8 ms·

Dropbox inventor determined to build the next Apple or Google

104 points by benjlang 15y ago

ryandvm 15y ago
Yeah, me too.
buu700 15y ago
"Drew Houston, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Dropbox, last fall pocketed $250 million from seven of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms." Well, that's quite the accusation.
- dwynings 15y ago
  That's likely worded incorrectly – Dropbox's latest round was that amount but it's unimaginable that Drew took all that money off the table.
mvkel 15y ago
While Dropbox is a great service (I can't imagine life without it!), it's a bit delusional to think it could be the next Google or Apple. As Steve Jobs himself said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a company.
- richcollins 15y ago
  If nearly every service on the Internet uses the Dropbox feature, it will likely be as big as Apple / Google
  - Helianthus 15y ago
    Competition will drive prices down such that even if Dropbox corners the market they won't have the revenue of Apple or Google. I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. In the end, they're selling storage, not their technology. Which is another factor that will drive down their revenues: storage is reliably getting cheaper.
    - brk 15y ago
      They're not selling either. They are selling ease-of-use. Filesharing between multiple PC's you owned along with potentially PC's of colleagues was always difficult and cumbersome. Dropbox pioneered an easy way to make file sharing among machines as simple as dragging files to a pre-defined location on your PC. And even this concept wasn't entirely new, Microsoft's "Briefcase" in Windows95 was basically an early version of this. Dropbox's success is all about the simple execution of a task that impacts millions of PC owners, and removing the difficulty of performing that task. Will filesharing make Dropbox the next Apple or Google? Doubtful. BUT, there are still several pain-in-the-ass little nuances about the multi-device world. IMO, they might look next to the overall interaction and data management among a household of PC/Tablet/Laptop/Smartphone users. One example: I have a set of contacts on my laptop. Call it "Everyone I know", My wife has a similar set of contacts on her PC. Some of these contacts are duplicates (family members), others are unique to each of us (personal friends or business associates). On each of our phones we have a subset of these contacts. I'm not a fan of having an over-filled phone contact list, I want to keep it to the most commonly-contacted people. My iPad has a completely separate contact list that is all disorganized. I'd like an easy way to manage a contact pool among multiple users and devices much like Dropbox manages files. I'd like to be able to edit or update certain info in my company address book, and sync certain contacts to certain devices. Dropbox has a huge opportunity just in making all sorts of information appear and share in just the locations we want it to be, among many other things.
      - toomuchtodo 15y ago
        Everything you described with regards to your contacts lists I've already been doing with Google Contacts (work contacts, shared contacts with wife, etc). My Android phone lets me easily sort and categorize my contacts, and only see what I want to (while keeping all of the data I still may want to get to in the background). Why is this a job for Dropbox again?
    - mutagen 15y ago
      > I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. I'd tend to agree with you but I'm not seeing the competition emerge. Sure, I've got 50GB on Box.net for free but I have to go through their website to get anything done. I've got SpiderOak, who seem quite technically impressive but they're more of an online backup system. I've tried a handful of others (Ge.tt? Amazon, Apple's cloud thing) and they all do what they're designed to do but they seem to miss the brilliant simplicity of Dropbox, that it works like I work, with files and folders. On that point I disagree with you, Dropbox is not selling storage, they're selling an easy way to do something that was hard. Maybe these other companies are not trying to compete, maybe they're looking to differentiate elsewhere. I keep seeing companies and even projects on Github that claim to be competing but seem to miss this essential point, that they're competing with seamlessness, with elegant simplicity, not with an online storage product.
- AdamFernandez 15y ago
  Maybe they should continue to work on being the 'first' instead of the 'next'.
- ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  Technically, search is a feature too. Google seems to be doing alright. I think that was just Steve being steve, and saying whatever would scare the piss outta Dropbox to get them to sell. If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it?
