Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

fortune.com

224 pointscvander183 comments

A major difference between between this tech boom and the dot com boom of the 90s is the general public had a real shot at investing in serious growth potential during the dot com boom. Now most of the growth is experienced under private ownership, then the grossly overvalued company is pawned off for the public to invest in. VCs have figured out how to extract most of the exciting gains.

"Investing" in those days was "speculating." Hundreds of dubious companies made it to IPO that would never make it that far today, and most of those lost all their public investors' money.

https://mattermark.com/technology-company-ipos-then-now/

Well, Snap is losing $2 billion a quarter... how's that not a dubious IPO?... Uber's market cap is now 1/3 of WalMart a company with 485.9 billion in revenues.

For comparison, Webvan hit $8 billion market cap, losing $400 million a year, Uber's on $69 billion (hasn't even IPOd yet) losing $3 billion last year.

Replace 'companies' with 'cryptocurrency', and you have your exciting market today!

Hundreds of dubious cryptocurrencies of which a few might make it far.

John Bogle's investment philosophy [0], which I agree with, boils down the difference between investing and speculating to the time horizon: "The main difference between investment and speculation lies in the time horizon."

So in a way, I think you and the parent are both right -- you are talking about different sides of the same thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Bogle#Investment_philo...

Another one of Bogle's self serving comments. He's a legend but rarely unbiased. The key difference is the speculator buys it purely in the hope of flipping it. The investor considers the fundamentals of the investment. Time horizon is irrelevant. You can have special sits which you are in and out of in a month or so; but it's definitely an investment.

We are all hoping to flip our investments in the equities market; no one is holding forever. Unless you intend to die and pass your ownership interest to heirs.

Buffett's favorite holding period is forever. Cuban points out that non-dividend stocks aren't much more than baseball cards. Kiyosaki argues that the reason people suffer financially is that they purchase liabilities and list them under the asset column.

The difference between investing and speculating is whether you get paid for owning it or only for finding a greater fool to relieve you of it. The wheels have come off the equities market because management has realized putting on a convincing show for speculators nets more dumb money than actually succeeding as a business worth owning.

Cuban doesn't know anything about public market investing. But what do I know, I've just worked at a hedge fund for most of my career.

Buffett holds LT due to tax deferral benefits conferred by the US tax system. If there were no capital gains taxes he'd be a different animal.

Whether that wealth is going to the top 1% or to the top .01% doesn't matter so much as far as the welfare of the general public is concerned. I think you could argue that the products that these tech companies are bringing to market are what is really benefiting the general public, much more than any investment returns ever could. And if the current model of investing is most efficient--in terms of generating new products and delivering them to market--then it is better for the public.

What is the public benefit of snapchat ?

Seriously? People use it as a form of communication. It makes people feel closer to their friends. That has enormous value.

So this is interesting. You may feel closer to people you haven't seen for a while when they are always "with" you on Snapchat -- I have certainly experienced that with people I don't talk to often or people who live on another continent.

But then again, I can't shake the feeling that this is more about fun than really being close. I remember having close friends in high school and at the university. We spent many hours a day together for several years. Can't fake that, and I doubt anything like that will be born through Snapchat or similar tools.

You sound quite certain that it has value. However, some claim that "communication" through technology can also alienate people. Some say it's a bit more shallow, that it doesn't have the same feel as actually talking to someone or even touching them for a second or two (really important for bonding).

Value is not always clear. Forgive me a drastic comparison, but factory farming strikes me as similar: it brought cheap, tasty meat to a great number of people, but the jury is still out on whether it's good.

> But then again, I can't shake the feeling that this is more about fun than really being close. I remember having close friends in high school and at the university. We spent many hours a day together for several years. Can't fake that, and I doubt anything like that will be born through Snapchat or similar tools.

I've got a whole bunch of friends whom I know mainly from online interaction. Surely that's a new class of friendship, which is useful?

Try going offline for 2-3 months and see what happens. See how many of those people are real friends who call/email you, or even try to message you through your social media venue of choice.

My recent experience going cold turkey from Facebook revealed 1 friend who noticed my absence and reached out to me.

I think there are disadvantages from social networks in the long term as people isolate themselves and allow them to take the place of physical connections, which they don't. But that their advantages from bringing friends to each other is at the same time often without a doubt beneficial. A virtual connection is better than none at all, and I know I would not have the lasting friendships I would have had today if it were not for social networks.

I guess in a perfect world, people would understand the benefits but also fallacies and balance their use of these networks. That's the way I think we could get the most value out of them without exposing ourselves to their issues too much.

Snap Chat is by far the most social of the "social" media applications.

You really have to see how adolescents use it differently from adults to appreciate this. There is a sort of additional language to it in a similar vein to how we all used AIM and its ilk back in the day. For adolescents, who spend time together as you describe, they spend more time sharing experiences over SC augmenting their continuous in person interactions.

