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Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion

66 points by AhtiK 13y ago

driverdan 13y ago
Why? Because they can get it at a favorable valuation?
- leokun 13y ago
  Yeah, it's like leaving money on the table I suppose.
shin_lao 13y ago
That's a lot of money! Do they seek it because they can or because they need it?
ghshephard 13y ago
"Dropbox, which is increasingly competing with Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," This implicitly (if not explicitly) reverses the actuality, which is really: "Dropbox, which is increasingly facing competition from Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," They do a better job later on with, "Those features come at a time large rivals like Microsoft and Amazon Inc are muscling into cloud-storage, a strategic weapon in an era of widespread mobile computing."
- execat 13y ago
  "zOMG. You guys are going head on against the giants? Wow. So cool." They are probably looking at that reaction from the people who don't know the rough timeline when Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft's own service and Box started.
  - judk 13y ago
    Steven Levy wrote about how Google Drive was built long before Dropbox, but was held back from launch due to internal political maneuvering about whether desktop files are welcome in the "cloud" world. But yeah, Dropbox went on market first with abfully supported any-filetype local client sync, not just Office docs and photos and cloud-only videos.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  I have a few friends who work at Box, that company seems much better at extracting revenue from its product via concentrating on the business rather than consumer space.
  - seivan 13y ago
    Their product isn't as good, but I bet they have some amazing sales people. Like most 'enterprise' stuff.
    - nlh 13y ago
      Depends what your definition of "good" is -- my company is about to switch to Box from Dropbox. Once you get to a certain size and have a certain type of user (non-power-users), Box is MUCH better for maintaining some organizational structure / permissions.
      - seivan 13y ago
        Is the overhead of having to maintain 'organizational structure / permissions.' worth it? Is your head count > 100?
        nlh 13y ago
        No, about 20 active users. I personally LOVE Dropbox -- love it. Great tech, great company, great people. But it's ideal for a very specific type of use case -- exactly what they've always wanted to be: A dead-simple shared, well, dropbox that just works. And it does. But we've moved past that. A few months ago one of our sales guys was frustrated that his Macbook was out of hard drive space, so he went through and deleted everything that he didn't recognize. That included most of the shared Dropbox :) We didn't realize until a few days later when people started sending emails along the lines of "hey, where did ___ file go?" We sorted it out, but it cost us time, time, time. Yes, I know it's easy to say "Well that was dumb of him - he should understand how Dropbox works", but one thing you learn about a growing company - particularly a non-tech one - is that not everyone "gets it" the way we geeks do, and at some point you have to stop blaming them and instead adapt to them. Take that story and add another 200 iterations of it and you can see why sometimes, you need some structure and permissions and fine-grained control on a per-folder basis, and Dropbox doesn't have it yet while Box does.
- jonathansizz 13y ago
  Since you're nitpicking, I'll just point out that both formulations actually have the same meaning. There's nothing (not even an implication) in the first quoted sentence that suggests that Dropbox is younger than its competitors. 'Competing with' and 'facing competition from' are exact equivalents.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    I read "facing competition from" as being the incumbent and getting a challenge. And "Competing with" all are on equal basis.
    - codex 13y ago
      Do you have any numbers to suggest that Dropbox usage is higher than Google or Microsoft or iCloud?
      - venomsnake 13y ago
        No ... I was just commenting on the linguistic part whether the two phrases mean the same. I moderately don't give a frak about the services due to my irrational, passionate and relentless hatred for everything cloud related. (I love the underlying technologies, I just hate the feudal model of a foreign service holding your data hostage)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ultramundane828 13y ago
    This irks me because of the absolutism in the writing voice. But I'm sure you'd say there is no absolutism present (not even an implication). Let's leave the linguistic criticisms on this one to Frege and Russell please. I can interpret the phrasing in both your terms and in the previous commenter's terms quite easily.
shocks 13y ago
Every time I see Dropbox on the front page of HN I think about this[1] all over again… 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  That thread is hilarious, especially the first reply.
