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"Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable."

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.

> 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?

Probably SpiderOak?

[Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox.]

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?

EBITDA should really be renamed EBMS: Earnings Before Manipulative Shenanigans. A high net profit might be heavily correlated with high EBITDA, but it's relatively easy to show a GAAP profit while being in terrible financial shape, and not so easy to do that with EBITDA.

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.

How about SBBSNAMM? Stopped the Bleeding But Still Not Actually Making Money

How do you show a GAAP profit without a corresponding positive EBITDA?

Agree 95%. On the Linux side, it can sometimes be a little tricky keeping it working. e.g. I recently lost my taskbar icon in Lubuntu after a Dropbox upgrade. I contacted support and was told they don't support Lubuntu. Perhaps understandable that they can't support all the various flavours of Linux but less than ideal for me. The various forums, Stackoverflows, etc are filled with similar issues with varying degrees of success. I'm a Dropbox for Business subscriber so did expect a little more of a thoughtful answer. Again, 95% agree...

I used to think Dropbox was such a simple company -- how could they need hundreds (or are they at thousands?) of software engineers?

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.

how could they need hundreds (or are they at thousands?) of software engineers?

supporting hundreds of millions of users (and probably tens of millions of paid users) is non-trivial

Famously, WhatsApp supported 900M users with only 50 engineers: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

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.

Since Dropbox is making a big push into enterprise, they are hiring a ton of high touch enterprise sales people - who can't scale in the same way an engineer can.

>Famously, WhatsApp supported 900M users...

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?

The big difference between WhatsApp and Dropbox is mass storage of customer data. Scaling that data for random access is orders of magnitude harder to scale than simple message throughput without storage. The fact that WhatsApp is end-to-end with no syncing also makes it's feature-set easier to implement.

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.

Yep, agreed. This means that Dropbox's minimum engineering count will be larger than WhatsApp's, but I still maintain that once you have sufficient engineers to tackle the problem, it's still largely independent of user count. Or, put another way, the number of engineers you need is O(problem complexity), not O(user count).

Yes, although I would submit that in a case like Dropbox you get the VC demand for growth which means that if your product is not a natural homerun you are forced to start adding incidental complexity to try to keep the growth engine going. Then before you know it you are O(Investment Money) like Dropbox or Twitter.

Check out https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/lepton-image-compress...

Dropbox has repeatedly tried to do more than one thing, but almost no one took them up on it.

Their basic service is very good, though. Apart from sometimes using lots of resources on MacOS.

I agree to an extent. Dropbox is the superior product from a 'just works' point of view. I really want to support them but they're just not priced competitively in our locale.

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 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.

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.

This. They just do such a good job. System is virtually perfect.

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.

"don't bother the user"

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.

Same. They used to be good about that, but lately they've been very pushy on their premium and it's probably why they are finally profitable...

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!"

Isn't the promotion transparent enough to not be shitty? To me is seems more like, 'if you are going to do it anyway and are on the fence about who you are going to go with, try us!'.

SyncThing mostly works. Dropbox just doesn't support soft links. I have tried so many of these tools and SyncThing comes close to preventing me from reaching for rsync. SyncThing between Windows and Linux was painful the last time I tried though with all sorts of, you guessed it, soft link issues.

Official line from Dropbox is not to use soft links.

Why is doing one thing a qualification for a good piece of software? I could see that some users may prefer this model of tools, but I use plenty of good software that provides a more complete solution than just doing one thing.

> not once

I have experienced sync failures on occasion that required restarting.

"be profitable"

The problem is that they aren't profitable.