We are in danger of speaking past each other regarding the group and type of connection. But I absolutely believe SC is capable of Bri going people together. I do not believe that about any other Social platform. (Excepting blogs and podcasts but those are very different.)

If you define "real" friendship as spending hours in each other's physical presence then of course you're going to say snapchat isn't "real" - that's just circular reasoning though.

> the jury is still out on whether it's good.

i think the jury is in on that - the market being the jury. The overwhelming majority of purchasers decide through no uncertain terms, that factory farming is the way to go.

There are some people who have moral reservations against factory farming, but i believe those numbers are low (despite how loud their voices are). A silent majority (especially through less wealth countries) agree by voting with their wallets.

What about the tobacco industry? Is it wrong that government set regulations to tax cigarettes and limit advertising?

What about the gambling industry?

I feel in a few decades, this social media will be considered harmful and will be regulated and possibly taxed.

Snapchat adds value in the way meth adds value.

With a whiff of ouija board.

Of Facebook?

That's a bit too clever.

The issue is whether a society that has mutated to a system funneling meaningful wealth gains to 0.01% of its members is on the path to long term health or on the certain path to some sort of catastrophic system failure with a generous dolling out of collatoral damage to the 99.99% that were on the receiving end of "value added" goods and services [only].

True. I don't know if this system is really any better than the system of the 90s. We do know that that one led to a market crash and the current one hasn't (yet). But we very well could have more innovation if companies still IPOed early. I really don't know.

My comment was intended to establish a yardstick to judge them by. Society doesn't value free market enterprise because it's great at enriching a small number of people. We don't like that Dropbox exists because it turned its founders and investors into millionaires and billionaires. We value capitalism because it encourages people to bring new products to market. If society's goal was to enrich a small number of people, then we should've stuck with feudalism. But society wants to enrich society.

Market crashes of 80s and 90s is not even remotely what I am talking about. Who cares about that.

If a tiny tiny subset of a society has established a system where they are the analog of "judge, jury, and executioner" of what sort of mind products are developed, supported, and made de facto 'necessity of modern life' (such as Google's) then let's stop pretending and call it what is it: an authoritarian system that (ab)uses market mechanisms

It's the anomaly of QE, which diverted so much of the institutional private capital from essentially zero-yielding debt markets into private equities markets.

This wasn't an anomaly, it was the entire rationale for QE: force capital into risk assets.

EDIT: my username is not a coincidence here...

If you want to replicate 90s experience of the dot-com boom, buy into ICOs now. And the end result will most probably be... well also same to 90s.

ICOs will evolve with more realistic offerings. The DAO disaster only happened one year ago and the community recovered very fast. The main point is the difficulty to access good deals early on and that is what is happening with new IPOs.

"The community" didn't "recover" because it wasn't broken in the first place. Sure ETH:USD declined, but then went up because everyone and their dog buy or mine cryptocurrencies in hope of getting rich fast (extensive media coverage helps). It's not a sign of a sound economic system, it's a sign of a bubble.

Not saying it is not a bubble. Amazon was part of the dot com era bubble and look at what they are now. When you lower the barrier of entry you have all kind of community members, including the few good ones who don't want to follow a more classical funding approach. In the worst case, all this is an interesting experiment.

Exactly. The "startup boom" that's going on now is staying strong because tech is available to most people and people are becoming more and more accustomed to using services offered by startups. Cryptos are now in the same position tech was in 90's/early2K's - not available or unknown to most people but promoted as "easy money by easy investments". Dozens of useless companies banking in on people chasing cheap money.

That's what everyone said about facebook, but it's up 4x since IPO, and 8x from the post IPO dip it had.

Compare that to the first 5 years of Amazon post-IPO.

Saving everyone a Google search: AMZN opened at (split adjusted) $1.49. 5 years later it was at $19.47. Over that span, it maxed at $106.69 (Dec 1999).

it went from $2 to $16 (split adjusted). The real difference is that it was much much smaller at IPO, meaning it's pretty much impossible for FB to continue generating outsized returns whereas Amazon actually did much better from 5-10 or 10-15 than FB possibly could.

The exception that proves the rule, eh?

The riskiness of the dotcom boom of the 90s crashed so hard it spent the entire stock market into a downward spiral. Maybe it makes sense to have those kinds of risks taken largely in private markets for accredited investors only.

If you invested in all the IPOs from the .com era, would that actually beat the NASDAQ returns over the last 5 years from 2012-2017? Do we really need retail investors to invest in micro cap level companies? Look at the horror stories of people losing their retirement savings on GTAT.

There were a lot of busts from that era and the average person isn't going to be able pick them well.

