Interview with Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Box offers great controls for businesses, better API and built in workflow engine, but has crappy syncing app. Box Notes also useless.
OneDrive is just shit in every way possible and acts more like an unwanted virus in new Windows installations.
Google Drive has solid syncing with built-in search and google docs integration which is the best office suite other than MS office. Their Team Drives feature is finally doing things right for businesses, although it still has a broken permissions system and issues with desktop integration.
There's also Apple, Amazon, Egnyte, Quip, etc for other niches. Overall, we are nowhere near perfect with any service. All of these companies will continue to grow since there's no singularly great option yet.
What does Paper do for you that's so much better?
And not just an example in general, but an example in detail -- decisions and efforts they made at every point, from engineering to corporate finance -- have been factors in that story.
(I don't use them anymore because they are too expensive but good for them that they are able to charge so much)
> It's a mess. You have all these new tools like Slack, but they're totally disconnected from the old ones, so people are constantly toggling back and forth. This fragmented experience wastes a lot of time, and it makes it really hard to focus.
The proliferation and fragmentation of SaaS apps is a huge problem for businesses. When Drew Houston says it's a mess, you know there's a massive startup idea here.
One way forward is consolidated services like Bitrix. They may not be as good as Slack, Dropbox, Asana etc for some specific tasks, but may provide more integrated service with smaller price tag.
Another option would be for "best of breed" companies to team up to offer package deals.
That's a great idea, and I can't imagine why I haven't seen it in a meaningful way. I'd be very much on board to buy a "web office" bundle with Dropbox/Slack/Github/Trello or something like that if it meant upwards of a 15% discount.
It's obviously easier to make a personal budget for one re-occuring SaaS bill than 6 $5-10/mo SaaS bills.
Another obvious advantage is that a lot of these little folk have common enemies with MS/Google/Amazon, and this is a great way for them to achieve similar lock-in with almost zero investment.
Finally, Dropbox/Slack/GitHub/etc... all have awesome integrations that either already exist in each-others products or are super easy to implement.
I have a vague feeling there was a lesson about this in In Search of Stupidity [0], but I can't be sure.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1191767.In_Search_of_Stu...
https://xkcd.com/927/ is evolving!
Last year the story broke about very questionable tactics of Dropbox Mac to gain root access.
This year I had a client whose machine was crippled because of a fun Dropbox default where, upon inserting any USB device Dropbox will automatically copy. The user inserted a camera with 4GB of hunting pics and it basically downed his machine. Now maybe he clicked on something to technically approve of this. But I surveyed the user base whom I had asked to install Dropbox and more than one had experienced a problem with this "feature". In one case the employee almost got in trouble for personal use of a machine, because she had connected her phone and didn't realize all her personal pictures were copied there. Less savvy users were involved, but I need to feel comfortable recommending a product like this to less savvy users.
This is evidenced by the fact that Dropbox felt the need to apologize and alter their behavior. Largely through HN activism BTW https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/dropbox-responds-to-accusa...
They explaining themselves is not evidence of what at all.
Characterizing typical users as unable to understand rooting sidesteps the point that, when the concept is explained to them, most will not be comfortable with software companies doing this.
Are you suggesting that because many of Dropbox's users don't know about the rooting thing, it's justified by their expansion?
I think the important thing is that, were most users to understand the rooting issue, they would be upset. Most users could easily understand it, if explained clearly. This is likely why Dropbox didn't disclose at all until caught -- and now, presumably, has a techie-sounding disclosure instead of "can we 0wn your machine?", if they are even still doing this on Macs.
This goes along with my original complaint about Dropbox: defaults that are ostensibly in Dropbox's interest, but not users'.
The potential security issue isn't big enough to claim it's a problem compared to making it easy to use for most people.
If you take this in the context of what others have said about Dropbox's takeover of CPU, hopefully my use of 'cripple' makes sense...
I have rarely seen cases where "magic behaviors" that users don't understand work really well.
Dropbox for Business launched at $12.50 per user/mo for unlimited storage. It's now $20.00 per user/mo.
