12 ms·

Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

100 points by wallflower 6y ago

pmart123 6y ago
They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on. Prior to their IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending time to migrate off of AWS versus continuing to build around their core offering. As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching, etc.) if order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive, Microsoft, etc.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  I love Dropbox as a product and happily pay for it. It always works. No fuss. No conflicts, it just works. Something to be said about tools you forget that you’re even paying for, they silently make your life better. Lately, they’re getting slightly annoying though. Designers at Dropbox - it’s a fucking file syncing tool, not a life philosophy. Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido(retired)...ehhh engineers to do their thing. The problem is the shareholders. Dropbox doesn’t need to grow. It can stay the same and continue to be helpful (and make money, provide a living to many employees). But the goddamn shareholders will ruin a perfectly good product. Public companies get hollowed out and the marrow sucked by the shareholders. I want a Drew Houston & Sons Co.; not Dropbox Incorporated.
  - pm90 6y ago
    Small nit: Guido left Dropbox in 2019, he is now retired.
  - trimbo 6y ago
    > allow Guido to do his thing Guido van Rossum? He retired. https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido
  - gumby 6y ago
    > Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido to do his thing. Guido retired last November.
    - fermienrico 6y ago
      Oh great. Good for Guido.
  - xmodem 6y ago
    In today’s SV mantra, standing still means falling behind, and waiting until you either get disrupted by other startups, copied by big tech, or both. No, something must be done, and trying to force themselves deeper into their customers’ workflows is something. So they did it.
    - fermienrico 6y ago
      I think standing still with 500 million users in my book is standing way the hell up there. Boosted into space at this point. Why shy away from competition? Should face it.
  - kerneltime 6y ago
    Smugmug.. I love those guys..
  - nvarsj 6y ago
    > No fuss. No conflicts, it just works. I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux filesystems bizarrely - forcing me to reimage multiple machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour on non-ext4. I also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason I haven’t swapped to something else is my life is locked into it from the early days. I’d love to drop it at this point. I don’t even need that much space - just something cross platform.
    - fermienrico 6y ago
      Works just fine for windows and mac. I know of that shit storm when they neutered the linux app. I think you're referring to this fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209
      - _visgean 6y ago
        It also works on Linux. Specifically on ext4.
    - enitihas 6y ago
      They started supporting other file systems again though.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  > As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering what I don't get is why they don't have a price plan in the 100-200GB range like google drive has for two or three bucks. I've set up like seven or eight of those for family members and relatives, it's a very good price point and size for the average user. The free plan of dropbox pretty much is super small and the next thing is 5TB.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    The theory is it would cannibalize their $10/mo plan. They have a lot of users who don’t have tons of files but value paid features. Google and Apple’s storage services are plainer offerings.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      I'm on Google Drive mainly because they dpn't offer such a plan. Dropboxes client is better, but I'm not paying an extra $8/month for storage I don't need.
      - 1123581321 6y ago
        You are on Google Drive because you don’t need what Dropbox does. That’s not something they should worry about. They would need at least five of you for every $10/mo customer who downgraded to improve their situation, not factoring things like increased support cost and higher churn rates from lowest-price shoppers.
- OriginalPenguin 6y ago
  Unless Amazon decided that they want to give DropBox a huge discounted rate for the PR, it would simply cost too much to have stayed on the Amazon cloud.
hartator 6y ago
My main thing is almost always 100% cpu on my huge 1tb folder when working there.
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  >> [pg] That does count for a lot with us. It's surprising how many of the groups who apply have a cofounder who's not willing to quit his or her job. It's a worrying sign when someone who knows the company a lot better than we do isn't willing to bet on it. But again, there are always exceptions. The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job to wok on dropbox part-time. The problem I see with pg's logic is that the founder and YC are not betting the same value on the company. The way I see it, YC is asked to bet some money, but the founder is asked to bet everything they got. If YC was asked to bet everything they had on that one company, they'd say no. In that case, having a plan B is not a sign of lack of resolve, it's a sign of sanity. But I'm probably missing something. I really don't have the whatsitcalled, entrepreneurial spirit. It all looks like gambling to me and I hate gambling, especially when the odds are stacked against me; which they always are, otherwise it's not gambling. So I guess I don't get it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnHammersley 6y ago