Yes, we need retail investors to be able to invest in micro cap level companies. Nobody independent is going to do well competing against institutional investors who have, better access, faster trades and teams of quants. The only way to win is to play a game they can't play. Micro caps are a good example since institutional investors can't invest in them easily (even buying the whole company doesn't move the needle much for them). The other place where independents have an edge is long time horizons. They don't have anyone to report to or any need to sacrifice the long term in order to make quarterly numbers.

As for the average person picking well, I encourage you to look at the Motley Fool community. There you'll find literally millions of hobbyist investors, some who have been chatting together since the mid 90s and many, many people doing well. Even looking at the medium-active CAPS player (basically their over/under prediction board where anyone can make bull or bear cases on any stock), it's better than what you'd get giving your money to Wealthfront or some other manager.

Blocking retail investors from micro caps would just be one more way insulating the rich from competition with the conscientious. As bad as Sarbox has been, that would be an entirely new way to make the US system less equitable for the masses.

> Yes, we need retail investors to be able to invest in micro cap level companies.

No retail investor will invest in a micro cap company because the cost to perform due diligence is too expensive for the amount they want to invest.

Retail/institutional investors want a company they can put 10-1000 million dollars into. For this size of investment, the due diligence research is worthwhile. For a micro cap company, they can't throw that amount of money at them because it'd be larger than the company's market cap, so basically the investor would be buying the whole company (and the investor doesn't want to buy the company, just own a portion of it).

Basically, the administrative overhead for investment institutions is too large for micro cap companies. Just look at how much money is in Small Cap ETFs versus other ETFs.

> micro cap

pardon my ignorance, but what is a 'micro cap'?

A company that's worth millions (instead of hundreds of millions or billions)

unintended consequence of SOX and over regulation of the public markets.

That's the way it should be. Around half the world isn't online so these companies can still, at the very least, double in value over the long term. The 'easy' money is gone, sure, but it's probably good that we don't have hundreds of high valued-loss making companies on the public markets.

It would seem that ICO may change that.

They've come a long way from their Show HN 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

From a demo hacked together over a few months (written in Python, IIRC) and posted on HN to an IPO. Pretty cool, honestly.

Thanks for the link, it was really enlightening read. It is interesting to read the elaborated comments of some naysayers there who are stuck in their old ways and can't see the value of it yet.

One of them describes his solution with FUSE and FTP that 'basically achieves the same' and has doubts that anyone would want to use Dropbox if they can use FTP.

Same stuff surely happens here today.

Though most of the comments are positive, it's only really BrandonM's comment which looks silly in hindsight. Quite a few valid questions and thoughts too, where is this stored, how are you handling locked down corp accounts, etc.

It's a pity they hide the vote numbers these days.

> Quite a few valid questions and thoughts too

all of which are "merely" implementation details and polish. The analogy is that you've built a crude engine that can sit on a box in an axel to move rather than using an animal, but the nay-sayers ask how do you deal with the bad weather/water, and how do you brake and turn smoothly?

The idea is fundamentally good, and it takes someone with vision to see through the smog of implementation details and problems.

I believe the naysayers will be right at some point. Cloud storage is really a race to the bottom.

> Same stuff surely happens here today.

This is exactly what gives me hope when I post a sideproject here or on reddit and it is either met with radio silence or active resistance. I'm starting to suspect that horses don't actually like water.

I still don't see the value of it...

I would be soooooo happy if I got to see the code that began it. Does it happen to available anywhere?

According to the original comments "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

I remember that comment vividly, and love it. What better example of tech not understanding design and product-market fit?

I see similar comments on virtually every ShowHN thread. "You can just take these 5 extra steps and do it yourself! This product will fail"

Somehow, HN seldom seems to grasp that people are inherently lazy and any solution that cuts work for them will find at least a few takers.

They also fail to grasp that the know-how and ability of a technically minded person is different from most people who use computers.

My mum can use Dropbox. She could not set up an ftp account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS with it.

> HN seldom seems to grasp that people are inherently lazy

I would dispute "inherently lazy" in favour of "have better things to spend their time on than crafting a personal solution to an already solved problem".

Basically most HN comments on new products then.

That guy still posts here. In one of his most recent comments [1] he says "it's not all that hard to file your own taxes the old-fashioned way" and that it takes him "a full 12-16 hours (a solid day or two on a weekend)" :D Is he a long gimmick?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924397

But the "innovative" part is that Dropbox hacked into the OSX kernel to achieve better integration. See e.g. [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338

All you need is a nice quick python wrapper for that and you've got a business :)

Yes.. a a quick python script to market and sell it!

Haha, I'd pay for that!

So would tens of millions of dropbox users.

And that’s still true today. You can combine git with a file syncing system via FTP, SCP or WebDAV, and you get... SeaFile.