  - jbrooksuk 13y ago
    I wonder how the people who replied to that thread feel now?
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
      I have seen "I was wrong then" posts over time.
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      I remember seeing that "4chan on HN" thread a few days back and they were ripping apart this Dropbox post.
  - amit_m 13y ago
    What is so funny about it? I think the first reply is spot on. In fact, one of the best things about Dropbox is that they worked very hard on removing any barriers, including making sure that it can be installed on a windows machine without requiring administrator privileges. I am confident that a large percentage of their users would have been unable to use Dropbox had this issue not been addressed.
- dcarmo 13y ago
  "The only problem is that you have to install something."
  - twic 13y ago
NLPsajeeth 13y ago
"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million." http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303985504579206763922615986-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwOTExNDkyWj http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...
- chii 13y ago
  i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it. What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?
  - gabemart 13y ago
    Most of the less-technical people I know who use it use it as a backup. The free tier can restore deleted files within a certain time period (30 days?). If you put your default file locations (My Documents or similar) inside dropbox, it works pretty well as a set-and-forget backup.
  - josephagoss 13y ago
    I use it so my laptop and desktop share the same files. I can code on my laptop and once I get home I have my desktop ready to continue.
  - leoedin 13y ago
    It was exceptionally useful as a student when I was frequently using lots of computers. As a sort of USB stick in the cloud (with added shared-folders) it was brilliant. The sync, versioning and useful web interface "just work". I can completely see that if you're a small team and are faced with the problem of shared folders, dropbox would be a good solution. It's not too expensive and a lot easier than setting up reliable and secure self-hosted file storage.
  - aryastark 13y ago
    I use it to collaborate with a fairly non-technical person, where it's marginally easier to use than email. That's it. I'm actually rather horrified at the people using it for backup and git. These are stupendously bad ideas. Proper collaboration with multiple parties also dictates that some form of locking is required. Something more advanced than yelling "I got it!"
brador 13y ago
The problem I see is dropbox as a service becoming a commodity as competition in the sector ramps up. Apple is making a big push on cloud with airdrop and icloud, Tencent is offering 10tb storage. It's heating up and it's gonna be hard to maintain a viable USP.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. There are huge network effects because of folder sharing. I've gotten at least a dozen people to sign up for Dropbox over the years this way. It was tough at first, but the adoption rate is sufficiently high now that in a group of 5, there may be only one person who hasn't got an account already. And when they're the odd one out, the peer pressure to sign up is so great that it forces even the latest of late adopters to give in. Apple is irrelevant because they're not cross platform, and no one will trust their data to a Chinese company, particularly the businesses that actually pay for Dropbox.
  - franstereo 13y ago
    I agree there are big network effects to sharing folders and that is a big push to sign up. Paying is a different story however. If you are a casual non-business user, sharing photos or the occasional document (e.g., Grandparent use case) then even the annoying space restrictions won't move you to pay.
- netcan 13y ago
  IMO the underlying assumption of Dropbox's competitiveness is that it is not a commodity. 1GB with the right user experience is worth more than more with a worse UX. Commodity would imply that it's all about price per gb. So far, I think that assumption has been right.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    But how hard is it to tell an engineering team to just copy Dropbox? And then offer a lower price point or better OS integration?
kriro 13y ago
Seems a bit like setting an anchor for a buyout. I have a feeling a 4 billion offer by Google/MS/Amazon would be accepted very quickly even if it was very little cash/all stock. Maybe my sense is very wrong but it seems like a decent time to get bought out timing wise.
- AhtiK 13y ago
  IPO
- rubberband 13y ago
  Google or Microsoft won't buy them. They're hedging their bet that this technology will be a commodity soon (Google Drive and SkyDrive). It doesn't really fit in Amazon's universe. They already told Apple to screw (albeit only at 800M). I think that Drew is a True Believer, where he thinks there is tremendous growth potential in this space. And hell, anything's possible. Who would have thought that such a simple idea, done extremely well, would have such potential.