    I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might struggle to be successful. I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much effort, it's likely that if you're not able to quit to work on it, you'll lose out to a team that can. PS: I'm saying this as a founder who quit his job (as did my co-founder) when it looked liked we had something, and I doubt Overleaf would be where it is today if we'd not. So I may be biased in that direction!
Havoc 6y ago
Recently saw an appealing -40% discount on amex for dropbox. That could be cool - esp if stacked with a promo. Headed over to their subreddit in search of a special...literally an entire subreddit of complaints. Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.
- boultonmark 6y ago
  Steve Jobs called them ‘a feature’. Methinks you are right, that they will be gone in 5
  - jelling 6y ago
    Dropbox is the new Novell. OSs eventually catch up and even quicker when it creates a new recurring revenue stream.
- seanieb 6y ago
  Find me a technical saas product of tyat scale that doesn’t have support forums that are on fire? Checkout gdrive or iclouds.
  - Havoc 6y ago
    Not sure I'd call their subreddit a support forum
mehrdada 6y ago
Dropbox feels more bearucratic internally than Google, a company two orders of magnitude its size. I feel like it is a perfect case of all the “VC-style” advice of “CEO job changes every 6 months and you should adapt” going haywire; mistaking the focus to be building an abstract hierarchical HR org, while completely losing the ability, vision, or desire to build a product that people love. Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ quote on monopoly businesses, except it happened before they got a proper monopoly. https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg In fact, the early success may have been a curse there, thinking they have the genie in the bottle when they really had not.
- tim_sw 6y ago
  In what ways is it bureaucratic? Is there a lot of process to get things done across teams or to ship new features?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- throwawaypop 6y ago
  I think people just wanted a cloud solution to store and retrive files. Dropbox was one of the products that grew during the PC and digital wave. Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.
  - aheilbut 6y ago
    Google Drive is a confusing mess, and still doesn’t work on linux.
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      Maybe not with the official tools, but it works great with rclone [1]. Which to me is far superior to any official tool but hey, to each their own. 1- https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
recursivecaveat 6y ago
Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite with whatever chat service comes after Meet/Hangouts/Allo, then Zoom's days are numbered.
- rosywoozlechan 6y ago
  Does this apply to Slack as well?
  - echelon 6y ago
    Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.
    - askafriend 6y ago
      > Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.
      - quineoa 6y ago
        That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as possible seeing how critical each action is. I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.
daveoc64 6y ago
I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus plan, and that does everything I want - albeit at a higher price than I'd like, but it always seems like their marketing is so heavily geared towards business use. Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan. I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".
- claviska 6y ago
  I was a loyal Dropbox customer early on. At some point, they stopped caring about individuals and put all of their effort (especially marketing) into businesses. As a paid user, it was annoying to see upgrade nags in the app and on the website. I just wanted a damn folder that would sync properly. That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need pushed me away. After their horrible rebranding, I got sick of looking at the ugly new icon on my iPhone. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I now pay something like $10/mo for iCloud storage which works pretty good. Maybe Dropbox no longer needs (or wants) me as a customer, but it’s something I would’ve happily continued to pay for potentially decades to come.
  - wheels 6y ago
    I recently uninstalled Dropbox after years of use. The upgrade nags were over the top, and the number-of-device limitations on the free plan made it no longer usable for me. I like the app, and would happily have paid something for it, but as a mostly private user, the lack of a plan between 2 GB / free and 2 TB / $10/month just didn't make sense. $3/month for 5 GB would have been an easy choice. Now I'm using SyncThing, which I don't love, but gets the job done, is free, and doesn't limit me to a couple devices. I have a folder that syncs to my web server that replaces me sharing things on Dropbox, which works, but is a little cumbersome. (That said, sharing links might be a fun thing to hack into SyncThing.)
