7 ms·

My prediction, the next dead unicorn: Dropbox They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just

My prediction, the next dead unicorn: Dropbox They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.

trollian 11y ago
My favourite question to ask of start-ups: "have you built a product or a feature?"
- cristianpascu 11y ago
  Is it Steve Jobs that told dropbox founders this?
- cyberpanther 11y ago
  Building a feature is fine but that means you need to sell out then at some point or grow into new areas. Dropbox is not doing to good at moving into new areas and they are probably too big now to sell out easily.
- benjiweber 11y ago
  What about "Have you built a business or a product?"
tajano 11y ago
Another prediction: Twitter. 2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while. Declining signups, declining engagement. Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role. I don't see how this ends well.
- robryan 11y ago
  Twitter isn't going anywhere, it just might not fulfil the high expectations of the later stage/ public investors. Worst case for Twitter is probably a massive acquisition by Facebook/Google/Microsoft.
- swagswag 11y ago
  140+ char limit is gonna be revolutionary
  - tajano 11y ago
    Brevity is the only thing most Tweets have going for them.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  Twitter's core product is still useful for a lot of people, it's just never going to be Facebook. It will eventually be bought by someone, probably Google.
- hsod 11y ago
  Disagree about a lack of improvements. Some recent ones I'm a fan of: better handling of multimedia, better "quote tweet", polls, engagement metrics, and a bunch of UI improvements.
- Ezhik 11y ago
  It's so hard for me to imagine a service like Twitter crashing.
  - tajano 11y ago
    I don't expect it to disappear (not completely, not over night). But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here. Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true? So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    The fundamental problem of the current market is that it's all sustained by VC injections and trivial revenue streams. No-one is prepared to pay for something like Twitter (or Tumblr, or, or...) because we've gotten used to the idea of Stuff For Free. But the model just isn't sustainable, particularly given the ongoing attack on the only (ad) revenue stream that these services do have.
- Agustus 11y ago
  Twitter is expanding its product offerings with Periscope and as of today's press releases is looking to expand past 140 characters.[1] The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers. As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system. Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results. 1. http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-140-character-limit/ http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-...
eli 11y ago
File sync is a feature of the Google Suite, but Dropbox is much better than Google Drive. Dropbox gets a lot of subtle things right. Maybe in the long term you're right, but I'm not so sure. I think Dropbox Teams is too expensive but I'm paying it anyway because I think it's that much better. (I think that's a sign they set the prices exactly right)
- gutnor 11y ago
  Dropbox problem is that it was obviously better several years ago so its user acquisition was easy. Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario. Syncing quality is #1 feature of a cloud storage, you need to be able to trust it fully. However, how do I convince a MS user that 1 TB from dropbox for 7.99 GBP/month is a better deal than 1 TB (actually 5 TB since it is 1 TB per user) + Office 365 + 60 Skype Minutes for 7.99 GBP/month ?
  - lemevi 11y ago
    Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      Amen. OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity. With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.
0898 11y ago
I'm curious: why do you feel Dropbox needs to make something new and noteworthy? Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable?
- untog 11y ago
  Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable? Because now Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer it at a cheaper price and better integrated with their own products. The broader answer here is "Dropbox took a bunch of VC money, so 'just doing well enough' isn't an option for them and they have to stop at nothing to grow faster"
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > Google, Microsoft and Amazon For me, the key part of Dropbox isn't first-party support, it's that a bajillion third-party apps have cross-platform support for it where availability of other services is rather more piecemeal.
    - tacos 11y ago
      Dropbox third-party developer here. Their API and developer support is dogshit. They spent years screwing around with photos when they could've built a platform.
  - tajen 11y ago
    > took a bunch of VC money Notes-taking apps have the competition of <div contenteditable="true"/>. There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles. Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another plan than "Add more features forever".
    - volaski 11y ago