Bait and switch your way to profitability.
The problem is I put my Outlook .pst in my Dropbox folder. When I have Outlook open, which is nearly the entire day, Outlook puts a lock on the .pst file.
Instead of Dropbox ignoring that file and coming back to it later - it's just gets stuck in some kind of infinitely loop trying to synch the locked file and can't. Resulting in 100% CPU usage.
I'm on one of their top plans (2TB). What's the point in having such large plans when the number of files you have causes the whole service to break down?
Been searching for a good alternative to Dropbox. Something that would be CPU efficient, safe, secure and reliable. I also use their packrat plan (saves a history of every file ever), which is nice too.
Any other HN readers have any alternatives? I really just want a plug and play solution, and not have to roll my own.
I don't trust Apple iCloud for one bit as they've been quite inept at running cloud services. I've tried Google drive with poor results too.
I have a single command on alias that goes and checks out all my git projects, and does a bit pull on any existing. Can switch between Computers in like 30 seconds. And it's all free git on bitbucket.
Git is much better way to deal with small files. Dropbox is ok for large files or nontechnical users.
I have about 300K files (250GB total) in my 1TB SpiderOak account. The UI has always been atrociously slow, but backup speeds are okay when most files are static. Things get more interesting when I check out another branch in git and touch a few thousand files at a time. As for sync, well, I've all but given up on editing a file on my desktop, opening my laptop, and expecting the updated file to appear anytime soon. If I really need to sync a file immediately, I put in in my Dropbox (free account, almost empty).
What I like most of this VDI setup is that, since it is a thin client setup, my computers last many years without becoming obsolete.
Unfortunately smart sync is only available for business subscriptions (probably because it makes it easy to put more stuff to Dropbox than you have disk space)
The Outlook .pst file plays notoriously bad with backup and synching in my experience. I set up CrashPlan for a family member once, and when I followed up a few weeks later it hadn't backed anything up in weeks because it was stuck on the .pst. In this case it was because the .pst was so huge and kept changing so frequently. By the time it had been uploaded for off-site backup, then it had changed and CrashPlan would start uploading it again. CrashPlan wasn't smart enough to prioritize other files in between, probably because it puts the most recently changed files in front of the queue or something.
Sounds like he should make a copy to dropbox, if he wants a copy backed up.
Can't backup an open file after all.
This is just how computers work.
He is complaining that their software hangs on open file instead of doing the sensible thing and not using 100% cpu until the lock goes away. That has nothing to do with "how computers work".
For a company with Condoleezza Rice on the board. A person who helped pioneer warentless surveillance. This doesn't really ring true:
https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...
(Full disclosure I'm ex Dropbox security)
Also, that link is from 2015.
I truly believe that Dropbox is a lousy solution to a problem created by ignorance on the part of the OS vendors. There is absolutely no good reason that the computers of today cannot share media seamlessly between themselves, without requiring the use or involvement of an external third party - the only reason its necessary to have Dropbox now, is because OS vendors fell asleep at the wheel and forgot that they're producing Operating Systems.
I think this will change, though - OS vendors are going to catch up to this market, and Dropbox will become less and less important as the OS starts to do its job again, and lead on these kinds of services.
I can't imagine Apple or MSFT ever offering something that would truly replace it - anything either does is likely to privilege their own OS over any other, and Dropbox has no reason to do that.
The other reason that services like Dropbox shine, at least for me, is that by providing a cloud-mediated sync solution, you don't have to coordinate a synchronous conversation between the devices in question. That's valuable, especially since it enables easy sync with > 2 devices (which also opens the door to selective sharing).
That always-there aspect is also how Dropbox became the de facto mobile file system for iOS (and Android, maybe? I'm guessing -- I'm an iOS user). It's also the default mechanism for sharing files too big or numerous for email (e.g., Aunt Sally's holiday pictures).
My tl;dr is that while Dropbox's initial value prop might not be earthshaking, it's done what it set out to do very, very well for me since I started using it 8 years ago, and I'm very glad to pay them for their service.