    - sowbug 6y ago
      Same here. I used it to sync my Keepass database, currently 1.6 MB, across a sliding window of about 10 devices (sliding because I like trying new OSes and phones). That ground to a halt with the 3-device limitation, so I migrated to Syncthing. I would have loved to pay for Dropbox; in fact, in 2008 I did upgrade to 50GB for one year because I liked the company and wanted to help it survive the downturn. But if I had kept that up, I'd have paid $1,200 by now to sync less than 5 MB. Interesting you mention $3/month. I pay almost exactly that at vultr.com to keep an IPv6 Syncthing instance running so that a copy of my stuff is globally available.
ativzzz 6y ago
Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. ... Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- superfrank 6y ago
  The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.
  - paxys 6y ago
    The people who can do it are still their target audience, once they try it and realize how much of a pain it is to maintain.
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    In case you or others missed it, the parent commenter is quoting a comment that was posted on HN's original thread announcing Dropbox in 2007, where the poster questioned if Dropbox would ever generate income. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting Dropbox's success.
    - fireattack 6y ago
      Should really use quote marks I guess.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bsder 6y ago
aprdm 6y ago
I just recently was shopping for a solution for myself and considered google drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud . What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on Dropbox which I have been (a free ) user for 8 years. I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the worse, I also got super confused about their site which didn’t try to sell to people but instead to enterprise only. As a person that needs around 300gb and want it integrated with my MacBook/iPhone I ended up paying for iCloud .
- namdnay 6y ago
  As Jobs said, Dropbox is a feature, not a product. And iCloud is the best feature of apple devices IMHO
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Did you look at pCloud? Their pricing is decent, they have great link sharing functionality and rudimentary but workable media streaming. Their Linux client is miles ahead of Dropbox and any of the third-party GDrive sync applications.
- MikusR 6y ago
  OneDrive is fully supported on Mac including cloud only files. It also comes with free Office suite.
ykevinator 6y ago
Feels like Dropbox is a slow moving worthless company
aabhay 6y ago
I’m a huge fan of dropbox, partially because I’m an enterprise user of all their features (including paper and transfer!). In addition to Discord, I feel that it is one of the few companies that has kept their product simple and streamlined. Even modern tools like Airtable, Notion, Miro and of course Slack feel bloated and complicated. It’s a genuine challenge for large organizations to maintain simplicity so I respect what they were able to do.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  How the hell is slack more complicated than dropbox?? I didn't see Slack Paper, or Slack photos which they then comoletely and annoyingly dropped support for!
  - aabhay 6y ago
    Compared to Google Drive and OneDrive, Dropbox is like a zen masterpiece. I just install the Dropbox helper and I rarely if ever need to use the website or use any funky app integrations. Slack used to be simple, now it’s a mess of different teams, with a thousand channels, each with threads and document tools and integrations and slash commands to remember.
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  > I feel that it is one of the few companies that has kept their product simple and streamlined I'm a longitme paid Dropbox user for personal things and I have the exact _opposite_ feeling. I want Dropbox to a be a single folder that is always synced perfectly to anywhere the app is. Things like link sharing, API access, "smart sync", etc are nice bonuses. But, they had VC money (and are now public). They couldn't have been content with a complete product, there always needed to be _more_. I'm a paying user, but I still have "pay us more!" banners. They want me to connect my calendar [1]. They want me to use their writing suite with my (nonexistent) team. Their mac app has become increasingly invasive over the years. [2] I constantly feel "left behind" by them as a customer. Their product motivation so far from the reason I joined them. Each year as my renewal date looms, I look for reasonable alternatives. Ultimately it has the best syncing and I've stuck with it, but I'd almost pay extra to get rid of all the extra junk that's "integrated" with the service now. Just sync my files. [1]: https://cdn.zappy.app/b874d95cff539ec74d76e9dcd8679dad.png https://cdn.zappy.app/b874d95cff539ec74d76e9dcd8679dad.png [2]: https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-dirty-little-security-hack/ https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-di...
ausjke 6y ago
what happened to the stock, it's lustlacking comparing to other high tech stocks.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > it's lustlacking comparing to other high tech stocks Something described as "lackluster" is lacking luster, not lust.
sonicggg 6y ago
This article did not age well for Dropbox.
bane 6y ago
Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud. Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts. Imagine these scenarios: - A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account. Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing sites. - A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services. - A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services. - A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on youtube...and video takes up a ton of storage. Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist. And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a crowded space competing with companies who are making it necessary to have their file sharing services because they're tying all kinds of productivity applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.
- saghm 6y ago
  > A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services I recently dumped my music collection that previously was on Google Music on Dropbox; I'd easily pay twice what I'm paying for space to get a music app from them that played my stuff on there.
- 6y ago
danbmil99 6y ago
I was beta user number 50. I saw no value in something I could do easily with SFTP or SCP etcetera. I'm not an investor I guess
miked85 6y ago
I switched to Resilio (formerly BitTorrent) Sync [1] years ago and never looked back. It does have the restriction that at least one of your machines must be online to sync with others, but aside from that, it has been a solid replacement. [1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ https://www.resilio.com/individuals/
- teknas 6y ago
  If one of your devices is guaranteed to be always online, you should take a look at syncthing. I found it to be faster than resilio. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
maxdata 6y ago
My company was largely run on dropbox as a crucial piece of infrastructure for many years before my arrival. As of a couple months ago, it has been cut out of our production pipeline entirely, but for many years, if you saw a digital out-of-home ad in certain places, it only got there because someone had added a media file and schedule to a dropbox folder. Looking back on it, it's pretty wild how much of their business relied on dropbox working reliably. Thankfully, that's all gone now.
- jumhyn 6y ago
  I worked in a research lab several years ago that used Dropbox as their version control system for all the data analysis scripts they wrote. It took a while but by the time I left I had convinced everyone to switch over to git.
innocenat 6y ago
I am a happy user of paid Dropbox, and I think many person are the same as me. For me, OneDrive and Google Drive are not enough simply because of their terrible sync system. Back then when OneDrive was just launched the speed for me was absolutely horrible (like <100KB/s). Sure, I'd like if I could just buy space as I grow, as I remembered it was a hard decision to buy 1TB (back then) when I only needed 50GB. I currently have >600,000 files in my Dropbox. I don't know if other system can reliably deal with this many files, Dropbox has proved it to me that it can deal with my files on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- bichonnages 6y ago
  Synology Drive @ home + Backblaze B2 much cheaper works great
sqldba 6y ago
I dropped Dropbox when they enforced the 3 device limit on the free consumer plan a few years ago. It sucks for them because I was very outspoken about them beforehand because I used it. Then it changed from endorse to absolutely tell people to stay away because it’s unusable. Penny wise pound foolish.
ValisTuring 6y ago
I heard some positive feedback of AI Dungeon using Cortex to reduce their cost of using GPT2. Reference: 1.[How we scaled AI Dungeon 2 to support over 1,000,000 users ]https://medium.com/@aidungeon/how-we-scaled-ai-dungeon-2-to-support-over-1-000-000-users-d207d5623de9 https://medium.com/@aidungeon/how-we-scaled-ai-dungeon-2-to-...
KozmoNau7 6y ago
I used Dropbox for a while, but their Linux client was a mess that randomly spiraled into 100% CPU usage for long periods of time. Google Drive with Insync was better, but had absolutely no bandwidth limiting, so it ate all of my meager upload speed a lot of the time. There are also the obvious issues of hosting your files with American companies, if you're not fond of various three letter agencies looking through your stuff. I do t have anything even remotely incriminating, but I am opposed to widespread secret surveillance on principle. So I use pCloud, which is hosted in Switzerland. Their Linux client is great, their pricing is decent, they have reasonable media streaming built in (supports FLAC, too) and their sharing links are easy to use and don't require people to register accounts. They also have good undelete features (30 days standard, up to a year for an additional fee).
krzyk 6y ago
I resigned from Dropbox recently because they don't have a subscription that is right for me (I'm not a data hoarder who needs 1TB of synced space, I just need 50 or 100 GB max) and because (most importantly) added an artificial limit of max 3 devices sync for free tier. I switched to syncthing and so far I love it. Now my data lives on 2 always online servers plus few laptops, vms.
hunvreus 6y ago
I would gladly pay for Dropbox if their service was more compelling than Google Drive. And it could: Dropbox Paper is still the best editing experience I've ever had. If it allowed for better organization and search, it would blow Notion out of the water.