CrackpotGonzo 11y ago
And they royally fucked up Mailbox after buying it.
puranjay 11y ago
I tried Google Drive when it was launched. Used it a lot, but had tons of syncing issues. I ended up losing quite a bit of data. Switched to Dropbox and haven't had a single sync issue since. You're right that it's a service that is ridiculously simple in what it does, but right now, I can't imagine moving my 10GB+ of data to another platform.
- wahsd 11y ago
  Google Drive is really horrible in comparison to many other services.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Really? How so? I have about 60GB in total stored across Google Drive, OneDrive and DropBox. Other than OneDrive requiring me to login too frequently with the desktop folder syncing app they all work identically. I've yet to have an issue with syncing with any of them after editing documents in multiple machines. I'm not saying you're wrong I just haven't seen what you might be referring to hence why I asked.
    - FelixP 11y ago
      Google keeps trying to force me to open files in Docs, Sheets, etc., which is very annoying. It also tries to convert Excel files into Sheets.
      - jeo1234 11y ago
        This drives me mad! Even simple Excel files break Sheets. Google pushes users into using a unsuitable product for what? Short term market share gain?
        FelixP 11y ago
        I actually like and use sheets (it's much better than Excel for simple and/or non-analytical use cases), so when I use Excel for something, it's because I want to use Excel for that thing.
cvwright 11y ago
These predictions are fun. Is it time for FC 2.0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
- WaterSponge 11y ago
  http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
latchkey 11y ago
The issue I have with Dropbox is that their usage / pricing model is totally broken. If someone shares their folder with me, it shouldn't eat into my storage allocation.
- azinman2 11y ago
  Agreed, although it starts getting complicated if you put stuff in there too (do file creators pay? shared folders pay? what if that owner wants to drop out, can they re-elect someone else)? Anything but this method starts to get really complicated.
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    It's not that complicated. Have the user toggle an "I also claim ownership of this directory" flag before letting them edit it and have it count against their storage after that. (No idea how difficult it would be to introduce this into their system, but conceptually it's a pretty easily surmounted problem.)
- mgkimsal 11y ago
  i hated that - one of the main reasons I don't use dropbox. Early on I had a bunch of clients all raving about how cool dropbox was - each sharing 200-500meg projects with me. Within days I'm hitting a 2gig limit, being encouraged to upgrade my account just to use a service someone else was forcing me to use. I use DB as little as possible.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
DB is too big to fail. They are just everywhere at this point; I have rarely seen a technology that has managed to find itself into every corner of every industry, and be used by professionals at every technical-level. I have experienced the LEAST technical people asking me to use Dropbox. Dropbox is like if Email was owned by one company.
- paradite 11y ago
  From my personal experience it's 50% time Google Drive and 50% time Dropbox.
- mziel 11y ago
  And why wouldn't they switch to MS or Google Drive? The migration costs don't seem overwhelming. Dropbox won't disappear, but it's not a beast you make it out to be. Case in point: I'm a big fan of Excel and Word, it's a solid piece of software. But I haven't used it in over a year, all my stuff sits with Google Docs/Sheets. Excel won't disappear (extremely popular in finance with VBA) but for most users there's no difference and little switching costs.
wpietri 11y ago
Personally, I don't want them to make anything noteworthy. I want them to make something subtle, unobtrusive, and as reliable as gravity. I've been using them 3 or 4 years now and as far as I'm concerned, they're my favorite vendor. Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps doing what they're doing with only modest, incremental improvements (that gradually add up). As long as they keep things solid, I'll keep using and recommending them.
- sweetbacon 11y ago
  I hear ya. But how much $$ have they made from us to keep the servers running? Sometimes it feels like my data could vanish at any time... I've started looking into ownCloud and the like lately as I'm just getting tired of offloading critical storage to something that may prove transient.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    I don't know about other people, but I'm paying them $100/year for disk space that costs them under $15. Which is fine by me; I'm paying them for the seamless sync and the reliability.
rodgerd 11y ago
Literally the only thing that keeps me paying for Dropbox, instead of completely abandoning it for OneDrive, is that OneDrive doesn't have a Linux client. And much of the OneDrive functionality (for example, the photo organiser) is a hell of a lot better. I'm an edge case, and the case (Linux support) doesn't bode well for DropBox.