  - adgar 15y ago
    > Technically, search is a feature too. Google seems to be doing alright. That's because they were able to monetize search enormously through ads. How precisely does Dropbox plan to monetize storage to the same extent? > If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it? Strawman. Nobody is saying Dropbox is a bad idea. They are saying it is likely not an idea capable of being an "Apple or Google." Edit: also, a Hacker News reader should be well aware of talent acquisitions.
- gerggerg 15y ago
  What Steve Jobs said is a horrible reason to limit your life.
  - toddmorey 15y ago
    Yeah, it's important to realize he could be both really right on some things and really wrong on others. However, here I think he's right. They play in a space that is so important to the OS vendors' product and strategy. It's hard to imagine sync remaining 3rd party forever.
- mvkel 15y ago
  I love the replies saying, "you can't just take what Jobs said as gospel. THAT SAID, I do agree." You can agree with what I said _and_ make an ancillary point, you know :)
notatoad 15y ago
I don't see much long-term growth for Dropbox in its current state. Right now, they're a stopgap feature. They've been successful so far because they fill a niche, but the niche that they fill is temporary. Old computing is having your files on your computer and accessing them with local applications. New computing is having your files in the cloud and accessing them from applications in the cloud. In a fully cloud-hosted architecture, there is no need for dropbox. Dropbox is a halfway point in getting us into the cloud, and as more and more apps move into the cloud they will become more and more unnecessary.
- 6ren 15y ago
  I was also surprised at their massive funding rounds too. Perhaps there's more room for growth than it seems... Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
- kasrak 15y ago
  I think Dropbox can remain relevant by getting cloud apps to save their files on Dropbox accounts. This actually also helps the end users, whose files won't be locked away by whatever apps they use.
  - sek 15y ago
    How many files will there be in the future? The perfect cloud doesn't know the concept of File, only URL's.
- mrich 15y ago
  At the moment each OS vendor is pushing their own cloud solution (Azure, iCloud, Kindle Amazon cloud storage) Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.
krigath 15y ago
"Dropbox engineers even hacked their way into Apple's file system to make the Dropbox icon appear on users' menu bars, a bold feat that blew away Apple's cloud team and caught the attention of none other than Jobs." I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?
- eurleif 15y ago
  No. Not at all. And it has nothing to do with "hacking Apple's file system". There's an API for it.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - shaggyfrog 15y ago
    Is the API available for all versions of OS X? If not, when the API first appear?
- wallflower 15y ago
  The Finder, not the menu bar. I think it was a pretty impressive hack. Mach Code Injection! (talked about at 15:30) http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how-dropbox-did-it-and-how-python-helped-4896698 http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how... https://github.com/rianhunter/mach_star https://github.com/rianhunter/mach_star
- tednaleid 15y ago
  I wonder if this is a mistake. I thought the hack was not the menu bar but messing with the icons in the finder so they have a status icon on top of the normal file icon (so a checkbox if they're uploaded to the server). That's quite a bit less common than menu bar changes and I think when they first did it, there was not an API for it (not sure if there is now in Lion).
- gigantor 15y ago
  It is quite difficult, as well as painstaking. I can't find the article where Drew Houston was mentioning this, but because the API method wasn't available, they had to use a hex editor and alter the memory location to get the functionality to appear in the finder. And they needed to do this for every version of OS X as the Finder memory address to inject the assembler/C code would be in different locations depending on the version. The process would be similar to writing a crack for software to find the algorithm for the serial key check. Besides Dropbox being a great service, what got Steve Job's attention was the fact that the internal cloud team was impressed on how Dropbox managed to do this, since they themselves couldn't get the OS X team's cooperation for a similar feature. Edit: found the article - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/1 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/...
