8 ms·

How come Dropbox wasn't eradicated by Microsoft's and Google's offerings that are integrated with their product suites?

nicoburns 10y ago
I would imagine partly because they have a lot of brand awareness form being first to market, partly because their product is pretty solid, partly because Dropbox still have the superior client (especially consistency across platforms)
- planteen 10y ago
  I agree with the superior client. I have a personal paid Dropbox account. The reason I chose Dropbox was their Linux client. Nobody else is close.
raiyu 10y ago
Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product, it took quite some time before Apple's cloud offering was really production ready. The same can be said for the other software giants. Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. This is a tremendous amount of adoption. Dropbox's real benefit lay in that it integrated directly into your OS so that it appeared just like a regular directory. This meant that usage patterns for users didn't change and so adoption ramped quicker. Google on the other hand was always more of a work suite or productivity suite. So ultimately what happened is that as the other large companies played catch up there simply wasn't enough of an advantage to switch to them away from Dropbox.
- Angostura 10y ago
  And iCloud is still as confusing as hell.
- epmaybe 10y ago
  I think that the reason jobs did that was because Dropbox refused their offer for acquisition
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Yes, Jobs was always good with quips about the opposition.
- danieldk 10y ago
  Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. Paying users? Why? Every user brings in 120 USD/Euro per year.
  - y4mi 10y ago
    there is a free tier you know... its limited to 2GB, but you could increase it by installing the app on your phone and enabling the auto upload of pictures. every picture increased it by (iirc) 5MB - and this extra space stayed if you removed the pictures. haven't used it in ages though.
    - danieldk 10y ago
      there is a free tier you know... I know, I have used Dropbox since 2010 ;). But the free tier does not contribute to the revenue of Dropbox. There are no ads (except for Dropbox Pro/Business :p). Dropbox has some deals with Samsung and others for coupons for certain phones, but most of the 1B is probably brought in by paid subscriptions. Since Dropbox costs $10 per month (plus some Packrat and Advanced Team users), there are roughly 8 million paying users who bring in the revenue. Since Dropbox has ~500 million users, that would be a conversion rate of 1.6%, which seems reasonable. Of course, I could be way off.
      - mod 10y ago
        There wouldn't be 8 million paying users without a free tier.
- ProblemFactory 10y ago
  > Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product Which is the best selling point of Dropbox. It doesn't try to be an office app suite, a photo editing solution, a cloud collaboration platform, etc. It just syncs files between computers and phones, and has simple UX because of it.
lucideer 10y ago
UX. Drive in particular is terrible from a usability perspective. I prefer drive because I'm aware of the advantages of the platform integration as well as the docs collaborative editing features, but many lay users won't get past the onboarding from Gmail over to Drive to discover its advantages. For a first time user, Dropbox is a much better product on day one by comparison.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  For me, Drive was the better option because of the non-binary pricing options. I wasn't prepared to spend $10/month for 1 TB with Dropbox, mainly because I don't see myself needing that much storage. Drive on the other hand provides a 100 GB option for $2/month which is perfect.
  - coding123 10y ago
    This was my reason for abandoning Dropbox. I reached it's free limit, wanted more. I even emailed them before switching to onedrive, to see if they were going to offer prices similar to OneDrive/GDrive. Nope. Not even close. I probably would have paid twice the amount I pay for OneDrive for its better software, but I can't pay $10 per month. Hilariously the #1 reason I decided against Google Drive is how it inherits your phone's profile. Android is TOO Google sometimes. Each app should have the ability to have its own profile. One drive is perfect because I can install Onedrive on my phone AND my wifes phone and share the same profile.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      OneDrive is great too. I started as a OneDrive free user, then decided to upgrade once I hit the limit. I didn't have a need for the Office 365 stuff as I have a license from my university, so I opted to migrate Drive. That's interesting. So I can only have one Drive account signed in on my Android phone?
      - doubleplusgood 10y ago
        No, you can access Gdrive via multiple GApps accounts on a single Android device.
pdelbarba 10y ago
As a dropbox user, even with my life in the google ecosystem, I find it's the software that make the most difference. Everything works seamlessly across systems and there's no guesswork on how most of the common synchronization issues will be solved. Microsoft and Google tainted their offerings from day one and I don't think anyone who remembers those systems wants to go back to them, even if they've improved. I think the old restrictions on file sizes and awkward interfaces have left them with baggage that Dropbox managed to avoid. These are just my opinions based on my experiences using all three products.
- te_chris 10y ago
  A million times this. I'm CTO of a digital agency and implementing dropbox has been a huge productivity win for us. It's the little things: universal links to files, but they're still just files. It makes the onboarding so much more simple. We've actually just started using Office 365 as well, as the integration is great between the two, so you can edit dropbox files on 365 and it's pretty much seamless - Sharepoint/CloudDrive/whatever is a car crash, don't touch it. I never thought I'd write excitedly about this, and was super sceptical at first, but honestly, it's great. GSuite feels like a toy at this point.
  - komali2 10y ago
    You still can't have universal links to an image in a Google drive folder, as far as I can tell. If you can, it's quite difficult to find.
  - sidcool 10y ago