trollian 11y ago

My favourite question to ask of start-ups: "have you built a product or a feature?"

cristianpascu 11y ago
Is it Steve Jobs that told dropbox founders this?
cyberpanther 11y ago
Building a feature is fine but that means you need to sell out then at some point or grow into new areas. Dropbox is not doing to good at moving into new areas and they are probably too big now to sell out easily.
benjiweber 11y ago
What about "Have you built a business or a product?"

tajano 11y ago

Another prediction: Twitter. 2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while. Declining signups, declining engagement. Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role. I don't see how this ends well.

robryan 11y ago
Twitter isn't going anywhere, it just might not fulfil the high expectations of the later stage/ public investors. Worst case for Twitter is probably a massive acquisition by Facebook/Google/Microsoft.
swagswag 11y ago
140+ char limit is gonna be revolutionary
- tajano 11y ago
  Brevity is the only thing most Tweets have going for them.
onewaystreet 11y ago
Twitter's core product is still useful for a lot of people, it's just never going to be Facebook. It will eventually be bought by someone, probably Google.
hsod 11y ago
Disagree about a lack of improvements. Some recent ones I'm a fan of: better handling of multimedia, better "quote tweet", polls, engagement metrics, and a bunch of UI improvements.
Ezhik 11y ago
It's so hard for me to imagine a service like Twitter crashing.
- tajano 11y ago
  I don't expect it to disappear (not completely, not over night). But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here. Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true? So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  The fundamental problem of the current market is that it's all sustained by VC injections and trivial revenue streams. No-one is prepared to pay for something like Twitter (or Tumblr, or, or...) because we've gotten used to the idea of Stuff For Free. But the model just isn't sustainable, particularly given the ongoing attack on the only (ad) revenue stream that these services do have.
Agustus 11y ago
Twitter is expanding its product offerings with Periscope and as of today's press releases is looking to expand past 140 characters.[1] The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers. As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system. Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results. 1. http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-140-character-limit/ http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-...

eli 11y ago

File sync is a feature of the Google Suite, but Dropbox is much better than Google Drive. Dropbox gets a lot of subtle things right. Maybe in the long term you're right, but I'm not so sure. I think Dropbox Teams is too expensive but I'm paying it anyway because I think it's that much better. (I think that's a sign they set the prices exactly right)

gutnor 11y ago
Dropbox problem is that it was obviously better several years ago so its user acquisition was easy. Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario. Syncing quality is #1 feature of a cloud storage, you need to be able to trust it fully. However, how do I convince a MS user that 1 TB from dropbox for 7.99 GBP/month is a better deal than 1 TB (actually 5 TB since it is 1 TB per user) + Office 365 + 60 Skype Minutes for 7.99 GBP/month ?
- lemevi 11y ago
  Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Amen. OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client. When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity. With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.

0898 11y ago

I'm curious: why do you feel Dropbox needs to make something new and noteworthy? Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable?

untog 11y ago
Why can't it just stick to its knitting, and continue to offer something that works and people find valuable? Because now Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer it at a cheaper price and better integrated with their own products. The broader answer here is "Dropbox took a bunch of VC money, so 'just doing well enough' isn't an option for them and they have to stop at nothing to grow faster"
- zyxley 11y ago
  > Google, Microsoft and Amazon For me, the key part of Dropbox isn't first-party support, it's that a bajillion third-party apps have cross-platform support for it where availability of other services is rather more piecemeal.
  - tacos 11y ago
    Dropbox third-party developer here. Their API and developer support is dogshit. They spent years screwing around with photos when they could've built a platform.
- tajen 11y ago
  > took a bunch of VC money Notes-taking apps have the competition of <div contenteditable="true"/>. There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles. Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another plan than "Add more features forever".
  - volaski 11y ago

CrackpotGonzo 11y ago

And they royally fucked up Mailbox after buying it.