Second: I realize everyone’s experience is different, but the three times I’ve had the misfortune to interact with Dropbox shared files (once in a corporate setting, twice with files shared by acquaintances outside work), it just didn’t work. So the meme that Dropbox is a reliable mechanism for sharing to others confuses me.
Obviously your experience is your own, but I have yet to have a Dropbox sharing event fail for reasons other than user error (typically by unsophisticated relatives or coworkers, so I'm not suggesting at all that this was the root of your problem).
We should probably both be cautious of overgeneralizing from our own experiences with Dropbox, but the general presence of "it's easy and it works" even among the nontechnical suggests that your experience is atypical for some reason. Did you ever figure out the cause?
After all, it was once totally conceivable that a multi-million dollar company would be founded on the basis of, basically, a device driver.
We're still doing that sort of thing, its not a new phenomenon that some crack in the design/methods/ethics of a technology vendor is exploited by some un-controllable third-party. Gone are the days when Microsoft, by way of example, would have waged war and just built-in local- and remote- peer discovery, rsync++, etc. in response to this daring challenger to the hegemony.
I guess, I really do sort of miss that. Dropbox really sucks. I only use it because my friends do.
In what way is Dropbox more guilty of this than any other tool/service provided by a third party?
If you're talking about some sort of decentralized peer-2-peer, the average non-sysadmin non-techie user isn't going to want to leave their laptop up 24/7 as a node to share files.
The lawyers with the legal MS Word docs, and accountants with their MS Excel spreadsheets want to shut down their computer, drive home, or get on an airplane, or go to a meeting that may not have wifi connection.
If we ask users to save it to some sort of store & forward storage so their files are accessible to others (especially with others who are outside their particular company's boundaries) ... well... you end up reinventing an entity like Dropbox.
The trouble is, precisely this argument can be made about every single layer, upon layer, upon layer, of cruft which requires a lot of things to be in place, just to make Dropbox work.
So, I'm sorry, but I don't think you've entirely thought this argument through. Dropbox should be a built-in.
Why isn't it?
Unfortunately, OneDrive is little more than a half-baked clone of Dropbox. The first thing I do after setting up a Windows 10 machine is uninstalling OneDrive.
A universal protocol would only handle the "data in flight". The other issue is "data at rest" which is storage problem.
As analogy, SMTP is a universal protocol and yet email giants like GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo exist. They store emails. Average users don't want to point DNS MX records to their laptops running home mail servers 24/7.
- Dropbox-the-client-software simplifies "data in flight".
- Dropbox-the-cloud-storage simplifies "data at rest".
Since storage costs money (e.g. see Amazon Cloud Drive drops "unlimited" plan), it means there would be conflicting business interests from OS vendors at that infrastructure layer. This why a company that was _not_ Apple/Microsoft /Google/Redhat such as Dropbox was able to fill a gap.
1. Rsync has existed since the birth of filesystems.
2. Rsync will seamlessly sync between devices in the way that Dropbox does without the use of a third party. It clearly does nothing to overcome NAT.
It seems like referencing RSync does nothing to substantiate your claim, which still appears false.
The problem dropbox tries to solve is allowing access to files when either party is not connected to the internet or to grant publicly share a set of files.
> Well, it’s really important—and it hits close to home for us. My co-founder Arash Ferdowsi’s parents immigrated here from Iran. If these policies were in effect back then, there would be no Dropbox.
I would posit that that is false as there are many world class tech companies which did not begin in the US nor need the US to succeed.
To be clear, I'm glad they both successfully founded the company and that it contributes to the economy, but that's altogether a different topic.
What the US is doing right now puts it at a competitive disadvantage, IMO.
Interestingly, we didn't raid Japan for talent so much and maybe that contributed to their post war performance.
dropbox is large, binary-only, obfuscated code, built on FOSS (uses same library as rdiff), makes some people very wealthy and gives third party control over user's files.
i have never used dropbox. no need.