9 ms·

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 we

by blowski 10y ago

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.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well. A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.
- nicoburns 10y ago
  Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?
  - objclxt 10y ago
    The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the company. Ultimately this model of "investment" can kill a business that is technically succeeding because the speculators don't see a high enough return. That's also a problem for society as it creates instability and prevents technologically successful companies from prospering long term. At least that's one narrative that appears to fit well with my observations.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        On the other hand if the speculators also reward people doing the work, they incentivize lots of them to do that work. Hence startup economy, where many companies blatantly lie that they care about users, where in fact those companies are only vehicles for the founders to get a good exit.
      - vecter 10y ago
        If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.
        zasz 10y ago
        Plenty of investors are risking other people's money, though. Venture capitalists themselves are prime examples of this.
        vecter 10y ago
        So what? That's literally their jobs. In fact, both parties entered into that contract knowingly with the expectation that it will be mutually beneficial. How is that money "free"?
        russdpale 10y ago
        Free as in no time or labor spent by themselves. At least that is what I think he meant
        vecter 10y ago
        It turns out being an institutional investor is a fulltime job. It's quite ridiculous for GP to believe otherwise.
        abalashov 10y ago
        Be that as it may, this is pedantic quibbling outside of the point the GGP post author was actually trying to make: speculative pressure by investors (lazy or otherwise) conflicts with the aim of stable long-term equilibrium doing +/- one thing well. If you actually care about building a sustainable business, not Unicorns and moonshots and other things investors want you to become and do, don't take investment, or at least not much.
  - bksenior 10y ago
    Hah. It becomes a problem for it's users. When they are chasing quarterlies and the focus shifts from providing a good experience to making numbers, you'll feel it. Most companies DNA is pretty baked in by the time they offer publicly.
    - evilduck 10y ago
      Evernote is a good example of that.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    "When you owe the bank $1000, you're in trouble. When you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 the bank is in trouble" Similar mechanics apply to having a large valuation, no?
  - dboreham 10y ago
    In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, where N >> 1) at some point.
    - Retric 10y ago
      That's not how investing works. People don't invest because they think a company is worth X, they invest because they think it will be worth X at some point in the future adjusted for the risk of not being worth X. Further, they don't necessarily buy stock from the company. In other words startups have a small chance of being worth a much larger X, and Exxon has a very large chance of being worth a slightly larger X. If you need zero risk buy government bonds not stock.
      - dboreham 10y ago
        Um, it certainly is how investing works. They think the company will be worth >X in the future ( >>X in the case of pre-IPO investing).
        Retric 10y ago
        Stock and Bonds are very different things. A bond is an agreement with a company to hand back X amount of money at time Y. Stock is an agreement to share in future profits. Importantly, when you buy stock from a someone other than the company then the price you pay has little to do with the company. But, again my point is risk is an inherent part of the process. If you invest in a startup and they use all of that money to buy government bonds and then fold in five years you would be pissed because they avoided risking your capital.
        adamlett 10y ago
        I think you are talking past each other because you are not talking about the same party when asserting whether there is or isn't a problem. It's true that the investors don't have a problem if Dropbox fails to live up to its valuation. Venture capitalists expect that most of their investments will fail. But a company that has accepted venture capital is beholden to its investors and will almost certainly have a problem if it fails to live up to their expectations. Remember that investors are part owners, and get to make decisions about how the company should be run. The more dissatisfied they become, the more drastic the changes they will demand.
  - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
    I recall this being something pointed out in "Silicon Valley" where an offer/valuation was way over the top and would leave the team in this same kind of situation. Dropbox had to accept the offer, so they did agree to the terms that put themselves where they are now.
- IAmGraydon 10y ago
  They can survive, but from an investment standpoint they need to be able to expand and grow for it to make sense.
reverend_gonzo 10y ago
The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.
- Afton 10y ago
  > it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?" This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.
  - dleslie 10y ago
    Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user. rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      I've been looking at rclone but am always leery of trusting any new software project with my data. Have you had any issues with it? Thanks.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.
yeukhon 10y ago
I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox... Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 [2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html [3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home
- robbiemitchell 10y ago
  It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.
    - srtjstjsj 10y ago
      Dropbox is remote backup and cloud storage. It solves a rather different (larger) problem from a local backup.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".
EGreg 10y ago
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?
- newsat13 10y ago
  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).
- nsm 10y ago
  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.
- mnutt 10y ago
  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.
stevehawk 10y ago
Normalley I'd say - "There's nothing wrong with that and they can do what they want." but... .they're filing for an IPO.. so their shareholders are going to start hitting them with the "If you don't always make more money than last time we'll fire you and find someone who will." If you don't want to expand your business far beyond what it's already doing then you don't IPO and take on shareholders.