100 points by wallflower 6y ago

They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on. Prior to their IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending time to migrate off of AWS versus continuing to build around their core offering. As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching, etc.) if order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive, Microsoft, etc.

fermienrico 6y ago
I love Dropbox as a product and happily pay for it. It always works. No fuss. No conflicts, it just works. Something to be said about tools you forget that you’re even paying for, they silently make your life better. Lately, they’re getting slightly annoying though. Designers at Dropbox - it’s a fucking file syncing tool, not a life philosophy. Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido(retired)...ehhh engineers to do their thing. The problem is the shareholders. Dropbox doesn’t need to grow. It can stay the same and continue to be helpful (and make money, provide a living to many employees). But the goddamn shareholders will ruin a perfectly good product. Public companies get hollowed out and the marrow sucked by the shareholders. I want a Drew Houston & Sons Co.; not Dropbox Incorporated.
- pm90 6y ago
  Small nit: Guido left Dropbox in 2019, he is now retired.
- trimbo 6y ago
  > allow Guido to do his thing Guido van Rossum? He retired. https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido
- gumby 6y ago
  > Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido to do his thing. Guido retired last November.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    Oh great. Good for Guido.
- xmodem 6y ago
  In today’s SV mantra, standing still means falling behind, and waiting until you either get disrupted by other startups, copied by big tech, or both. No, something must be done, and trying to force themselves deeper into their customers’ workflows is something. So they did it.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    I think standing still with 500 million users in my book is standing way the hell up there. Boosted into space at this point. Why shy away from competition? Should face it.
- kerneltime 6y ago
  Smugmug.. I love those guys..
- nvarsj 6y ago
  > No fuss. No conflicts, it just works. I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux filesystems bizarrely - forcing me to reimage multiple machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour on non-ext4. I also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason I haven’t swapped to something else is my life is locked into it from the early days. I’d love to drop it at this point. I don’t even need that much space - just something cross platform.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    Works just fine for windows and mac. I know of that shit storm when they neutered the linux app. I think you're referring to this fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209
    - _visgean 6y ago
      It also works on Linux. Specifically on ext4.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    They started supporting other file systems again though.
Barrin92 6y ago
> As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering what I don't get is why they don't have a price plan in the 100-200GB range like google drive has for two or three bucks. I've set up like seven or eight of those for family members and relatives, it's a very good price point and size for the average user. The free plan of dropbox pretty much is super small and the next thing is 5TB.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  The theory is it would cannibalize their $10/mo plan. They have a lot of users who don’t have tons of files but value paid features. Google and Apple’s storage services are plainer offerings.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    I'm on Google Drive mainly because they dpn't offer such a plan. Dropboxes client is better, but I'm not paying an extra $8/month for storage I don't need.
    - 1123581321 6y ago
      You are on Google Drive because you don’t need what Dropbox does. That’s not something they should worry about. They would need at least five of you for every $10/mo customer who downgraded to improve their situation, not factoring things like increased support cost and higher churn rates from lowest-price shoppers.
OriginalPenguin 6y ago
Unless Amazon decided that they want to give DropBox a huge discounted rate for the PR, it would simply cost too much to have stayed on the Amazon cloud.

hartator 6y ago

My main thing is almost always 100% cpu on my huge 1tb folder when working there.

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> [pg] That does count for a lot with us. It's surprising how many of the groups who apply have a cofounder who's not willing to quit his or her job. It's a worrying sign when someone who knows the company a lot better than we do isn't willing to bet on it. But again, there are always exceptions. The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job to wok on dropbox part-time. The problem I see with pg's logic is that the founder and YC are not betting the same value on the company. The way I see it, YC is asked to bet some money, but the founder is asked to bet everything they got. If YC was asked to bet everything they had on that one company, they'd say no. In that case, having a plan B is not a sign of lack of resolve, it's a sign of sanity. But I'm probably missing something. I really don't have the whatsitcalled, entrepreneurial spirit. It all looks like gambling to me and I hate gambling, especially when the odds are stacked against me; which they always are, otherwise it's not gambling. So I guess I don't get it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnHammersley 6y ago
  I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might struggle to be successful. I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much effort, it's likely that if you're not able to quit to work on it, you'll lose out to a team that can. PS: I'm saying this as a founder who quit his job (as did my co-founder) when it looked liked we had something, and I doubt Overleaf would be where it is today if we'd not. So I may be biased in that direction!