fourstar 15y ago
He does realize he essentially already won the startup lottery at a relatively young age, right? Good luck...
- feralchimp 15y ago
  Exactly. "I refused to sell to you" != "I am positioned to eat you or become you."
JesseAldridge 15y ago
> "I'm a Windows guy anyway," Houston said with a smile. Really? Drew runs Windows?
- astrodust 15y ago
  Guess he's building the next Google which is the next Microsoft anyway.
andrewhillman 15y ago
I can see dropbox turning into a service that stores and connects you to your whole "environment" so you can access it from any device.
- naner 15y ago
  I remember reading an article a few years ago by (I think) a novelist who envisioned that in the future we'd store our entire computing system online and just switch between devices, always having access to our environment and files. Whether you're on a smart phone, your home computer, or at a terminal in the library, etc. I don't believe dropbox is going to do that, but it is an interesting idea.
  - moocow01 15y ago
    Isn't that what a web application is? Or I suppose taken to even more of an extreme what OnLive is?
    - naner 15y ago
      No. Everything is synced (apps, settings) and there is still native-run code.
  - there 15y ago
    that is pretty much what google is doing with the chromebook. a local terminal with not much state storage, keeping all of the important data in the cloud. they're trying to do the same thing with android (which is why the google nexus phones keep coming out with such small amounts of flash storage). mobile devices are powerful enough and desktops/laptops are cheap enough now that the computation can be done locally, with the data still being stored on a central server. a decade or two ago, the computation was also done on the servers. microsoft did it with windows terminal server, sun did it with the ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray), but the concept was basically like vnc'ing into a central server and having your entire session preserved, no matter where you logged in from. and of course, before graphical desktops were big, unix and dumb terminals did the same thing. you could use a vt100 connected to a modem from anywhere, run 'screen -r' and restore your saved session to access all of your applications, data, and email stored on the server.
teflonhook 15y ago
Dropbox I see as a feature, not as a long term defensible business. Google is well positioned to take them out.. if they can get their act together.
joeybaker 15y ago
The way the Dropbox execs have been talking themselves up in the press over the last few months just makes me think that they're angling to raise the price on an acquisition. Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are: * compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way. * compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.
feralchimp 15y ago
My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell: I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
- azakai 15y ago
  > My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell: > I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar. Have you ever paid Google a dollar?
  - adgar 15y ago
    > Have you ever paid Google a dollar? Are you suggesting that Dropbox is going to hit multi-billions through advertising? To successfully complete your analogy, you need to fill in the gap between "hosting files for free for most of their customers" and multiple billions of dollars.
    - azakai 15y ago
      I am not suggesting exactly that, no. But it is possible to make large amounts of money without being paid by the people using your service, if there is a ridiculously large amount of those people. Google is the best example, that part is true. To be more concrete, there are at least two possible ways for something like Dropbox to make money without users paying Dropbox directly: * Data mine the files hosted for users. Even anonymized data like this can be very valuable for third parties. Edit: or for other separate services inside your own company. * Ads that become an integral part of the Dropbox service, preferably targeted using data mining from the previous point. Are these good ideas? I don't know.
- swombat 15y ago
  I do the same. I have bought one 50GB account for me, one for my partner, and one of my companies have bought a Team account. The plural of anecdote is not data. How many people did you refer to get the free storage you needed? How long do you think it will be before you need more and pony up?
marcamillion 15y ago
