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The 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.

The 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 ago
They 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 ago
Dropbox 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 ago
  The 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.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    >The mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content. True, good point. >That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now I think OneDrive can do that as well now.
bane 6y ago
If dropbox can't make money offering their product (easy to use cloud storage), then they should shut down business operations tomorrow, full-stop. While you are correct that there are technical challenges with delivering lots of media to lot of consumers, these challenges have been handily addressed many times by many companies. In addition Dropbox relies on people installing clients on their devices. For people who are "in their network", why not just use a bittorrent-style method to move the files between users directly? Most media that people put online isn't consumed. It's a power law distribution. So most of the vacation photos or cover-band songs aren't going to really use any egress bandwidth. But putting those things up consumes space, which pushes users over tiers, which encourages them to upgrade. When the latest dropbox-tube influencer's videos get watched by 100 million people, that's all 100% advertising to viewers that this person is a "dropboxer", some percentage of which will feel inclined to also start using the service, creating a virtuous cycle of customers who then go and make reaction videos to the first person's reaction videos, which mostly likely will get 10 views but will consume that user's storage -- which sells dropbox's primary service offering. Finally, why wouldn't dropbox turn a network of people's shareable media into an advertising network?And generate more revenue? It seems hilariously obvious to me that they would do that. After all, isn't that how Google funds 98.999% of all of their offerings?
- kenhwang 6y ago
  Dropbox makes a profit (just barely). Google is still dodges investor questions on YouTube profitability which suggests it doesn't. Flickr/Soundcloud have been fighting for survival for years now. The power law distribution is problematic because unless you can predict which content becomes a hit, you either treat all the content like it would (extremely expensive), as if it wouldn't (extremely slow and still expensive), or some smart predictive in-between (which is a very hard problem that you can see Netflix/HBO and even Youtube suffers from). You can see Dropbox is working on smart-sync too, because it's pretty critical for keeping costs down. Besides, you really don't want things to go viral. Viral is expensive to serve and expensive to engineer for. I think torrent-style distribution is a brilliant idea. Not sure how people will feel about their phone data or metered connections being used, nevermind the engineering challenges of getting torrenting working on a cellular connection. You're asking Dropbox to essentially become Google without the profitable part (search ads). Way easier said than done. There's very little profit to be made from being a commodity, it's not clear that becoming an umbrella of multiple commodities is any different. Dropbox is certainly positioned to make a good product, so is Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple. But until people actually start paying for good products so they're profitable products, they won't be built or will keep disappearing to be replaced by subsidized/free mediocre products by Google.

mormegil 6y ago

They 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 ago

Dropbox 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 ago
The 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.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  >The mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content. True, good point. >That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now I think OneDrive can do that as well now.

bane 6y ago

If dropbox can't make money offering their product (easy to use cloud storage), then they should shut down business operations tomorrow, full-stop. While you are correct that there are technical challenges with delivering lots of media to lot of consumers, these challenges have been handily addressed many times by many companies. In addition Dropbox relies on people installing clients on their devices. For people who are "in their network", why not just use a bittorrent-style method to move the files between users directly? Most media that people put online isn't consumed. It's a power law distribution. So most of the vacation photos or cover-band songs aren't going to really use any egress bandwidth. But putting those things up consumes space, which pushes users over tiers, which encourages them to upgrade. When the latest dropbox-tube influencer's videos get watched by 100 million people, that's all 100% advertising to viewers that this person is a "dropboxer", some percentage of which will feel inclined to also start using the service, creating a virtuous cycle of customers who then go and make reaction videos to the first person's reaction videos, which mostly likely will get 10 views but will consume that user's storage -- which sells dropbox's primary service offering. Finally, why wouldn't dropbox turn a network of people's shareable media into an advertising network?And generate more revenue? It seems hilariously obvious to me that they would do that. After all, isn't that how Google funds 98.999% of all of their offerings?

kenhwang 6y ago
Dropbox makes a profit (just barely). Google is still dodges investor questions on YouTube profitability which suggests it doesn't. Flickr/Soundcloud have been fighting for survival for years now. The power law distribution is problematic because unless you can predict which content becomes a hit, you either treat all the content like it would (extremely expensive), as if it wouldn't (extremely slow and still expensive), or some smart predictive in-between (which is a very hard problem that you can see Netflix/HBO and even Youtube suffers from). You can see Dropbox is working on smart-sync too, because it's pretty critical for keeping costs down. Besides, you really don't want things to go viral. Viral is expensive to serve and expensive to engineer for. I think torrent-style distribution is a brilliant idea. Not sure how people will feel about their phone data or metered connections being used, nevermind the engineering challenges of getting torrenting working on a cellular connection. You're asking Dropbox to essentially become Google without the profitable part (search ads). Way easier said than done. There's very little profit to be made from being a commodity, it's not clear that becoming an umbrella of multiple commodities is any different. Dropbox is certainly positioned to make a good product, so is Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple. But until people actually start paying for good products so they're profitable products, they won't be built or will keep disappearing to be replaced by subsidized/free mediocre products by Google.