Havoc 6y ago

Recently saw an appealing -40% discount on amex for dropbox. That could be cool - esp if stacked with a promo. Headed over to their subreddit in search of a special...literally an entire subreddit of complaints. Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.

boultonmark 6y ago
Steve Jobs called them ‘a feature’. Methinks you are right, that they will be gone in 5
- jelling 6y ago
  Dropbox is the new Novell. OSs eventually catch up and even quicker when it creates a new recurring revenue stream.
seanieb 6y ago
Find me a technical saas product of tyat scale that doesn’t have support forums that are on fire? Checkout gdrive or iclouds.
- Havoc 6y ago
  Not sure I'd call their subreddit a support forum

mehrdada 6y ago

Dropbox feels more bearucratic internally than Google, a company two orders of magnitude its size. I feel like it is a perfect case of all the “VC-style” advice of “CEO job changes every 6 months and you should adapt” going haywire; mistaking the focus to be building an abstract hierarchical HR org, while completely losing the ability, vision, or desire to build a product that people love. Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ quote on monopoly businesses, except it happened before they got a proper monopoly. https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg In fact, the early success may have been a curse there, thinking they have the genie in the bottle when they really had not.

tim_sw 6y ago
In what ways is it bureaucratic? Is there a lot of process to get things done across teams or to ship new features?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
throwawaypop 6y ago
I think people just wanted a cloud solution to store and retrive files. Dropbox was one of the products that grew during the PC and digital wave. Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.
- aheilbut 6y ago
  Google Drive is a confusing mess, and still doesn’t work on linux.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    Maybe not with the official tools, but it works great with rclone [1]. Which to me is far superior to any official tool but hey, to each their own. 1- https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/

recursivecaveat 6y ago

Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite with whatever chat service comes after Meet/Hangouts/Allo, then Zoom's days are numbered.

rosywoozlechan 6y ago
Does this apply to Slack as well?
- echelon 6y ago
  Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.
  - askafriend 6y ago
    > Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.
    - quineoa 6y ago
      That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as possible seeing how critical each action is. I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.

daveoc64 6y ago

I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus plan, and that does everything I want - albeit at a higher price than I'd like, but it always seems like their marketing is so heavily geared towards business use. Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan. I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".

claviska 6y ago
I was a loyal Dropbox customer early on. At some point, they stopped caring about individuals and put all of their effort (especially marketing) into businesses. As a paid user, it was annoying to see upgrade nags in the app and on the website. I just wanted a damn folder that would sync properly. That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need pushed me away. After their horrible rebranding, I got sick of looking at the ugly new icon on my iPhone. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I now pay something like $10/mo for iCloud storage which works pretty good. Maybe Dropbox no longer needs (or wants) me as a customer, but it’s something I would’ve happily continued to pay for potentially decades to come.
- wheels 6y ago
  I recently uninstalled Dropbox after years of use. The upgrade nags were over the top, and the number-of-device limitations on the free plan made it no longer usable for me. I like the app, and would happily have paid something for it, but as a mostly private user, the lack of a plan between 2 GB / free and 2 TB / $10/month just didn't make sense. $3/month for 5 GB would have been an easy choice. Now I'm using SyncThing, which I don't love, but gets the job done, is free, and doesn't limit me to a couple devices. I have a folder that syncs to my web server that replaces me sharing things on Dropbox, which works, but is a little cumbersome. (That said, sharing links might be a fun thing to hack into SyncThing.)
  - sowbug 6y ago
    Same here. I used it to sync my Keepass database, currently 1.6 MB, across a sliding window of about 10 devices (sliding because I like trying new OSes and phones). That ground to a halt with the 3-device limitation, so I migrated to Syncthing. I would have loved to pay for Dropbox; in fact, in 2008 I did upgrade to 50GB for one year because I liked the company and wanted to help it survive the downturn. But if I had kept that up, I'd have paid $1,200 by now to sync less than 5 MB. Interesting you mention $3/month. I pay almost exactly that at vultr.com to keep an IPv6 Syncthing instance running so that a copy of my stuff is globally available.