>He'd strap on headphones to block out everything but the endorphin rush as he cranked code late into the night on a new service that instantly syncs all of your files on all of your devices. sigh Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?
int3rnaut 15y ago
I know it would be relatively small but can anyone wager a guess as to how much each of the 2gb freemium packages costs Dropbox? At 50 million users it has to add up--I've always wondered about Dropbox's conversion rate (free to pay) but it must be relatively high to support the current monetary system.
- adgar 15y ago
  Keep in mind that they use S3, so they pay for what they use, not what they have committed to their free users. But if they were, then for 50 million free users: 2gb * 50,000,000 = 100PB. That would qualify them for S3's over 5PB pricing of $0.055 per GB-month. So that's $66 million per year just for storage. But again... they're probably actually using far, far less than 100PB on their free customers. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
  - fduran 15y ago
    Dropbox also uses deduplication thus reducing those figures
benjlang 15y ago
I don't really see Dropbox becoming anywhere near as big as Apple or Google. Already a $4B valuation seems like an exaggeration to me.
jinushaun 15y ago
Dropbox needs to pull an "Amazon" and pivot like they did with AWS, and Apple did with the iPod. Storage is not going to take them there. Growth is limited and someone can easily come along and replace them. They need a secondary source of income.
nhangen 15y ago
Was a huge fan of Dropbox until I went out on a limb to convince my boss to move from internal servers to a team account. The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent, and the product is overpriced and relatively shallow at an enterprise level. Still pay for a personal 50gb account, but canceled the team account...well we will as soon as they actually return my call.
- d-roo 15y ago
  > The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent... I couldn't agree more -- I also pay for a 50 gig plan. About a week ago, I had to rebuild one of my machines and somehow my new Dropbox folder (which of course was empty) synced out to the cloud and to the rest of my machines. Suddenly my backup consolidation was completely wiped out. I submitted a support ticket and even now, nearly a week later, it is still unassigned. So, I spent a day undeleting 3500+ files through their web interface. Although quite limited, I will say I was thankful that functionality was there. After being so impressed with Dropbox, their lack of customer support has been a huge disappointment.
samstave 15y ago
I'm late to the thread, but I'd like to share how I use dropbox and share some of my issues. I have been a long time user, and recently I joined a company which is 100% virtual. We are all consultants who work from our homes - but travel regularly to client sites. While we are working from our homes - we collaborate and work on the docs needed for our client visits. Everyone has their own account, and quickly a couple gigs would fill up, due to what i feel is poor logic on dropbox's part, and it is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue. The issue is that we have ~10 people all sharing project folders. But with the free account, this means we get a lot of duplicated consumption. If 3 people have 2GB space, and they each share .5GB with eachother, then that .5GB is taking up .5GB from everyones account. This sucks. Personally, I have a paid 50GB account, and I created a shared public folder. Everyone on my team joined the public folder - which is always 50GB to ME - but to them it consumes THEIR space - and soon their syncing stops because the folder I made is larger than their box. This is retarded, I think that if they visit MY folder, this should not count against THEIR storage - especially when I am paying for it. I do undestand the complexities of this - but then the problem is that the cost to fix this issue is that everyone needs to upgrade their account. I have looked at the team offering, but then that is too expensive. I think what is best - is to have one corporate DB account, and have everyone login with that userID - and pay for the upgraded space for that one account. With this said, based on the current design of dropbox and the fact that it is simply a feature - there is no way this company will be the next Apple, let alone google. Unless Drew is referring to emulating their culture, or maybe brand recognition. certainly he cant be talking about product diversity.... Anyway - I love dropbox, and am happy to pay for it, but as it currently stands, is a half-feature. I dont even know what kind of use-case model for teams such as mine they are looking at. Perhaps I should send them an email.