by blowski 10y ago

TAForObvReasons 10y ago

A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well. A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.

nicoburns 10y ago
Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?
- objclxt 10y ago
  The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the company. Ultimately this model of "investment" can kill a business that is technically succeeding because the speculators don't see a high enough return. That's also a problem for society as it creates instability and prevents technologically successful companies from prospering long term. At least that's one narrative that appears to fit well with my observations.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      On the other hand if the speculators also reward people doing the work, they incentivize lots of them to do that work. Hence startup economy, where many companies blatantly lie that they care about users, where in fact those companies are only vehicles for the founders to get a good exit.
    - vecter 10y ago
      If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.
      - zasz 10y ago
        Plenty of investors are risking other people's money, though. Venture capitalists themselves are prime examples of this.
        vecter 10y ago
        So what? That's literally their jobs. In fact, both parties entered into that contract knowingly with the expectation that it will be mutually beneficial. How is that money "free"?
      - russdpale 10y ago
        Free as in no time or labor spent by themselves. At least that is what I think he meant
        vecter 10y ago
        It turns out being an institutional investor is a fulltime job. It's quite ridiculous for GP to believe otherwise.
        abalashov 10y ago
        Be that as it may, this is pedantic quibbling outside of the point the GGP post author was actually trying to make: speculative pressure by investors (lazy or otherwise) conflicts with the aim of stable long-term equilibrium doing +/- one thing well. If you actually care about building a sustainable business, not Unicorns and moonshots and other things investors want you to become and do, don't take investment, or at least not much.
- bksenior 10y ago
  Hah. It becomes a problem for it's users. When they are chasing quarterlies and the focus shifts from providing a good experience to making numbers, you'll feel it. Most companies DNA is pretty baked in by the time they offer publicly.
  - evilduck 10y ago
    Evernote is a good example of that.
- Swizec 10y ago
  "When you owe the bank $1000, you're in trouble. When you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 the bank is in trouble" Similar mechanics apply to having a large valuation, no?
- dboreham 10y ago
  In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, where N >> 1) at some point.
  - Retric 10y ago
    That's not how investing works. People don't invest because they think a company is worth X, they invest because they think it will be worth X at some point in the future adjusted for the risk of not being worth X. Further, they don't necessarily buy stock from the company. In other words startups have a small chance of being worth a much larger X, and Exxon has a very large chance of being worth a slightly larger X. If you need zero risk buy government bonds not stock.
    - dboreham 10y ago
      Um, it certainly is how investing works. They think the company will be worth >X in the future ( >>X in the case of pre-IPO investing).
      - Retric 10y ago
        Stock and Bonds are very different things. A bond is an agreement with a company to hand back X amount of money at time Y. Stock is an agreement to share in future profits. Importantly, when you buy stock from a someone other than the company then the price you pay has little to do with the company. But, again my point is risk is an inherent part of the process. If you invest in a startup and they use all of that money to buy government bonds and then fold in five years you would be pissed because they avoided risking your capital.
        adamlett 10y ago
        I think you are talking past each other because you are not talking about the same party when asserting whether there is or isn't a problem. It's true that the investors don't have a problem if Dropbox fails to live up to its valuation. Venture capitalists expect that most of their investments will fail. But a company that has accepted venture capital is beholden to its investors and will almost certainly have a problem if it fails to live up to their expectations. Remember that investors are part owners, and get to make decisions about how the company should be run. The more dissatisfied they become, the more drastic the changes they will demand.
- 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
  I recall this being something pointed out in "Silicon Valley" where an offer/valuation was way over the top and would leave the team in this same kind of situation. Dropbox had to accept the offer, so they did agree to the terms that put themselves where they are now.
IAmGraydon 10y ago
They can survive, but from an investment standpoint they need to be able to expand and grow for it to make sense.

reverend_gonzo 10y ago

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.

Afton 10y ago
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?" This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.
- dleslie 10y ago
  Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user. rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    I've been looking at rclone but am always leery of trusting any new software project with my data. Have you had any issues with it? Thanks.
- protomyth 10y ago
  I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.

yeukhon 10y ago

I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox... Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 [2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html [3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home

robbiemitchell 10y ago
It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    Dropbox is remote backup and cloud storage. It solves a rather different (larger) problem from a local backup.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".

EGreg 10y ago

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?

newsat13 10y ago
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).
nsm 10y ago
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.
mnutt 10y ago
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.

stevehawk 10y ago

Normalley I'd say - "There's nothing wrong with that and they can do what they want." but... .they're filing for an IPO.. so their shareholders are going to start hitting them with the "If you don't always make more money than last time we'll fire you and find someone who will." If you don't want to expand your business far beyond what it's already doing then you don't IPO and take on shareholders.