ativzzz 6y ago

Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. ... Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

superfrank 6y ago
The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.
- paxys 6y ago
  The people who can do it are still their target audience, once they try it and realize how much of a pain it is to maintain.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  In case you or others missed it, the parent commenter is quoting a comment that was posted on HN's original thread announcing Dropbox in 2007, where the poster questioned if Dropbox would ever generate income. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting Dropbox's success.
  - fireattack 6y ago
    Should really use quote marks I guess.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bsder 6y ago

aprdm 6y ago

I just recently was shopping for a solution for myself and considered google drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud . What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on Dropbox which I have been (a free ) user for 8 years. I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the worse, I also got super confused about their site which didn’t try to sell to people but instead to enterprise only. As a person that needs around 300gb and want it integrated with my MacBook/iPhone I ended up paying for iCloud .

namdnay 6y ago
As Jobs said, Dropbox is a feature, not a product. And iCloud is the best feature of apple devices IMHO
KozmoNau7 6y ago
Did you look at pCloud? Their pricing is decent, they have great link sharing functionality and rudimentary but workable media streaming. Their Linux client is miles ahead of Dropbox and any of the third-party GDrive sync applications.
MikusR 6y ago
OneDrive is fully supported on Mac including cloud only files. It also comes with free Office suite.

ykevinator 6y ago

Feels like Dropbox is a slow moving worthless company

aabhay 6y ago

I’m a huge fan of dropbox, partially because I’m an enterprise user of all their features (including paper and transfer!). In addition to Discord, I feel that it is one of the few companies that has kept their product simple and streamlined. Even modern tools like Airtable, Notion, Miro and of course Slack feel bloated and complicated. It’s a genuine challenge for large organizations to maintain simplicity so I respect what they were able to do.

ramraj07 6y ago
How the hell is slack more complicated than dropbox?? I didn't see Slack Paper, or Slack photos which they then comoletely and annoyingly dropped support for!
- aabhay 6y ago
  Compared to Google Drive and OneDrive, Dropbox is like a zen masterpiece. I just install the Dropbox helper and I rarely if ever need to use the website or use any funky app integrations. Slack used to be simple, now it’s a mess of different teams, with a thousand channels, each with threads and document tools and integrations and slash commands to remember.
Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
> I feel that it is one of the few companies that has kept their product simple and streamlined I'm a longitme paid Dropbox user for personal things and I have the exact _opposite_ feeling. I want Dropbox to a be a single folder that is always synced perfectly to anywhere the app is. Things like link sharing, API access, "smart sync", etc are nice bonuses. But, they had VC money (and are now public). They couldn't have been content with a complete product, there always needed to be _more_. I'm a paying user, but I still have "pay us more!" banners. They want me to connect my calendar [1]. They want me to use their writing suite with my (nonexistent) team. Their mac app has become increasingly invasive over the years. [2] I constantly feel "left behind" by them as a customer. Their product motivation so far from the reason I joined them. Each year as my renewal date looms, I look for reasonable alternatives. Ultimately it has the best syncing and I've stuck with it, but I'd almost pay extra to get rid of all the extra junk that's "integrated" with the service now. Just sync my files. [1]: https://cdn.zappy.app/b874d95cff539ec74d76e9dcd8679dad.png https://cdn.zappy.app/b874d95cff539ec74d76e9dcd8679dad.png [2]: https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-dirty-little-security-hack/ https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-di...

ausjke 6y ago

what happened to the stock, it's lustlacking comparing to other high tech stocks.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> it's lustlacking comparing to other high tech stocks Something described as "lackluster" is lacking luster, not lust.

sonicggg 6y ago

This article did not age well for Dropbox.

