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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
by 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.
- soneca 6y agoI am a fairly happy paying user of Dropbox for what it is, and I do not share most of complaints in the thread. But I think your suggestions are excellent! Please apply to Head of Product there!
- arduinomancer 6y agoThis is bang-on. You need to build an ecosystem/experience around the files rather than just straight up only doing storage.
- 8ytecoder 6y agoThey could have turned it into a platform. Provide APIs to back any number of applications.
- Spooky23 6y agoDropbox had a great, gmail like onboarding process for free users. And they made graphics people happy with their sync tech. Then they stopped and focused on segmentation to chisel more margin and missed the boat. It’s a shame. The enterprise sales force that I dealt was a bunch of overpaid folks who didn’t seem motivated to sell. Microsoft and Google gobbled up the enterprise market. And eventually, Adobe will steal the creatives too.
- 8ytecoder 6y agoYup, image versioning was a big deal. No one else had it at the time. Graphics people were indeed happy. I wonder if they tried to strike a deal with Adobe to back lightroom or photoshop with Dropbox.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoAlso, I can't help but wonder if they would do better after some mergers, like with BackBlaze, Box, and some other smallish storage-focused companies. If you're going to be a storage company, why not be the biggest you can...
- partoa 6y agoMy sentiments exactly. I, however, see more value along the lines of file related workflows and third party apps. Google Drive now has third party apps. Workflows on the other hand, I have only seen in NextCloud. Third party apps would have helped them remain focused. That ship has, almost certainly, sailed though.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> Imagine these scenarios: > 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. Considering that Amazon offered this exact functionality, and decided it wasn't even worth maintaining, I don't think it's obvious that Dropbox missed something by not doing it at all.
- staticassertion 6y agoTotally agreed. I pay for Dropbox myself, but I don't know that I've shared a file with it in a decade or so. I just use Paper, which they continue to fail to market, despite it being absolutely amazing.
- dingaling 6y agoI see your point , I just visited the Paper product subsite and I still don't know what it is despite watching several videos. Some sort of collaborative task / list management?
- dehrmann 6y agoI think they're halfway copying Box's strategy and focusing on B2B. The first two scenarios might have been huge selling points a decade ago, but Spotify replaced music downloads with streaming (not that Dropbox couldn't have made a stream your own music app), and Flickr faded away. I'm not even sure how people save their photos, these days. Just leave them on their phones?
- kenhwang 6y agoThe problem with all those things are: bandwidth. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. Dropbox wants you to stick stuff with them and then never touch it. Then they would only need slow disks and slow networks. Once Dropbox tries to become Flickr/Soundcloud/Youtube, they have the same problem those services have: massive money loss. Playing media at scale is hard and expensive. Especially when Dropbox's niche is easily mutable data. Dropbox doesn't exactly have a massive advertising empire that could subsidize and take advantage of Youtube. So the one place they did expand into is productivity tools. No one's going to massively share a text document/slideshow/spreadsheet, nor do those things eat very much bandwidth, and it plays into their mutability advantage very well.
- mormegil 6y agoThey even had (almost) this feature and disabled it, right? Originally, your Dropbox folder came with a Public folder which had content accessible (directly) from the web. You could host your website there. Some time later they found people are hosting their websites there which costs them bandwidth, and removed this ability. (Now you can share individual files using special links.)
- fauigerzigerk 6y agoDropbox customers are clearly willing to pay more than the absolute minimum possible. Dropbox is relatively expensive. So instead of not offering a service that customers want they could simply charge for bandwidth. Also, Dropbox does support partially syncing large files, so mutability is not necessarily that big of a problem (depending on the file format I guess).
- kenhwang 6y agoThe mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content. Youtube/Flickr pretty much operate on full replacement, when you're done fiddling with your files you publish them and they never change. This makes it easier to serve the content cheaper through caching and CDNs. That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now. Change a bit and it tries only sync a bit. Now imagine how difficult that would be to serve with multiple layers of caching.
- doublesCs 6y agoIf dropbox actually did any of these things, people would be complaining about walled gardens.