104 points by benjlang 15y ago

Yeah, me too.

"Drew Houston, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Dropbox, last fall pocketed $250 million from seven of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms." Well, that's quite the accusation.

dwynings 15y ago
That's likely worded incorrectly – Dropbox's latest round was that amount but it's unimaginable that Drew took all that money off the table.

mvkel 15y ago

While Dropbox is a great service (I can't imagine life without it!), it's a bit delusional to think it could be the next Google or Apple. As Steve Jobs himself said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a company.

richcollins 15y ago
If nearly every service on the Internet uses the Dropbox feature, it will likely be as big as Apple / Google
- Helianthus 15y ago
  Competition will drive prices down such that even if Dropbox corners the market they won't have the revenue of Apple or Google. I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. In the end, they're selling storage, not their technology. Which is another factor that will drive down their revenues: storage is reliably getting cheaper.
  - brk 15y ago
    They're not selling either. They are selling ease-of-use. Filesharing between multiple PC's you owned along with potentially PC's of colleagues was always difficult and cumbersome. Dropbox pioneered an easy way to make file sharing among machines as simple as dragging files to a pre-defined location on your PC. And even this concept wasn't entirely new, Microsoft's "Briefcase" in Windows95 was basically an early version of this. Dropbox's success is all about the simple execution of a task that impacts millions of PC owners, and removing the difficulty of performing that task. Will filesharing make Dropbox the next Apple or Google? Doubtful. BUT, there are still several pain-in-the-ass little nuances about the multi-device world. IMO, they might look next to the overall interaction and data management among a household of PC/Tablet/Laptop/Smartphone users. One example: I have a set of contacts on my laptop. Call it "Everyone I know", My wife has a similar set of contacts on her PC. Some of these contacts are duplicates (family members), others are unique to each of us (personal friends or business associates). On each of our phones we have a subset of these contacts. I'm not a fan of having an over-filled phone contact list, I want to keep it to the most commonly-contacted people. My iPad has a completely separate contact list that is all disorganized. I'd like an easy way to manage a contact pool among multiple users and devices much like Dropbox manages files. I'd like to be able to edit or update certain info in my company address book, and sync certain contacts to certain devices. Dropbox has a huge opportunity just in making all sorts of information appear and share in just the locations we want it to be, among many other things.
    - toomuchtodo 15y ago
      Everything you described with regards to your contacts lists I've already been doing with Google Contacts (work contacts, shared contacts with wife, etc). My Android phone lets me easily sort and categorize my contacts, and only see what I want to (while keeping all of the data I still may want to get to in the background). Why is this a job for Dropbox again?
  - mutagen 15y ago
    > I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate. I'd tend to agree with you but I'm not seeing the competition emerge. Sure, I've got 50GB on Box.net for free but I have to go through their website to get anything done. I've got SpiderOak, who seem quite technically impressive but they're more of an online backup system. I've tried a handful of others (Ge.tt? Amazon, Apple's cloud thing) and they all do what they're designed to do but they seem to miss the brilliant simplicity of Dropbox, that it works like I work, with files and folders. On that point I disagree with you, Dropbox is not selling storage, they're selling an easy way to do something that was hard. Maybe these other companies are not trying to compete, maybe they're looking to differentiate elsewhere. I keep seeing companies and even projects on Github that claim to be competing but seem to miss this essential point, that they're competing with seamlessness, with elegant simplicity, not with an online storage product.
AdamFernandez 15y ago
Maybe they should continue to work on being the 'first' instead of the 'next'.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Technically, search is a feature too. Google seems to be doing alright. I think that was just Steve being steve, and saying whatever would scare the piss outta Dropbox to get them to sell. If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it?
- adgar 15y ago
  > Technically, search is a feature too. Google seems to be doing alright. That's because they were able to monetize search enormously through ads. How precisely does Dropbox plan to monetize storage to the same extent? > If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it? Strawman. Nobody is saying Dropbox is a bad idea. They are saying it is likely not an idea capable of being an "Apple or Google." Edit: also, a Hacker News reader should be well aware of talent acquisitions.
gerggerg 15y ago
What Steve Jobs said is a horrible reason to limit your life.
- toddmorey 15y ago
  Yeah, it's important to realize he could be both really right on some things and really wrong on others. However, here I think he's right. They play in a space that is so important to the OS vendors' product and strategy. It's hard to imagine sync remaining 3rd party forever.
mvkel 15y ago
I love the replies saying, "you can't just take what Jobs said as gospel. THAT SAID, I do agree." You can agree with what I said _and_ make an ancillary point, you know :)

notatoad 15y ago

I don't see much long-term growth for Dropbox in its current state. Right now, they're a stopgap feature. They've been successful so far because they fill a niche, but the niche that they fill is temporary. Old computing is having your files on your computer and accessing them with local applications. New computing is having your files in the cloud and accessing them from applications in the cloud. In a fully cloud-hosted architecture, there is no need for dropbox. Dropbox is a halfway point in getting us into the cloud, and as more and more apps move into the cloud they will become more and more unnecessary.

6ren 15y ago
I was also surprised at their massive funding rounds too. Perhaps there's more room for growth than it seems... Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
kasrak 15y ago
I think Dropbox can remain relevant by getting cloud apps to save their files on Dropbox accounts. This actually also helps the end users, whose files won't be locked away by whatever apps they use.
- sek 15y ago
  How many files will there be in the future? The perfect cloud doesn't know the concept of File, only URL's.
mrich 15y ago
At the moment each OS vendor is pushing their own cloud solution (Azure, iCloud, Kindle Amazon cloud storage) Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.

krigath 15y ago

"Dropbox engineers even hacked their way into Apple's file system to make the Dropbox icon appear on users' menu bars, a bold feat that blew away Apple's cloud team and caught the attention of none other than Jobs." I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?