bane 6y ago

Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud. Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts. Imagine these scenarios: - A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account. Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing sites. - A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services. - A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services. - A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on youtube...and video takes up a ton of storage. Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist. And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a crowded space competing with companies who are making it necessary to have their file sharing services because they're tying all kinds of productivity applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.

saghm 6y ago
> A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services I recently dumped my music collection that previously was on Google Music on Dropbox; I'd easily pay twice what I'm paying for space to get a music app from them that played my stuff on there.
6y ago

danbmil99 6y ago

I was beta user number 50. I saw no value in something I could do easily with SFTP or SCP etcetera. I'm not an investor I guess

miked85 6y ago

I switched to Resilio (formerly BitTorrent) Sync [1] years ago and never looked back. It does have the restriction that at least one of your machines must be online to sync with others, but aside from that, it has been a solid replacement. [1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

teknas 6y ago
If one of your devices is guaranteed to be always online, you should take a look at syncthing. I found it to be faster than resilio. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/

maxdata 6y ago

My company was largely run on dropbox as a crucial piece of infrastructure for many years before my arrival. As of a couple months ago, it has been cut out of our production pipeline entirely, but for many years, if you saw a digital out-of-home ad in certain places, it only got there because someone had added a media file and schedule to a dropbox folder. Looking back on it, it's pretty wild how much of their business relied on dropbox working reliably. Thankfully, that's all gone now.

jumhyn 6y ago
I worked in a research lab several years ago that used Dropbox as their version control system for all the data analysis scripts they wrote. It took a while but by the time I left I had convinced everyone to switch over to git.

innocenat 6y ago

I am a happy user of paid Dropbox, and I think many person are the same as me. For me, OneDrive and Google Drive are not enough simply because of their terrible sync system. Back then when OneDrive was just launched the speed for me was absolutely horrible (like <100KB/s). Sure, I'd like if I could just buy space as I grow, as I remembered it was a hard decision to buy 1TB (back then) when I only needed 50GB. I currently have >600,000 files in my Dropbox. I don't know if other system can reliably deal with this many files, Dropbox has proved it to me that it can deal with my files on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

bichonnages 6y ago
Synology Drive @ home + Backblaze B2 much cheaper works great

sqldba 6y ago

I dropped Dropbox when they enforced the 3 device limit on the free consumer plan a few years ago. It sucks for them because I was very outspoken about them beforehand because I used it. Then it changed from endorse to absolutely tell people to stay away because it’s unusable. Penny wise pound foolish.

ValisTuring 6y ago

I heard some positive feedback of AI Dungeon using Cortex to reduce their cost of using GPT2. Reference: 1.[How we scaled AI Dungeon 2 to support over 1,000,000 users ]https://medium.com/@aidungeon/how-we-scaled-ai-dungeon-2-to-support-over-1-000-000-users-d207d5623de9 https://medium.com/@aidungeon/how-we-scaled-ai-dungeon-2-to-...

KozmoNau7 6y ago

I used Dropbox for a while, but their Linux client was a mess that randomly spiraled into 100% CPU usage for long periods of time. Google Drive with Insync was better, but had absolutely no bandwidth limiting, so it ate all of my meager upload speed a lot of the time. There are also the obvious issues of hosting your files with American companies, if you're not fond of various three letter agencies looking through your stuff. I do t have anything even remotely incriminating, but I am opposed to widespread secret surveillance on principle. So I use pCloud, which is hosted in Switzerland. Their Linux client is great, their pricing is decent, they have reasonable media streaming built in (supports FLAC, too) and their sharing links are easy to use and don't require people to register accounts. They also have good undelete features (30 days standard, up to a year for an additional fee).

krzyk 6y ago

I resigned from Dropbox recently because they don't have a subscription that is right for me (I'm not a data hoarder who needs 1TB of synced space, I just need 50 or 100 GB max) and because (most importantly) added an artificial limit of max 3 devices sync for free tier. I switched to syncthing and so far I love it. Now my data lives on 2 always online servers plus few laptops, vms.

hunvreus 6y ago

I would gladly pay for Dropbox if their service was more compelling than Google Drive. And it could: Dropbox Paper is still the best editing experience I've ever had. If it allowed for better organization and search, it would blow Notion out of the water.