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Who does Dropbox compete with these days? They have pretty much the highest prices for the least amount of value. The only reason I see them mentioned here freq

Who does Dropbox compete with these days? They have pretty much the highest prices for the least amount of value. The only reason I see them mentioned here frequently is their connection with Y Combinator.

rmoriz 6y ago
I've admired Drew and the early Dropbox team for getting things done and shipped even when compiled python GUIs was edgy as the initial Rails version of Twitter was. But they shipped and validated the market. Now adding all those fancy and cool tech mentioned in the blog post will increase the complexity by a lot but it's not clear what are the real benefits. Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity? Maybe they have some new products in the pipeline that built upon the new stack. Or they waste their time. We will see.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  > Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity? Of course it does. I am not sure why you think it doesn't.
  - rmoriz 6y ago
    servers are a commodity and cheap compared to runtime complexity
    - sanxiyn 6y ago
      Yes, but it's a lot of servers.
      - rmoriz 6y ago
        How many? 5000 servers? As a public company it should not really matter at that size. Developers are way more expensive.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      This attitude gives us ever less eficicent software that endlessly gobbles up resources for no good reason.
- alena_bsu 6y ago
  With that move it is actually decreasing the complexity and improving manageability and sustainability.
  - rmoriz 6y ago
    If you change all tires if a running car, you are increasing complexity and risk. The blog post describes the fallacy/anti-pattern of starting from scratch. It's usually a people problem when people don't want to understand the Source of the current state and also don't want to fix it. A green field looks so much nicer than dirty plumbing. But it's wrong. Another sign of this anti-pattern is the hyper focus on the green field solution and not to think about simpler solutions (better DevOps tooling, hire C++ developers to rewrite slower lua Code etc)
- dzonga 6y ago
  effect of being vc funded. the engineers hired later on, only care about engineering problems also company nametag & money, not user level problems. you would think, dropbox would be concerned with providing best value for the buck but nah. plenty of other examples fb, google - google software quality sucks for a place that employs 100s of engineers.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    There are lot of things they do that I'm not happy with, but it is still very valuable for the price point. No where else can you get unlimited storage that is fast for so cheap, and they are the only cloud provider that doesn't charge egress to those services.
thevagrant 6y ago
I noticed on social media a lot of negativity toward Dropbox and sometimes even on HN. The negative sentiment appears to come from tech circles who feel One Drive offers a better price point or iCloud works great for them, so Dropbox shouldn't exist. Personally, I prefer Dropbox. I found problems with One Drive. Google Drive client was always hit and miss and I could not rely on it. iCloud is not cross platform (afaik). Dropbox has worked where ever I needed it. Dropbox is more expensive but I prefer to have my files in Dropbox (as a separation of concerns) rather than have a single tech company control every aspect of my life. My experience with the 'average Joe' is that Dropbox is easy and it works. Yes, they might save a couple dollars switching to OneDrive but Dropbox still offer a good product. Will Dropbox survive long term? I certainly hope so. I have no affiliation, aside from being a customer.
- techntoke 6y ago
  I don't use Google Drive per say, since I run Linux. I primarily use rclone and previously had issues with Dropbox throttling uploads as well. Currently I pay $12 a month and get unlimited storage with G Suite. In addition to all the other G Suite features, Dropbox doesn't offer anything close in terms of price or features.
- ci5er 6y ago
  Insync solves a lot of Google Drive issues (not all! - the fundamental organization (and ability to search - at Google!) is horrible), Box.com is not bad for auditibility and observability, but One Drive keeps trying to suck you in (You think you are out! But you are not!), For the extra buck-or-two per user per month - I just like the fact that it "just works" for most people and little tech support. (Although I do miss the RSS feed on events that they removed that helped me keep track of all of the "stuff" "the people" were doing with "all the files". I'm sure there was a reason - but that was actually the only feature that made me think that they and Box.com might be comparable in that area)
greymalik 6y ago
Google and Apple, to start.
- techntoke 6y ago
  They don't compete though. Google offers 17+GB free with email, office suite, unlimited photos, drive and Voice with a free number for unlimited calling and texting. Dropbox has much stricter bandwidth limits as well. For $9.99 you get all that plus 2TB storage with Google One. Dropbox has a minimum for of 3 users for their business plan, but with 1 user on G Suite for $12/mo I get unlimited storage and all the Goodies I mentioned before.
  - ci5er 6y ago
    I'm learning to believe that there are various sub-sects of the HN crowd. The people who would rather pay $3/month to host a slow-ass VPS, and those where $10/month delta, as long as their work-flow is optimized is a "win". In fact, I think that drives a lot of these "what is better" debates in threads here. Some people go "Google Drive is better, because I get 2TB/month for a flat-fee that bundles the other services" (I do that plan too - I just subscribe to everything - to match the client's work flow. Where it really sucks is that I commercially subscribe to 3 (4?) commercial video conferencing systems). I am not going to choose to save $5 when it stands in the way of me making $100. I find that thinking impoverishing, and time-wasting, and frankly stupid. Even if I have to pay a designer $1000 to remake my slides after the content is settled for a client trying to pay me $15K, so that they can raise $2.5M, I'll gladly pay it! That doesn't seem to be the mindset here? (Or maybe I'm just coming across the people that shill for Vultr over Digital Ocean (or God-forbid - AWS!) - instead of focused on velocity of earnings. Maybe I just come across the wrong posts) But, that's me - and I suspect I am not the majority here.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      I am with you, also feel that HN has kind of turned into Slashdot of the yearly days. On a website that started to discuss business ideas and how to turn them into profitable endeavours, it is a bit surreal that every time someone brings commercial products out, one gets endless posts about free beer alternatives and how such software is doing a disservice to the community.