eurleif 15y ago
No. Not at all. And it has nothing to do with "hacking Apple's file system". There's an API for it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- shaggyfrog 15y ago
  Is the API available for all versions of OS X? If not, when the API first appear?
wallflower 15y ago
The Finder, not the menu bar. I think it was a pretty impressive hack. Mach Code Injection! (talked about at 15:30) http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how-dropbox-did-it-and-how-python-helped-4896698 http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how... https://github.com/rianhunter/mach_star https://github.com/rianhunter/mach_star
tednaleid 15y ago
I wonder if this is a mistake. I thought the hack was not the menu bar but messing with the icons in the finder so they have a status icon on top of the normal file icon (so a checkbox if they're uploaded to the server). That's quite a bit less common than menu bar changes and I think when they first did it, there was not an API for it (not sure if there is now in Lion).
gigantor 15y ago
It is quite difficult, as well as painstaking. I can't find the article where Drew Houston was mentioning this, but because the API method wasn't available, they had to use a hex editor and alter the memory location to get the functionality to appear in the finder. And they needed to do this for every version of OS X as the Finder memory address to inject the assembler/C code would be in different locations depending on the version. The process would be similar to writing a crack for software to find the algorithm for the serial key check. Besides Dropbox being a great service, what got Steve Job's attention was the fact that the internal cloud team was impressed on how Dropbox managed to do this, since they themselves couldn't get the OS X team's cooperation for a similar feature. Edit: found the article - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/1 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/...

fourstar 15y ago

He does realize he essentially already won the startup lottery at a relatively young age, right? Good luck...

feralchimp 15y ago
Exactly. "I refused to sell to you" != "I am positioned to eat you or become you."

JesseAldridge 15y ago

> "I'm a Windows guy anyway," Houston said with a smile. Really? Drew runs Windows?

astrodust 15y ago
Guess he's building the next Google which is the next Microsoft anyway.

andrewhillman 15y ago

I can see dropbox turning into a service that stores and connects you to your whole "environment" so you can access it from any device.

naner 15y ago
I remember reading an article a few years ago by (I think) a novelist who envisioned that in the future we'd store our entire computing system online and just switch between devices, always having access to our environment and files. Whether you're on a smart phone, your home computer, or at a terminal in the library, etc. I don't believe dropbox is going to do that, but it is an interesting idea.
- moocow01 15y ago
  Isn't that what a web application is? Or I suppose taken to even more of an extreme what OnLive is?
  - naner 15y ago
    No. Everything is synced (apps, settings) and there is still native-run code.
- there 15y ago
  that is pretty much what google is doing with the chromebook. a local terminal with not much state storage, keeping all of the important data in the cloud. they're trying to do the same thing with android (which is why the google nexus phones keep coming out with such small amounts of flash storage). mobile devices are powerful enough and desktops/laptops are cheap enough now that the computation can be done locally, with the data still being stored on a central server. a decade or two ago, the computation was also done on the servers. microsoft did it with windows terminal server, sun did it with the ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray), but the concept was basically like vnc'ing into a central server and having your entire session preserved, no matter where you logged in from. and of course, before graphical desktops were big, unix and dumb terminals did the same thing. you could use a vt100 connected to a modem from anywhere, run 'screen -r' and restore your saved session to access all of your applications, data, and email stored on the server.

teflonhook 15y ago

Dropbox I see as a feature, not as a long term defensible business. Google is well positioned to take them out.. if they can get their act together.

joeybaker 15y ago

The way the Dropbox execs have been talking themselves up in the press over the last few months just makes me think that they're angling to raise the price on an acquisition. Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are: * compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way. * compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.

feralchimp 15y ago

My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell: I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.

azakai 15y ago
> My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell: > I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar. Have you ever paid Google a dollar?
- adgar 15y ago
  > Have you ever paid Google a dollar? Are you suggesting that Dropbox is going to hit multi-billions through advertising? To successfully complete your analogy, you need to fill in the gap between "hosting files for free for most of their customers" and multiple billions of dollars.
  - azakai 15y ago
    I am not suggesting exactly that, no. But it is possible to make large amounts of money without being paid by the people using your service, if there is a ridiculously large amount of those people. Google is the best example, that part is true. To be more concrete, there are at least two possible ways for something like Dropbox to make money without users paying Dropbox directly: * Data mine the files hosted for users. Even anonymized data like this can be very valuable for third parties. Edit: or for other separate services inside your own company. * Ads that become an integral part of the Dropbox service, preferably targeted using data mining from the previous point. Are these good ideas? I don't know.
swombat 15y ago
I do the same. I have bought one 50GB account for me, one for my partner, and one of my companies have bought a Team account. The plural of anecdote is not data. How many people did you refer to get the free storage you needed? How long do you think it will be before you need more and pony up?

