significantly in the past 5 years. Previously, companies went public much sooner and you could expect a match, not an exact one, but in the same ball park, betwe…
VCs don't get to take their profits until after the company exits. If they invest at a high valuation and then it IPOs at some lower price, there is no gain and the VC gets zero carry.
That's not true with liquidation preferences? The reported valuations in the press that come out after some random funding round are calculated with simple arithmetic but don't take into account the preferences...
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#74I wonder why we haven't seen good open-source imitations of Dropbox yet, and why there isn't a good open protocol for file sharing. The last such protocol I've heard of is WebDAV, but it seemed to have been neglected by OS implementers (Apple's implementation was particularly bad). Also WebDAV was missing many modern features.
File sync is one of those things that is easy to get 90% right and exponentially harder to get 99% right; there are a ton of edge cases especially when you introduce cross-platform and mobile apps and all that fun stuff.
It's actually a true bonafide distributed systems problem, where the implementation and service matter just as much as the specification.
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I pay $100/year for Pro. Cheaper and easier to have 1TB of remote storage than SD cards, USB sticks, etc, and no excessive bandwidth charges such that AWS has. EDIT: I don't care if my files are encrypted. EDIT 2: Dropbox sync is rock solid. Every experience with the Google Drive sync client has been trash. I can (and do) pay for convenience.
Any reason that you use it over Google Drive?
Google Drive botches POSIX file permissions (e.g. it'll randomly/silently drop the execute bit for scripts).
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#76> In addition to selling utilities to keep digital files safe and accessible, Dropbox intends to offer software that businesspeople use for hours each day to create content and get work done. Aaaaagghh!!! Just... no. Dropbox used to do one thing well (modulo creepy stuff [1]): sync a directory across multiple computers. This wasn't so hard to do, but shockingly, Apple and Google didn't just implement this feature and…
Of course, you have to grow. You have to move into new areas. That is what everyone does, that is how the world works.
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#77Does anyone here still use Dropbox? (I signed up in 2009, and probably last touched it in 2011 ...) P.S. their studiously ignoring user-side encryption was a factor - if I'm getting my files exposed, might as well go with the big default services.
I pay $100/year for Pro. Cheaper and easier to have 1TB of remote storage than SD cards, USB sticks, etc, and no excessive bandwidth charges such that AWS has. EDIT: I don't care if my files are encrypted. EDIT 2: Dropbox sync is rock solid. Every experience with the Google Drive sync client has been trash. I can (and do) pay for convenience.
There are many alternatives, try SpiderOak if you want encryption, or SyncDocs if you just want to encrypt your free Google Drive storage.
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#78Being the one cloud service that sync across Linux, Windows, OS X with a native client, Dropbox is the service I'd like to give money for about 100GB of space for a couple of bucks a month, but I just don't need 1TB for $10 a month. So instead I use Google and wait in vain for a native Linux client that's probably never coming.
Try OverGrive. It changed my (Linux) life. It's as good as the official OS X client.
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a lot of us want is more granularity. I'm totally fine with their per-GB pricing, but if I (as a personal user) want more than 1TB, it is literally impossible to buy it from Dropbox. I would have to upgrade to a business plan, which makes no sense as I'm not a business. Basically, there are only 3 Dropbox tiers: 0, 1TB, or infinity.
I gave up and just started using AWS S3 directly. I use a few GB, pay a few pennies for storage, a few more pennies for bandwidth if I'm moving stuff around, and that's it. I've never paid more than $10/month, and it's usually under $1/month.
that defeats the whole purpose of dropbox though. You can have a cheap ftp server for $10/year if you look hard enough.
But the argument for dropbox is that you have a client for almost every platform you can use. With S3 you'll have to use a 3rd-party software, which might not function properly.
Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
#80Dropbox was definitely a good product and for the most part it still is. But with Google and Amazon going towards the free unlimited storage plans, I have my doubts on Dropbox from here on out. IPO just looks like a way out to me.