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Their product isn't as good, but I bet they have some amazing sales people. Like most 'enterprise' stuff.

by seivan 13y ago

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.
objclxt 13y ago
I would say their branding isn't as good, and for personal use Dropbox is a lot easier to get started with. However, Box has far more functionality than Dropbox, with an emphasis on corporate (I use Dropbox personally, I used to use Box at a previous employer).
rbritton 13y ago
The Dropbox SDK is MUCH better and more mature than the Box SDK. Dropbox bases its interactions on the paths of files/folders while Box bases it on the unique ID of the item. Converting a path to an ID in box is a very expensive operation that requires you to recursively list the root and then each ancestor folder up to the item. As another example, the Box authentication view controller on iOS has no real support for a cancel button. The web page displayed by it includes it's own faux toolbar at the top, which interferes visually with providing your own.

Their product isn't as good, but I bet they have some amazing sales people. Like most 'enterprise' stuff.

by 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.

objclxt 13y ago

I would say their branding isn't as good, and for personal use Dropbox is a lot easier to get started with. However, Box has far more functionality than Dropbox, with an emphasis on corporate (I use Dropbox personally, I used to use Box at a previous employer).

rbritton 13y ago

The Dropbox SDK is MUCH better and more mature than the Box SDK. Dropbox bases its interactions on the paths of files/folders while Box bases it on the unique ID of the item. Converting a path to an ID in box is a very expensive operation that requires you to recursively list the root and then each ancestor folder up to the item. As another example, the Box authentication view controller on iOS has no real support for a cancel button. The web page displayed by it includes it's own faux toolbar at the top, which interferes visually with providing your own.