marcamillion 15y ago

>He'd strap on headphones to block out everything but the endorphin rush as he cranked code late into the night on a new service that instantly syncs all of your files on all of your devices. sigh Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?

int3rnaut 15y ago

I know it would be relatively small but can anyone wager a guess as to how much each of the 2gb freemium packages costs Dropbox? At 50 million users it has to add up--I've always wondered about Dropbox's conversion rate (free to pay) but it must be relatively high to support the current monetary system.

adgar 15y ago
Keep in mind that they use S3, so they pay for what they use, not what they have committed to their free users. But if they were, then for 50 million free users: 2gb * 50,000,000 = 100PB. That would qualify them for S3's over 5PB pricing of $0.055 per GB-month. So that's $66 million per year just for storage. But again... they're probably actually using far, far less than 100PB on their free customers. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- fduran 15y ago
  Dropbox also uses deduplication thus reducing those figures

benjlang 15y ago

I don't really see Dropbox becoming anywhere near as big as Apple or Google. Already a $4B valuation seems like an exaggeration to me.

jinushaun 15y ago

Dropbox needs to pull an "Amazon" and pivot like they did with AWS, and Apple did with the iPod. Storage is not going to take them there. Growth is limited and someone can easily come along and replace them. They need a secondary source of income.

nhangen 15y ago

Was a huge fan of Dropbox until I went out on a limb to convince my boss to move from internal servers to a team account. The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent, and the product is overpriced and relatively shallow at an enterprise level. Still pay for a personal 50gb account, but canceled the team account...well we will as soon as they actually return my call.

d-roo 15y ago
> The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent... I couldn't agree more -- I also pay for a 50 gig plan. About a week ago, I had to rebuild one of my machines and somehow my new Dropbox folder (which of course was empty) synced out to the cloud and to the rest of my machines. Suddenly my backup consolidation was completely wiped out. I submitted a support ticket and even now, nearly a week later, it is still unassigned. So, I spent a day undeleting 3500+ files through their web interface. Although quite limited, I will say I was thankful that functionality was there. After being so impressed with Dropbox, their lack of customer support has been a huge disappointment.

samstave 15y ago

I'm late to the thread, but I'd like to share how I use dropbox and share some of my issues. I have been a long time user, and recently I joined a company which is 100% virtual. We are all consultants who work from our homes - but travel regularly to client sites. While we are working from our homes - we collaborate and work on the docs needed for our client visits. Everyone has their own account, and quickly a couple gigs would fill up, due to what i feel is poor logic on dropbox's part, and it is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue. The issue is that we have ~10 people all sharing project folders. But with the free account, this means we get a lot of duplicated consumption. If 3 people have 2GB space, and they each share .5GB with eachother, then that .5GB is taking up .5GB from everyones account. This sucks. Personally, I have a paid 50GB account, and I created a shared public folder. Everyone on my team joined the public folder - which is always 50GB to ME - but to them it consumes THEIR space - and soon their syncing stops because the folder I made is larger than their box. This is retarded, I think that if they visit MY folder, this should not count against THEIR storage - especially when I am paying for it. I do undestand the complexities of this - but then the problem is that the cost to fix this issue is that everyone needs to upgrade their account. I have looked at the team offering, but then that is too expensive. I think what is best - is to have one corporate DB account, and have everyone login with that userID - and pay for the upgraded space for that one account. With this said, based on the current design of dropbox and the fact that it is simply a feature - there is no way this company will be the next Apple, let alone google. Unless Drew is referring to emulating their culture, or maybe brand recognition. certainly he cant be talking about product diversity.... Anyway - I love dropbox, and am happy to pay for it, but as it currently stands, is a half-feature. I dont even know what kind of use-case model for teams such as mine they are looking at. Perhaps I should send them an email.