    Agree with most of your points, except for the fact that GSuite provides way more than file sharing. The true comparison would be between Google Drive and Dropbox, where Dropbox is difinitely better.
    - te_chris 10y ago
      Oh I meant the 365/Dropbox combo, probably should've been more clear.
IshKebab 10y ago
Well Dropbox's client is far better than Google's for a start. Google Drive seems to have serious issues with handling conflicts, noticing file changes, renaming files and so on. Dropbox has been pretty flawless for me.
Angostura 10y ago
It's simpler, it works.
Paul-ish 10y ago
I don't think I am a typical user, but I use Dropbox because they put the same amount of polish into their client for all systems I use (Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android). I fear that other providers will neglect the client on platforms they are not trying to push. If a new platform were to pop up and become popular, I am pretty confident Dropbox would make a client for it, whereas the others I think would drag their feet. I don't want to be weighed down by my cloud sync provider like that.
noam87 10y ago
Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable. * It 100% "just works" on all my devices (Mac, Linux, on a server, web, on my phone -- hell, I could stick it on a Raspberry Pi!). * It integrates seamlessly with my filesystem. * It has never, not once, failed me or bugged out on me. I've been using this product since it first came out and have not experienced even a minor bug! * It's not tied to any other platform or service that might have conflicting interests. * No fancy "smart" features or unexpected behaviour. All options are explicit and behave as expected. * No fancy UX experiments, just straightforward to setup and use. * I never have to think about it, it just does its job. * It's a paid service that makes money (this in itself IS a feature). It's just better than the competition. The peace of mind and get-out-of-the-wayness is well worth the $10 bucks a month. One of the few products that would be truly painful for me to lose...
- ssharp 10y ago
  "Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable." I hate to be cynical here, but they're EBITDA profitable, not profitable, and they've been in business for 10 years. I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.
  - visakanv 10y ago
    > I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox. Of those thousands of examples, which are the closest to Dropbox's scale?
    - feld 10y ago
      Probably SpiderOak?
      - rrdharan 10y ago
dflock 10y ago
Their client and sync support is simple and works very well. Hits the sweet spot of simplicity and features. The other options are more complex. Google still doesn't have any Linux support, so it's off the table for me personally.
xatan_dank 10y ago
Being integrated with Microsoft and Google's infrastructure is not a benefit, in my opinion. I've seen these companies make a lot of impulsive, ham-handed decisions with their "environments" in recent years and I'd rather pay for a service that isn't going to mutate negatively in order to coerce me to buy more things from Microsoft and Google that I just do not want.
ausjke 10y ago
totally agree, I use both office365 and g-suite and found them to be very useful and handy, for about the same price as dropbox, you not only just got the storage, but also all the mail/word/excel-alike stuff. let's see how long dropbox can fight against these big guns.
mel919 10y ago
As a former OneDrive user the service was terrible, I've had issues with sync and all of the clients - web, mobile and desktop. I've read similiar opinions. From my experience the quality of OneDrive is really poor; it's not really a competitive product. Results my vary and most certainly will but that's the way I see OneDrive. Dropbox on the other hand... just works.
- alexval 10y ago
  OneDrive sync has improved dramatically over the years. It's still not as good as dropbox, but OneDrive has this new popup window that shows you a bunch of information about your files when they sync and are updated. That part of the UX is better than dropbox.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    I tried OneDrive again a couple of weeks ago, since I have an Office 365 subscription anyway. Sync was still slow for me compared to Dropbox, sometimes does not sync everything correctly, and used 700MB of memory for a nearly-empty OneDrive. Dropbox just works and that's worth 10 Euro per month to me, it saves me heaps of time.
threatofrain 10y ago
From reputation I had expected that Google's sync would be as perfect as Dropbox, but my experience has been that sometimes Google screws up your data while Dropbox is perfect. Google Drive's features may be peerless, such as their built-in office suite, but the fear of damaged data or spending an afternoon getting your files right drives me back to Dropbox for basic multi-machine file storage and syncing.
jpalomaki 10y ago
I believe one very important thing was the courage to put fairly high(1) price tag for the service and compete on the quality of the user experience and not on price. People tend to compare the Dropbox price to for example S3 storage price, but I think that is wrong. I'm for example using the Dropbox for certain project files and I'm sure that at least in my case the major cost is not the actual storage, but bandwidth and processing. Edit: (1) Compared to other file storage services.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  Small comment: the * character italicizes text. The parser saw two of them in your comment and italicized everything in between.
Spooky23 10y ago
Ever use OneDrive for Business? It's a shitshow app. Dropbox just works.
- cwyers 10y ago
  It has improved dramatically in the past few years, to the point of only being half a shitshow.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
By not having a "platform agenda" DropBox works better across platforms. Its my goto way to share files between my tablet/phone/linux system/laptop.
j_s 10y ago
Dropbox will do whatever it takes to make their software as easy to use as possible. Dropbox has been willing to get their hands dirty in their pursuit of user-friendliness since day one, especially on the Mac¹. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742251
FigBug 10y ago
There are two reasons I won't use GDrive anymore. - If it starts up and your GDrive folder is empty, it deletes everything from the online version. - There is no history like Dropbox, so once you fuck up and delete everything there is no easy way to get it back.