rmoriz 6y ago

I've admired Drew and the early Dropbox team for getting things done and shipped even when compiled python GUIs was edgy as the initial Rails version of Twitter was. But they shipped and validated the market. Now adding all those fancy and cool tech mentioned in the blog post will increase the complexity by a lot but it's not clear what are the real benefits. Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity? Maybe they have some new products in the pipeline that built upon the new stack. Or they waste their time. We will see.

sanxiyn 6y ago
> Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity? Of course it does. I am not sure why you think it doesn't.
- rmoriz 6y ago
  servers are a commodity and cheap compared to runtime complexity
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    Yes, but it's a lot of servers.
    - rmoriz 6y ago
      How many? 5000 servers? As a public company it should not really matter at that size. Developers are way more expensive.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This attitude gives us ever less eficicent software that endlessly gobbles up resources for no good reason.
alena_bsu 6y ago
With that move it is actually decreasing the complexity and improving manageability and sustainability.
- rmoriz 6y ago
  If you change all tires if a running car, you are increasing complexity and risk. The blog post describes the fallacy/anti-pattern of starting from scratch. It's usually a people problem when people don't want to understand the Source of the current state and also don't want to fix it. A green field looks so much nicer than dirty plumbing. But it's wrong. Another sign of this anti-pattern is the hyper focus on the green field solution and not to think about simpler solutions (better DevOps tooling, hire C++ developers to rewrite slower lua Code etc)
dzonga 6y ago
effect of being vc funded. the engineers hired later on, only care about engineering problems also company nametag & money, not user level problems. you would think, dropbox would be concerned with providing best value for the buck but nah. plenty of other examples fb, google - google software quality sucks for a place that employs 100s of engineers.
- techntoke 6y ago
  There are lot of things they do that I'm not happy with, but it is still very valuable for the price point. No where else can you get unlimited storage that is fast for so cheap, and they are the only cloud provider that doesn't charge egress to those services.

thevagrant 6y ago

I noticed on social media a lot of negativity toward Dropbox and sometimes even on HN. The negative sentiment appears to come from tech circles who feel One Drive offers a better price point or iCloud works great for them, so Dropbox shouldn't exist. Personally, I prefer Dropbox. I found problems with One Drive. Google Drive client was always hit and miss and I could not rely on it. iCloud is not cross platform (afaik). Dropbox has worked where ever I needed it. Dropbox is more expensive but I prefer to have my files in Dropbox (as a separation of concerns) rather than have a single tech company control every aspect of my life. My experience with the 'average Joe' is that Dropbox is easy and it works. Yes, they might save a couple dollars switching to OneDrive but Dropbox still offer a good product. Will Dropbox survive long term? I certainly hope so. I have no affiliation, aside from being a customer.

techntoke 6y ago
I don't use Google Drive per say, since I run Linux. I primarily use rclone and previously had issues with Dropbox throttling uploads as well. Currently I pay $12 a month and get unlimited storage with G Suite. In addition to all the other G Suite features, Dropbox doesn't offer anything close in terms of price or features.
ci5er 6y ago
Insync solves a lot of Google Drive issues (not all! - the fundamental organization (and ability to search - at Google!) is horrible), Box.com is not bad for auditibility and observability, but One Drive keeps trying to suck you in (You think you are out! But you are not!), For the extra buck-or-two per user per month - I just like the fact that it "just works" for most people and little tech support. (Although I do miss the RSS feed on events that they removed that helped me keep track of all of the "stuff" "the people" were doing with "all the files". I'm sure there was a reason - but that was actually the only feature that made me think that they and Box.com might be comparable in that area)

greymalik 6y ago

Google and Apple, to start.

techntoke 6y ago
They don't compete though. Google offers 17+GB free with email, office suite, unlimited photos, drive and Voice with a free number for unlimited calling and texting. Dropbox has much stricter bandwidth limits as well. For $9.99 you get all that plus 2TB storage with Google One. Dropbox has a minimum for of 3 users for their business plan, but with 1 user on G Suite for $12/mo I get unlimited storage and all the Goodies I mentioned before.
- ci5er 6y ago
  I'm learning to believe that there are various sub-sects of the HN crowd. The people who would rather pay $3/month to host a slow-ass VPS, and those where $10/month delta, as long as their work-flow is optimized is a "win". In fact, I think that drives a lot of these "what is better" debates in threads here. Some people go "Google Drive is better, because I get 2TB/month for a flat-fee that bundles the other services" (I do that plan too - I just subscribe to everything - to match the client's work flow. Where it really sucks is that I commercially subscribe to 3 (4?) commercial video conferencing systems). I am not going to choose to save $5 when it stands in the way of me making $100. I find that thinking impoverishing, and time-wasting, and frankly stupid. Even if I have to pay a designer $1000 to remake my slides after the content is settled for a client trying to pay me $15K, so that they can raise $2.5M, I'll gladly pay it! That doesn't seem to be the mindset here? (Or maybe I'm just coming across the people that shill for Vultr over Digital Ocean (or God-forbid - AWS!) - instead of focused on velocity of earnings. Maybe I just come across the wrong posts) But, that's me - and I suspect I am not the majority here.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I am with you, also feel that HN has kind of turned into Slashdot of the yearly days. On a website that started to discuss business ideas and how to turn them into profitable endeavours, it is a bit surreal that every time someone brings commercial products out, one gets endless posts about free beer alternatives and how such software is doing a disservice to the community.