  - objclxt 13y ago
    > It doesn't really fit in Amazon's universe. Surely Dropbox must be one of AWS's biggest clients? It may not make sense for Amazon to buy them, but the more money Dropbox makes the more money Amazon make (at least whilst Dropbox are still using S3).
  - will_work4tears 13y ago
    Not sure if you are aware of it, but Amazon has a share in this space too, Amazon Cloud Drive[1] [1]- http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def/186-4662895-8664732?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0&docId=1000828861 http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def/186-4662895...
    - rubberband 13y ago
      Aah you're correct; I had forgotten about that. I suppose syncing all someone's Amazon-related files makes sense in a way. Kindle, MP3 purchases, etc. I may be wrong, but I don't think Dropbox has a technology which is Earth-shatteringly better than than its competitors, although I agree it is the best in the space. And heck, if Amazon bought them, they'd lose all that sweet sweet revenue from Dropbox ^_^.
hemancuso 13y ago
I'm curious to know what the plans are to keep driving revenue. Obviously very impressive numbers, but it looks like YoY top line growth looks slow: less than 100% [$116->$200M+]. It leaves one scratching their head as to how Dropbox gets to something like $1B/year under its current business model and later justify something like a 20B public market cap. That would take a something billion users with roughly the same conversion rate. They would need the same base of users as Facebook, but with a huge percentage of them actually paying money, while facing intense competition by players who demonstrate they are willing to lose billions of dollars a year to compete in new markets. One obvious answer is Dropbox for businesses, but it remains to be seen how well they actually compete in that space. Fined tunes permissions/controls. Integrations. Enterprisey things. They all become more necessary at higher price points. I wonder if Box is in a position to improve their existing sync client faster than Dropbox is to add all those features/controls yet keep their core simplicity.
- slouch 13y ago
  I haven't started paying, yet. Last year, I bought an HTC phone that gave me a bunch of space (20 gigs?) free for two years. I have 27.5gb and I am using 5.75 of it today. My account will either drop back down to 7.5 or I'll start paying to keep it. At my current rate of usage, I'll certainly be using some of the free space by then.
jwr 13y ago
Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%? I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.
- Altaer 13y ago
  While CPU and battery improvements are always nice, I personally love the added features such as photo syncing. I take a photo on my phone anywhere and it automatically uploads it to my Dropbox in the background so I can view them on my computer when I get home. It's probably one of my favorite features of Dropbox and I hope to see more of this kind of thing in the future. Not to say that other aspects don't need improvement, but I think features like this add a lot of value to the product.
- tlogan 13y ago
  Yes. Dropbox can easily win against SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, and others by just not screwing up their solution and making it more robust. Each time I see Dropbox sick page or I have to delete my "~/.dropbox", I think about how focus and doing things right is so important when it comes to storage / data.
- krrrh 13y ago
  The dropbox client only uses a fraction of the CPU of every other cloud syncing client I've tried, and even most simple menubar utilities. Do you know of one that uses less CPU? I'm genuinely curious.
  - Nimi 13y ago
    It didn't need those amounts of resources when Dropbox first started... What changed? Now it's literally causing Windows Explorer to be stuck on folder renames etc, I'm dying to get off the bandwagon the first opportunity I get. This isn't a good way to compete in a crowded market - hope the competition is just as bad.
  - shin_lao 13y ago
julesie 13y ago
During the Dublin Web Summit (two weeks ago) Drew Heuston stated that Dropbox hadn't touched the previous funds they had raised. I wonder why the need to raise the money at this point?
- venomsnake 13y ago
  A) Some real expansion B) You generate insane amounts of free marketing and get a check at the end.
uptown 13y ago
Recently, more of my software has added Dropbox as an option for synchronizing its data between devices - but I'm hesitant to do so. It seems like Dropbox lacks the necessary access-control granularity. If your FTP client, and a chat program, and a password manager all decide they need read/write access to your dropbox, doesn't that open up attack-vectors across completely unrelated applications and services in ways that previously may have been isolated and sandboxed?
adamio 13y ago
You can value it at $8 billion, but that doesn't rule out that someone just overpaid for it. They did get a great deal on advertising