I would imagine partly because they have a lot of brand awareness form being first to market, partly because their product is pretty solid, partly because Dropbox still have the superior client (especially consistency across platforms)

planteen 10y ago
I agree with the superior client. I have a personal paid Dropbox account. The reason I chose Dropbox was their Linux client. Nobody else is close.

raiyu 10y ago

Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product, it took quite some time before Apple's cloud offering was really production ready. The same can be said for the other software giants. Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. This is a tremendous amount of adoption. Dropbox's real benefit lay in that it integrated directly into your OS so that it appeared just like a regular directory. This meant that usage patterns for users didn't change and so adoption ramped quicker. Google on the other hand was always more of a work suite or productivity suite. So ultimately what happened is that as the other large companies played catch up there simply wasn't enough of an advantage to switch to them away from Dropbox.

Angostura 10y ago
And iCloud is still as confusing as hell.
epmaybe 10y ago
I think that the reason jobs did that was because Dropbox refused their offer for acquisition
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Yes, Jobs was always good with quips about the opposition.
danieldk 10y ago
Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. Paying users? Why? Every user brings in 120 USD/Euro per year.
- y4mi 10y ago
  there is a free tier you know... its limited to 2GB, but you could increase it by installing the app on your phone and enabling the auto upload of pictures. every picture increased it by (iirc) 5MB - and this extra space stayed if you removed the pictures. haven't used it in ages though.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    there is a free tier you know... I know, I have used Dropbox since 2010 ;). But the free tier does not contribute to the revenue of Dropbox. There are no ads (except for Dropbox Pro/Business :p). Dropbox has some deals with Samsung and others for coupons for certain phones, but most of the 1B is probably brought in by paid subscriptions. Since Dropbox costs $10 per month (plus some Packrat and Advanced Team users), there are roughly 8 million paying users who bring in the revenue. Since Dropbox has ~500 million users, that would be a conversion rate of 1.6%, which seems reasonable. Of course, I could be way off.
    - mod 10y ago
      There wouldn't be 8 million paying users without a free tier.
ProblemFactory 10y ago
> Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product Which is the best selling point of Dropbox. It doesn't try to be an office app suite, a photo editing solution, a cloud collaboration platform, etc. It just syncs files between computers and phones, and has simple UX because of it.

lucideer 10y ago

UX. Drive in particular is terrible from a usability perspective. I prefer drive because I'm aware of the advantages of the platform integration as well as the docs collaborative editing features, but many lay users won't get past the onboarding from Gmail over to Drive to discover its advantages. For a first time user, Dropbox is a much better product on day one by comparison.