puranjay 11y ago

I tried Google Drive when it was launched. Used it a lot, but had tons of syncing issues. I ended up losing quite a bit of data. Switched to Dropbox and haven't had a single sync issue since. You're right that it's a service that is ridiculously simple in what it does, but right now, I can't imagine moving my 10GB+ of data to another platform.

wahsd 11y ago
Google Drive is really horrible in comparison to many other services.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Really? How so? I have about 60GB in total stored across Google Drive, OneDrive and DropBox. Other than OneDrive requiring me to login too frequently with the desktop folder syncing app they all work identically. I've yet to have an issue with syncing with any of them after editing documents in multiple machines. I'm not saying you're wrong I just haven't seen what you might be referring to hence why I asked.
  - FelixP 11y ago
    Google keeps trying to force me to open files in Docs, Sheets, etc., which is very annoying. It also tries to convert Excel files into Sheets.
    - jeo1234 11y ago
      This drives me mad! Even simple Excel files break Sheets. Google pushes users into using a unsuitable product for what? Short term market share gain?
      - FelixP 11y ago
        I actually like and use sheets (it's much better than Excel for simple and/or non-analytical use cases), so when I use Excel for something, it's because I want to use Excel for that thing.

cvwright 11y ago

These predictions are fun. Is it time for FC 2.0? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

WaterSponge 11y ago
http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

latchkey 11y ago

The issue I have with Dropbox is that their usage / pricing model is totally broken. If someone shares their folder with me, it shouldn't eat into my storage allocation.

azinman2 11y ago
Agreed, although it starts getting complicated if you put stuff in there too (do file creators pay? shared folders pay? what if that owner wants to drop out, can they re-elect someone else)? Anything but this method starts to get really complicated.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  It's not that complicated. Have the user toggle an "I also claim ownership of this directory" flag before letting them edit it and have it count against their storage after that. (No idea how difficult it would be to introduce this into their system, but conceptually it's a pretty easily surmounted problem.)
mgkimsal 11y ago
i hated that - one of the main reasons I don't use dropbox. Early on I had a bunch of clients all raving about how cool dropbox was - each sharing 200-500meg projects with me. Within days I'm hitting a 2gig limit, being encouraged to upgrade my account just to use a service someone else was forcing me to use. I use DB as little as possible.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

DB is too big to fail. They are just everywhere at this point; I have rarely seen a technology that has managed to find itself into every corner of every industry, and be used by professionals at every technical-level. I have experienced the LEAST technical people asking me to use Dropbox. Dropbox is like if Email was owned by one company.

paradite 11y ago
From my personal experience it's 50% time Google Drive and 50% time Dropbox.
mziel 11y ago
And why wouldn't they switch to MS or Google Drive? The migration costs don't seem overwhelming. Dropbox won't disappear, but it's not a beast you make it out to be. Case in point: I'm a big fan of Excel and Word, it's a solid piece of software. But I haven't used it in over a year, all my stuff sits with Google Docs/Sheets. Excel won't disappear (extremely popular in finance with VBA) but for most users there's no difference and little switching costs.

wpietri 11y ago

Personally, I don't want them to make anything noteworthy. I want them to make something subtle, unobtrusive, and as reliable as gravity. I've been using them 3 or 4 years now and as far as I'm concerned, they're my favorite vendor. Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps doing what they're doing with only modest, incremental improvements (that gradually add up). As long as they keep things solid, I'll keep using and recommending them.

sweetbacon 11y ago
I hear ya. But how much $$ have they made from us to keep the servers running? Sometimes it feels like my data could vanish at any time... I've started looking into ownCloud and the like lately as I'm just getting tired of offloading critical storage to something that may prove transient.
- wpietri 11y ago
  I don't know about other people, but I'm paying them $100/year for disk space that costs them under $15. Which is fine by me; I'm paying them for the seamless sync and the reliability.

rodgerd 11y ago

Literally the only thing that keeps me paying for Dropbox, instead of completely abandoning it for OneDrive, is that OneDrive doesn't have a Linux client. And much of the OneDrive functionality (for example, the photo organiser) is a hell of a lot better. I'm an edge case, and the case (Linux support) doesn't bode well for DropBox.