66 points by AhtiK 13y ago

driverdan 13y ago

Why? Because they can get it at a favorable valuation?

leokun 13y ago
Yeah, it's like leaving money on the table I suppose.

shin_lao 13y ago

That's a lot of money! Do they seek it because they can or because they need it?

ghshephard 13y ago

"Dropbox, which is increasingly competing with Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," This implicitly (if not explicitly) reverses the actuality, which is really: "Dropbox, which is increasingly facing competition from Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," They do a better job later on with, "Those features come at a time large rivals like Microsoft and Amazon Inc are muscling into cloud-storage, a strategic weapon in an era of widespread mobile computing."

execat 13y ago
"zOMG. You guys are going head on against the giants? Wow. So cool." They are probably looking at that reaction from the people who don't know the rough timeline when Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft's own service and Box started.
- judk 13y ago
  Steven Levy wrote about how Google Drive was built long before Dropbox, but was held back from launch due to internal political maneuvering about whether desktop files are welcome in the "cloud" world. But yeah, Dropbox went on market first with abfully supported any-filetype local client sync, not just Office docs and photos and cloud-only videos.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I have a few friends who work at Box, that company seems much better at extracting revenue from its product via concentrating on the business rather than consumer space.
- seivan 13y ago
  Their product isn't as good, but I bet they have some amazing sales people. Like most 'enterprise' stuff.
  - nlh 13y ago
    Depends what your definition of "good" is -- my company is about to switch to Box from Dropbox. Once you get to a certain size and have a certain type of user (non-power-users), Box is MUCH better for maintaining some organizational structure / permissions.
    - seivan 13y ago
      Is the overhead of having to maintain 'organizational structure / permissions.' worth it? Is your head count > 100?
      - nlh 13y ago
        No, about 20 active users. I personally LOVE Dropbox -- love it. Great tech, great company, great people. But it's ideal for a very specific type of use case -- exactly what they've always wanted to be: A dead-simple shared, well, dropbox that just works. And it does. But we've moved past that. A few months ago one of our sales guys was frustrated that his Macbook was out of hard drive space, so he went through and deleted everything that he didn't recognize. That included most of the shared Dropbox :) We didn't realize until a few days later when people started sending emails along the lines of "hey, where did ___ file go?" We sorted it out, but it cost us time, time, time. Yes, I know it's easy to say "Well that was dumb of him - he should understand how Dropbox works", but one thing you learn about a growing company - particularly a non-tech one - is that not everyone "gets it" the way we geeks do, and at some point you have to stop blaming them and instead adapt to them. Take that story and add another 200 iterations of it and you can see why sometimes, you need some structure and permissions and fine-grained control on a per-folder basis, and Dropbox doesn't have it yet while Box does.
jonathansizz 13y ago
Since you're nitpicking, I'll just point out that both formulations actually have the same meaning. There's nothing (not even an implication) in the first quoted sentence that suggests that Dropbox is younger than its competitors. 'Competing with' and 'facing competition from' are exact equivalents.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  I read "facing competition from" as being the incumbent and getting a challenge. And "Competing with" all are on equal basis.
  - codex 13y ago
    Do you have any numbers to suggest that Dropbox usage is higher than Google or Microsoft or iCloud?
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      No ... I was just commenting on the linguistic part whether the two phrases mean the same. I moderately don't give a frak about the services due to my irrational, passionate and relentless hatred for everything cloud related. (I love the underlying technologies, I just hate the feudal model of a foreign service holding your data hostage)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ultramundane828 13y ago
  This irks me because of the absolutism in the writing voice. But I'm sure you'd say there is no absolutism present (not even an implication). Let's leave the linguistic criticisms on this one to Frege and Russell please. I can interpret the phrasing in both your terms and in the previous commenter's terms quite easily.

