How come Dropbox wasn't eradicated by Microsoft's and Google's offerings that are integrated with their product suites?
* It 100% "just works" on all my devices (Mac, Linux, on a server, web, on my phone -- hell, I could stick it on a Raspberry Pi!).
* It integrates seamlessly with my filesystem.
* It has never, not once, failed me or bugged out on me. I've been using this product since it first came out and have not experienced even a minor bug!
* It's not tied to any other platform or service that might have conflicting interests.
* No fancy "smart" features or unexpected behaviour. All options are explicit and behave as expected.
* No fancy UX experiments, just straightforward to setup and use.
* I never have to think about it, it just does its job.
* It's a paid service that makes money (this in itself IS a feature).
It's just better than the competition. The peace of mind and get-out-of-the-wayness is well worth the $10 bucks a month. One of the few products that would be truly painful for me to lose...
I hate to be cynical here, but they're EBITDA profitable, not profitable, and they've been in business for 10 years. I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.
Of those thousands of examples, which are the closest to Dropbox's scale?
Dropbox has exabytes of data. I'd be very surprised if SpiderOak is storing more than a few PB. Perhaps some SpiderOak folks would care to correct me on this though?
In this case, I'd consider Dropbox's emergence into slight EBITDA profits as not great, but a definitely welcome sigh of relief for a unicorn market full of bullshit.
There are some opportunities for real innovation, though. An easy one is de-duplication of identical files to save space (which I have tested that they do). However, I suspect it can be taken much further to gain a competitive advantage against other storage providers, such as de-duping blocks, advanced compression algorithms, etc.
And of course, there's always room for creativity in the hardware and data-centers, and UX.
supporting hundreds of millions of users (and probably tens of millions of paid users) is non-trivial
While support staff definitely increases with users (paid or not), beyond a certain size the number of engineering staff should be largely independent of user count. As long as you are able to run 24/7 ops, manage outages and incidents, scale appropriately, etc. the only variable should be how rapidly you need to build and maintain your software. The rest of the complexity is all handled via automation.
I am not an expert but I agree with you. Follow up question: why is this not more common? why don't other companies emulate WhatsApp?
Not to take anything away from WhatsApp, I'm sure they have a few lessons Dropbox could have learned from (Erlang more robust than Python at scale?), but it's really not a fair comparison.
I don't know how many people remember just how painful life was BEFORE Dropbox came along and fixed everything...but they were like an oasis in the desert when the beta first appeared.
Failing on that one for me. I hover close to the storage limit, and I receive constant notifications from the software about it. No option to "leave me alone" in the settings.
Another shitty thing they do is, they often have promotions giving you a huge amount of space (10-20GB) but only for a year. They get you to fill up your Dropbox with content you depend on, and after a year, they're like "now you got a week to delete it all or pay for premium!"
I have experienced sync failures on occasion that required restarting.
The problem is that they aren't profitable.
Their basic service is very good, though. Apart from sometimes using lots of resources on MacOS.
Is a 1TB family plan for $10NZD per month (not $10USD which is like $4000 NZD /s) too much to ask?
Microsoft have a $7.99 NZD per month O365 plan that includes Email and 1TB OneDrive.
I can also buy O365 Home Premium (5 user including thick apps and Skype credit) for less than $10 per month ($99 NZD per year) -- and that's for 5 users.
Microsoft are consistently adding value to their O365 offering, its only a matter of time until they nail the "Dropbox" level of quality on OneDrive and then Dropbox won't be relevant anymore. They need to bring that price point down for the different locales. $120USD per year is just too much.
I have an Office365 subscription that I don't use.
Their OneDrive client is shit and they don't do file version history, which means that files are very vulnerable to mistakes and ransomware.
With OneDrive you basically get exactly what you're paying for.
> Microsoft are consistently adding value to their O365 offering
One way of looking at that is the quality of their offering is so bad that the only way to go is up.
If you objectively analyse their price, Office 365 is in fact overpriced. For example I spent about $20 on Apple's Keynote and it was a one time fee that happened 3 years ago. It's still the best presentation software for me. And personally I have important data, like a big family photos archive, a lot of documents, presentations I did, stuff I found interesting, etc. The cost of losing it would be pretty high.
I'm very frugal in general, but I don't mind paying for email and storage.
Official line from Dropbox is not to use soft links.
Microsoft and Google tainted their offerings from day one and I don't think anyone who remembers those systems wants to go back to them, even if they've improved. I think the old restrictions on file sizes and awkward interfaces have left them with baggage that Dropbox managed to avoid. These are just my opinions based on my experiences using all three products.
I never thought I'd write excitedly about this, and was super sceptical at first, but honestly, it's great. GSuite feels like a toy at this point.
Drive in particular is terrible from a usability perspective. I prefer drive because I'm aware of the advantages of the platform integration as well as the docs collaborative editing features, but many lay users won't get past the onboarding from Gmail over to Drive to discover its advantages.
For a first time user, Dropbox is a much better product on day one by comparison.
That's interesting. So I can only have one Drive account signed in on my Android phone?
I fear that other providers will neglect the client on platforms they are not trying to push. If a new platform were to pop up and become popular, I am pretty confident Dropbox would make a client for it, whereas the others I think would drag their feet. I don't want to be weighed down by my cloud sync provider like that.
The same can be said for the other software giants.
Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. This is a tremendous amount of adoption. Dropbox's real benefit lay in that it integrated directly into your OS so that it appeared just like a regular directory. This meant that usage patterns for users didn't change and so adoption ramped quicker.
Google on the other hand was always more of a work suite or productivity suite.
So ultimately what happened is that as the other large companies played catch up there simply wasn't enough of an advantage to switch to them away from Dropbox.
Paying users? Why? Every user brings in 120 USD/Euro per year.
its limited to 2GB, but you could increase it by installing the app on your phone and enabling the auto upload of pictures. every picture increased it by (iirc) 5MB - and this extra space stayed if you removed the pictures.
haven't used it in ages though.
I know, I have used Dropbox since 2010 ;). But the free tier does not contribute to the revenue of Dropbox. There are no ads (except for Dropbox Pro/Business :p).
Dropbox has some deals with Samsung and others for coupons for certain phones, but most of the 1B is probably brought in by paid subscriptions. Since Dropbox costs $10 per month (plus some Packrat and Advanced Team users), there are roughly 8 million paying users who bring in the revenue. Since Dropbox has ~500 million users, that would be a conversion rate of 1.6%, which seems reasonable.
Of course, I could be way off.
Which is the best selling point of Dropbox. It doesn't try to be an office app suite, a photo editing solution, a cloud collaboration platform, etc. It just syncs files between computers and phones, and has simple UX because of it.
People tend to compare the Dropbox price to for example S3 storage price, but I think that is wrong. I'm for example using the Dropbox for certain project files and I'm sure that at least in my case the major cost is not the actual storage, but bandwidth and processing.
Edit: (1) Compared to other file storage services.
Dropbox has been willing to get their hands dirty in their pursuit of user-friendliness since day one, especially on the Mac¹.
Google Drive's features may be peerless, such as their built-in office suite, but the fear of damaged data or spending an afternoon getting your files right drives me back to Dropbox for basic multi-machine file storage and syncing.
Dropbox just works and that's worth 10 Euro per month to me, it saves me heaps of time.
It's a shitshow app. Dropbox just works.
- If it starts up and your GDrive folder is empty, it deletes everything from the online version.
- There is no history like Dropbox, so once you fuck up and delete everything there is no easy way to get it back.