Cyph0n 10y ago
For me, Drive was the better option because of the non-binary pricing options. I wasn't prepared to spend $10/month for 1 TB with Dropbox, mainly because I don't see myself needing that much storage. Drive on the other hand provides a 100 GB option for $2/month which is perfect.
- coding123 10y ago
  This was my reason for abandoning Dropbox. I reached it's free limit, wanted more. I even emailed them before switching to onedrive, to see if they were going to offer prices similar to OneDrive/GDrive. Nope. Not even close. I probably would have paid twice the amount I pay for OneDrive for its better software, but I can't pay $10 per month. Hilariously the #1 reason I decided against Google Drive is how it inherits your phone's profile. Android is TOO Google sometimes. Each app should have the ability to have its own profile. One drive is perfect because I can install Onedrive on my phone AND my wifes phone and share the same profile.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    OneDrive is great too. I started as a OneDrive free user, then decided to upgrade once I hit the limit. I didn't have a need for the Office 365 stuff as I have a license from my university, so I opted to migrate Drive. That's interesting. So I can only have one Drive account signed in on my Android phone?
    - doubleplusgood 10y ago
      No, you can access Gdrive via multiple GApps accounts on a single Android device.

pdelbarba 10y ago

As a dropbox user, even with my life in the google ecosystem, I find it's the software that make the most difference. Everything works seamlessly across systems and there's no guesswork on how most of the common synchronization issues will be solved. Microsoft and Google tainted their offerings from day one and I don't think anyone who remembers those systems wants to go back to them, even if they've improved. I think the old restrictions on file sizes and awkward interfaces have left them with baggage that Dropbox managed to avoid. These are just my opinions based on my experiences using all three products.

te_chris 10y ago
A million times this. I'm CTO of a digital agency and implementing dropbox has been a huge productivity win for us. It's the little things: universal links to files, but they're still just files. It makes the onboarding so much more simple. We've actually just started using Office 365 as well, as the integration is great between the two, so you can edit dropbox files on 365 and it's pretty much seamless - Sharepoint/CloudDrive/whatever is a car crash, don't touch it. I never thought I'd write excitedly about this, and was super sceptical at first, but honestly, it's great. GSuite feels like a toy at this point.
- komali2 10y ago
  You still can't have universal links to an image in a Google drive folder, as far as I can tell. If you can, it's quite difficult to find.
- sidcool 10y ago
  Agree with most of your points, except for the fact that GSuite provides way more than file sharing. The true comparison would be between Google Drive and Dropbox, where Dropbox is difinitely better.
  - te_chris 10y ago
    Oh I meant the 365/Dropbox combo, probably should've been more clear.

IshKebab 10y ago

Well Dropbox's client is far better than Google's for a start. Google Drive seems to have serious issues with handling conflicts, noticing file changes, renaming files and so on. Dropbox has been pretty flawless for me.

Angostura 10y ago

It's simpler, it works.