shocks 13y ago

Every time I see Dropbox on the front page of HN I think about this[1] all over again… 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

rfnslyr 13y ago
That thread is hilarious, especially the first reply.
- jbrooksuk 13y ago
  I wonder how the people who replied to that thread feel now?
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    I have seen "I was wrong then" posts over time.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    I remember seeing that "4chan on HN" thread a few days back and they were ripping apart this Dropbox post.
- amit_m 13y ago
  What is so funny about it? I think the first reply is spot on. In fact, one of the best things about Dropbox is that they worked very hard on removing any barriers, including making sure that it can be installed on a windows machine without requiring administrator privileges. I am confident that a large percentage of their users would have been unable to use Dropbox had this issue not been addressed.
dcarmo 13y ago
"The only problem is that you have to install something."
- twic 13y ago

NLPsajeeth 13y ago

"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million." http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303985504579206763922615986-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwOTExNDkyWj http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...

chii 13y ago
i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it. What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?
- gabemart 13y ago
  Most of the less-technical people I know who use it use it as a backup. The free tier can restore deleted files within a certain time period (30 days?). If you put your default file locations (My Documents or similar) inside dropbox, it works pretty well as a set-and-forget backup.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  I use it so my laptop and desktop share the same files. I can code on my laptop and once I get home I have my desktop ready to continue.
- leoedin 13y ago
  It was exceptionally useful as a student when I was frequently using lots of computers. As a sort of USB stick in the cloud (with added shared-folders) it was brilliant. The sync, versioning and useful web interface "just work". I can completely see that if you're a small team and are faced with the problem of shared folders, dropbox would be a good solution. It's not too expensive and a lot easier than setting up reliable and secure self-hosted file storage.
- aryastark 13y ago
  I use it to collaborate with a fairly non-technical person, where it's marginally easier to use than email. That's it. I'm actually rather horrified at the people using it for backup and git. These are stupendously bad ideas. Proper collaboration with multiple parties also dictates that some form of locking is required. Something more advanced than yelling "I got it!"

brador 13y ago

The problem I see is dropbox as a service becoming a commodity as competition in the sector ramps up. Apple is making a big push on cloud with airdrop and icloud, Tencent is offering 10tb storage. It's heating up and it's gonna be hard to maintain a viable USP.

w1ntermute 13y ago
I don't think this is true at all. There are huge network effects because of folder sharing. I've gotten at least a dozen people to sign up for Dropbox over the years this way. It was tough at first, but the adoption rate is sufficiently high now that in a group of 5, there may be only one person who hasn't got an account already. And when they're the odd one out, the peer pressure to sign up is so great that it forces even the latest of late adopters to give in. Apple is irrelevant because they're not cross platform, and no one will trust their data to a Chinese company, particularly the businesses that actually pay for Dropbox.
- franstereo 13y ago
  I agree there are big network effects to sharing folders and that is a big push to sign up. Paying is a different story however. If you are a casual non-business user, sharing photos or the occasional document (e.g., Grandparent use case) then even the annoying space restrictions won't move you to pay.
netcan 13y ago
IMO the underlying assumption of Dropbox's competitiveness is that it is not a commodity. 1GB with the right user experience is worth more than more with a worse UX. Commodity would imply that it's all about price per gb. So far, I think that assumption has been right.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  But how hard is it to tell an engineering team to just copy Dropbox? And then offer a lower price point or better OS integration?

kriro 13y ago

Seems a bit like setting an anchor for a buyout. I have a feeling a 4 billion offer by Google/MS/Amazon would be accepted very quickly even if it was very little cash/all stock. Maybe my sense is very wrong but it seems like a decent time to get bought out timing wise.

