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The opportunity cost is staggering. Not just of the people that do the work, but the cost of focus and top-level priorities over the years it takes to do the wo

The opportunity cost is staggering. Not just of the people that do the work, but the cost of focus and top-level priorities over the years it takes to do the work. Everybody loves to cite DropBox here. The greater arc of DropBox is their product stalled, they lost the enterprise of their market to Box, and they found themselves a commodity in a commodity market. Heck, maybe they'll go back to Amazon if they keep doing things like this: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/ But that's not all. It takes a top-level directive to repatriate an entire SaaS. That's at the cost of other top-level projects. It's wild to me that any company that has significant fuel left in the tank would buy back single-digit COGS percentages instead of investing in product that could add double-digit growth for several years at scale.

redis_mlc 5y ago
> things like this: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/ Yeah but why do they have 34 PB of analytics data?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The only question worth asking right there. It's the story of so many companies. We were doing something incredibly stupid, and in this five-part blog series we describe a slightly different implementation of an equally stupid idea.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    That was my observation as a DBA. The most powerful tools we have are aggregated reports and data retention periods, the same since the 1970s. Running 10 copies of the same report (but each one with slightly different bugs) across 34 PB of data for 10 different departments is absurd, yet here we are. Specifically for Dropbox, they're not a retailer like Safeway with 10,000 products and 100's of locations to crunch product and shipping data for - Dropbox could use a single server for their entire digital products data warehouse. (I operated a data warehouse myself (literally) at Yahoo - 10 servers generating canned web reports for 500 managers. I heard they replaced it with a 1,000 node Hadoop cluster later.)
praseodym 5y ago
This makes me wonder whether 34PB (+1PB per month) of analytics data creates more value than it costs to store and process all of it. I’d think that storing only aggregated information would provide nearly as much business insight to make strategic decisions at a fraction of the cost.
kelp 5y ago
What I know from talking to former Dropbox insiders is Drew really wanted to be running a consumer company. He really resisted a push to SMB and Enterprise, even though, at least to me, that seems like the obviously better business. So not sure if it's so much that the product stalled, but that leadership actively didn't want to move in that direction for too long, then lost the advantage. Instead they spent a bunch of energy on Carousel and Paper. (I don't have any idea how much of their eng team was working on those things)
- mxschumacher 5y ago
  slightly tangential, but Box, a storage company that did take the business route, is about 10% more valuable than it was at its IPO in early 2015. That is pretty bad in comparison to most other public software firms that grow like weeds. Dropbox is worth about 3x Box as of today
- sdljfjafsd 5y ago
  Carousel team was huge. My roommates was at Dropbox and said it was 100+ while he had a handful of engineers supporting him for enterprise features. Mailbox was another consumer investment that was largely a waste. Drew really didn't like enterprise.
deleted 5y ago
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jameshart 5y ago
Dropbox also clearly had a business where what they sold was fundamentally storage and bandwidth. So it makes a lot of difference to their fundamental cost structure how much they are paying for storage and bandwidth. Most businesses who are operating in the cloud are not so directly purchasing a cloud resource, layering a little value on top, and reselling it; most businesses make their money selling something else, and using cloud compute/storage/bandwidth/infrastructure is not a transactional cost. For every gigabyte of storage space dropbox sells, they have to buy a gigabyte of storage from someone. And if you're looking ahead to the future of selling lots more gigabytes, you're quite motivated to find a cheaper way to buy them. So I am never convinced by the argument that because Dropbox left the cloud, that means other businesses should.
- kristianp 5y ago
  Yes, this. Dropbox was essentially a skin over paas. It's the ideal case, and not a convincing example to use.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"buy back single-digit COGS percentages instead of investing in product that could add double-digit growth" Its good that we have people focused on lowering cost and optimisation, thats why people in India can afford a smartphone. On the other hand, hisotry is filled with features and products that never found their niche, from random dropbox features to thousands of products google created and killed

redis_mlc 5y ago

> things like this: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/ Yeah but why do they have 34 PB of analytics data?

jeffbee 5y ago
The only question worth asking right there. It's the story of so many companies. We were doing something incredibly stupid, and in this five-part blog series we describe a slightly different implementation of an equally stupid idea.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  That was my observation as a DBA. The most powerful tools we have are aggregated reports and data retention periods, the same since the 1970s. Running 10 copies of the same report (but each one with slightly different bugs) across 34 PB of data for 10 different departments is absurd, yet here we are. Specifically for Dropbox, they're not a retailer like Safeway with 10,000 products and 100's of locations to crunch product and shipping data for - Dropbox could use a single server for their entire digital products data warehouse. (I operated a data warehouse myself (literally) at Yahoo - 10 servers generating canned web reports for 500 managers. I heard they replaced it with a 1,000 node Hadoop cluster later.)

praseodym 5y ago

This makes me wonder whether 34PB (+1PB per month) of analytics data creates more value than it costs to store and process all of it. I’d think that storing only aggregated information would provide nearly as much business insight to make strategic decisions at a fraction of the cost.

kelp 5y ago

What I know from talking to former Dropbox insiders is Drew really wanted to be running a consumer company. He really resisted a push to SMB and Enterprise, even though, at least to me, that seems like the obviously better business. So not sure if it's so much that the product stalled, but that leadership actively didn't want to move in that direction for too long, then lost the advantage. Instead they spent a bunch of energy on Carousel and Paper. (I don't have any idea how much of their eng team was working on those things)

mxschumacher 5y ago
slightly tangential, but Box, a storage company that did take the business route, is about 10% more valuable than it was at its IPO in early 2015. That is pretty bad in comparison to most other public software firms that grow like weeds. Dropbox is worth about 3x Box as of today
sdljfjafsd 5y ago
Carousel team was huge. My roommates was at Dropbox and said it was 100+ while he had a handful of engineers supporting him for enterprise features. Mailbox was another consumer investment that was largely a waste. Drew really didn't like enterprise.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jameshart 5y ago

Dropbox also clearly had a business where what they sold was fundamentally storage and bandwidth. So it makes a lot of difference to their fundamental cost structure how much they are paying for storage and bandwidth. Most businesses who are operating in the cloud are not so directly purchasing a cloud resource, layering a little value on top, and reselling it; most businesses make their money selling something else, and using cloud compute/storage/bandwidth/infrastructure is not a transactional cost. For every gigabyte of storage space dropbox sells, they have to buy a gigabyte of storage from someone. And if you're looking ahead to the future of selling lots more gigabytes, you're quite motivated to find a cheaper way to buy them. So I am never convinced by the argument that because Dropbox left the cloud, that means other businesses should.

kristianp 5y ago
Yes, this. Dropbox was essentially a skin over paas. It's the ideal case, and not a convincing example to use.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"buy back single-digit COGS percentages instead of investing in product that could add double-digit growth" Its good that we have people focused on lowering cost and optimisation, thats why people in India can afford a smartphone. On the other hand, hisotry is filled with features and products that never found their niche, from random dropbox features to thousands of products google created and killed