Paul-ish 10y ago

I don't think I am a typical user, but I use Dropbox because they put the same amount of polish into their client for all systems I use (Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android). I fear that other providers will neglect the client on platforms they are not trying to push. If a new platform were to pop up and become popular, I am pretty confident Dropbox would make a client for it, whereas the others I think would drag their feet. I don't want to be weighed down by my cloud sync provider like that.

noam87 10y ago

Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable. * It 100% "just works" on all my devices (Mac, Linux, on a server, web, on my phone -- hell, I could stick it on a Raspberry Pi!). * It integrates seamlessly with my filesystem. * It has never, not once, failed me or bugged out on me. I've been using this product since it first came out and have not experienced even a minor bug! * It's not tied to any other platform or service that might have conflicting interests. * No fancy "smart" features or unexpected behaviour. All options are explicit and behave as expected. * No fancy UX experiments, just straightforward to setup and use. * I never have to think about it, it just does its job. * It's a paid service that makes money (this in itself IS a feature). It's just better than the competition. The peace of mind and get-out-of-the-wayness is well worth the $10 bucks a month. One of the few products that would be truly painful for me to lose...

ssharp 10y ago
"Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable." I hate to be cynical here, but they're EBITDA profitable, not profitable, and they've been in business for 10 years. I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.
- visakanv 10y ago
  > I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox. Of those thousands of examples, which are the closest to Dropbox's scale?
  - feld 10y ago
    Probably SpiderOak?
    - rrdharan 10y ago

dflock 10y ago

Their client and sync support is simple and works very well. Hits the sweet spot of simplicity and features. The other options are more complex. Google still doesn't have any Linux support, so it's off the table for me personally.

xatan_dank 10y ago

Being integrated with Microsoft and Google's infrastructure is not a benefit, in my opinion. I've seen these companies make a lot of impulsive, ham-handed decisions with their "environments" in recent years and I'd rather pay for a service that isn't going to mutate negatively in order to coerce me to buy more things from Microsoft and Google that I just do not want.

ausjke 10y ago

totally agree, I use both office365 and g-suite and found them to be very useful and handy, for about the same price as dropbox, you not only just got the storage, but also all the mail/word/excel-alike stuff. let's see how long dropbox can fight against these big guns.

mel919 10y ago

As a former OneDrive user the service was terrible, I've had issues with sync and all of the clients - web, mobile and desktop. I've read similiar opinions. From my experience the quality of OneDrive is really poor; it's not really a competitive product. Results my vary and most certainly will but that's the way I see OneDrive. Dropbox on the other hand... just works.

alexval 10y ago
OneDrive sync has improved dramatically over the years. It's still not as good as dropbox, but OneDrive has this new popup window that shows you a bunch of information about your files when they sync and are updated. That part of the UX is better than dropbox.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I tried OneDrive again a couple of weeks ago, since I have an Office 365 subscription anyway. Sync was still slow for me compared to Dropbox, sometimes does not sync everything correctly, and used 700MB of memory for a nearly-empty OneDrive. Dropbox just works and that's worth 10 Euro per month to me, it saves me heaps of time.

threatofrain 10y ago

From reputation I had expected that Google's sync would be as perfect as Dropbox, but my experience has been that sometimes Google screws up your data while Dropbox is perfect. Google Drive's features may be peerless, such as their built-in office suite, but the fear of damaged data or spending an afternoon getting your files right drives me back to Dropbox for basic multi-machine file storage and syncing.

jpalomaki 10y ago

I believe one very important thing was the courage to put fairly high(1) price tag for the service and compete on the quality of the user experience and not on price. People tend to compare the Dropbox price to for example S3 storage price, but I think that is wrong. I'm for example using the Dropbox for certain project files and I'm sure that at least in my case the major cost is not the actual storage, but bandwidth and processing. Edit: (1) Compared to other file storage services.

Cyph0n 10y ago
Small comment: the * character italicizes text. The parser saw two of them in your comment and italicized everything in between.

Spooky23 10y ago

Ever use OneDrive for Business? It's a shitshow app. Dropbox just works.

cwyers 10y ago
It has improved dramatically in the past few years, to the point of only being half a shitshow.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

By not having a "platform agenda" DropBox works better across platforms. Its my goto way to share files between my tablet/phone/linux system/laptop.

j_s 10y ago

Dropbox will do whatever it takes to make their software as easy to use as possible. Dropbox has been willing to get their hands dirty in their pursuit of user-friendliness since day one, especially on the Mac¹. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742251

FigBug 10y ago

There are two reasons I won't use GDrive anymore. - If it starts up and your GDrive folder is empty, it deletes everything from the online version. - There is no history like Dropbox, so once you fuck up and delete everything there is no easy way to get it back.