AhtiK 13y ago
IPO
rubberband 13y ago
Google or Microsoft won't buy them. They're hedging their bet that this technology will be a commodity soon (Google Drive and SkyDrive). It doesn't really fit in Amazon's universe. They already told Apple to screw (albeit only at 800M). I think that Drew is a True Believer, where he thinks there is tremendous growth potential in this space. And hell, anything's possible. Who would have thought that such a simple idea, done extremely well, would have such potential.
- objclxt 13y ago
  > It doesn't really fit in Amazon's universe. Surely Dropbox must be one of AWS's biggest clients? It may not make sense for Amazon to buy them, but the more money Dropbox makes the more money Amazon make (at least whilst Dropbox are still using S3).
- will_work4tears 13y ago
  Not sure if you are aware of it, but Amazon has a share in this space too, Amazon Cloud Drive[1] [1]- http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def/186-4662895-8664732?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0&docId=1000828861 http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cd_def/186-4662895...
  - rubberband 13y ago
    Aah you're correct; I had forgotten about that. I suppose syncing all someone's Amazon-related files makes sense in a way. Kindle, MP3 purchases, etc. I may be wrong, but I don't think Dropbox has a technology which is Earth-shatteringly better than than its competitors, although I agree it is the best in the space. And heck, if Amazon bought them, they'd lose all that sweet sweet revenue from Dropbox ^_^.

hemancuso 13y ago

I'm curious to know what the plans are to keep driving revenue. Obviously very impressive numbers, but it looks like YoY top line growth looks slow: less than 100% [$116->$200M+]. It leaves one scratching their head as to how Dropbox gets to something like $1B/year under its current business model and later justify something like a 20B public market cap. That would take a something billion users with roughly the same conversion rate. They would need the same base of users as Facebook, but with a huge percentage of them actually paying money, while facing intense competition by players who demonstrate they are willing to lose billions of dollars a year to compete in new markets. One obvious answer is Dropbox for businesses, but it remains to be seen how well they actually compete in that space. Fined tunes permissions/controls. Integrations. Enterprisey things. They all become more necessary at higher price points. I wonder if Box is in a position to improve their existing sync client faster than Dropbox is to add all those features/controls yet keep their core simplicity.

slouch 13y ago
I haven't started paying, yet. Last year, I bought an HTC phone that gave me a bunch of space (20 gigs?) free for two years. I have 27.5gb and I am using 5.75 of it today. My account will either drop back down to 7.5 or I'll start paying to keep it. At my current rate of usage, I'll certainly be using some of the free space by then.

jwr 13y ago

Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%? I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.

Altaer 13y ago
While CPU and battery improvements are always nice, I personally love the added features such as photo syncing. I take a photo on my phone anywhere and it automatically uploads it to my Dropbox in the background so I can view them on my computer when I get home. It's probably one of my favorite features of Dropbox and I hope to see more of this kind of thing in the future. Not to say that other aspects don't need improvement, but I think features like this add a lot of value to the product.
tlogan 13y ago
Yes. Dropbox can easily win against SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, and others by just not screwing up their solution and making it more robust. Each time I see Dropbox sick page or I have to delete my "~/.dropbox", I think about how focus and doing things right is so important when it comes to storage / data.
krrrh 13y ago
The dropbox client only uses a fraction of the CPU of every other cloud syncing client I've tried, and even most simple menubar utilities. Do you know of one that uses less CPU? I'm genuinely curious.
- Nimi 13y ago
  It didn't need those amounts of resources when Dropbox first started... What changed? Now it's literally causing Windows Explorer to be stuck on folder renames etc, I'm dying to get off the bandwagon the first opportunity I get. This isn't a good way to compete in a crowded market - hope the competition is just as bad.
- shin_lao 13y ago

julesie 13y ago

During the Dublin Web Summit (two weeks ago) Drew Heuston stated that Dropbox hadn't touched the previous funds they had raised. I wonder why the need to raise the money at this point?

venomsnake 13y ago
A) Some real expansion B) You generate insane amounts of free marketing and get a check at the end.

uptown 13y ago

Recently, more of my software has added Dropbox as an option for synchronizing its data between devices - but I'm hesitant to do so. It seems like Dropbox lacks the necessary access-control granularity. If your FTP client, and a chat program, and a password manager all decide they need read/write access to your dropbox, doesn't that open up attack-vectors across completely unrelated applications and services in ways that previously may have been isolated and sandboxed?

adamio 13y ago

You can value it at $8 billion, but that doesn't rule out that someone just overpaid for it. They did get a great deal on advertising