Not sure about the code, but here's the original Demo Video Drew had on their getdropbox.com landing page. It presents the features in a very entertaining way :)

[ Sep 15th 2008 ] DropBox Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE

This is one of the best product demo's I've seen. The product is just so fully formed, even back in 2008. Really is presented as "it just works".

"Why do you keep sending me this crap" without comment, made me lol.

This video is really great. Lots of easter eggs - including the contents of the pictures and the Dropbox Trade Secrets folder (I laughed hard at "Pets.com Executive Summary.pdf").

If you can find an old version of the dropbox client, someone did document how to decrypt and decompile it back to python source.

https://github.com/kholia/dedrop

I used Dropbox for a few years, but ultimately switched to another big-name company service. Consumers now have great options available from all the big-name companies: Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating.

Given this, I think it's reasonable to ask: what's their value proposition in 2017? I hadn't been following them for a few years, but looking at their landing and pricing page, it's clear they're transitioning away from being a consumer product and focusing on enterprise customers. For those of you that are paying for their consumer offering, I'd be very interested in reading about why you've chosen to stick with em instead of migrating to another service.

> what's their value proposition in 2017?

I have been paid user of Dropbox for now 4+ years. The reason I have stuck with it because "It works! plain and simple." I have tried other storage services like Google, iCloud and Box. But none match the simplicity, consistency, invisibility, cross-platform, seamless features of Dropbox. Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They have no concept of customer service. They might well be running by robots. I experienced Box at work, forced by the work IT group. IT wasn't very willing to hand out Box accounts unless you can justify business use case , people who used it didn't like it. Box interface was always in your way if you wanted to do anything stored in Box, few extra clicks to do anything. Most people who needed to collaborate used free Dropbox to get around all restrictions. iCloud is okay but only seems to work with Apple ecosystem. I still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and iPhone. Works great for photos and contacts but not so much for files. While Dropbox has released new features, I have never bothered with any.

IMO, Dropbox need to continue focusing their service seamless. There only mistake was to not go after business/enterprise earlier. They could have killed Box easily. While Box was hiring consultants and Enterprise sales people to pitch to IT groups (top down) Dropbox had the mindshare of employees (bottoms up). They were Dropbox champions, just Dropbox failed to leverage that in enterprise.

> Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They have no concept of customer service. They might well be running by robots.

With Dropbox is the same. Some time ago a weird bug occured on my Dropbox account and I reported it. Being paying customer (3 accounts) I expected my issue to be handled professionally, as with most of other services that I use. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. My issue was handled by someone ho had no clue what is the problem and how their service works and looks. During 20+ emails exchange I got mostly advices of reinstalling the applications, etc. They ignored my requests to pass the ticket to someone more knowledgeable. I had to complain on their Facebook page to get the task read by someone else and (finally) get passed to "analysis". But then, weeks passed without word from them. When I finally asked about the progress, I got answer meaning "your issue is not important enough for us, so nobody is working on it right now and don't expect it will change in the near future". Then some time more passed and they finally fixed the bug (it was something on their side, fix was listed in the mobile app changelog). I asked for an account credit for a time when the app wasn't working properly, which influenced my day-to-day work (which is normal with other services), but were repeatedly told to "fk off" in more or less polite way and then ignored completely.

So it seems that Dropbox is introducing the "best" Google customer service policies.

> is introducing

Nah, they've always been good at not listening to what they don't want to hear.

People were asking about client-side encryption back in 2009, and they've been mishearing for all these years. Top notch.

Well I guess they don't want to pay for the extra storage when they can't dedup files.

I understand what you are saying, and that is a somewhat plausible story. Another one is that search is more difficult.

But the reality is I think for any company with serious security policy will have to pass on a service that only "sort of" secures their files.

There are a lot of people also who will not ever consider going with dropbox because they have on their board (Rice) someone who has a sordid track record when it comes to warrantless wiretapping, torture, and so forth.

In my opinion dropbox is OK for sharing docs between 2 people as long as the doc is not something you consider private. If you want privacy though (business files/docs/artifacts), best to pick something else.

There are methods of client-side encryption that still allow for deduplication.

For example, use a hash of the file as the encryption key, then encrypt that hash with the client's key.

>I still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and iPhone.

On Mac I just open the iCloud folder and the files are there, just like Dropbox

On iPhone I open the iCloud Drive app and the files are there just like on Mac, much like in Dropbox pp expect Dropbox uses list format.

Personally I like iCloud currently more, but as you said it only works in Apple ecosystem (which I'm currently fine with). Recently I also setup OwnCloud on my RPi and it seems to fill my niche usage just fine as well, but I still don't quite trust it.

FYI, there's also iCloud for Windows [0], and some people claim to have gotten it to work with Wine [1] on Ubuntu.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/195603/are-there-any-ways-to...

I have the Windows client installed on my "gaming pc", but it doesn't seem to sync well enough. For example I can't find my password manager vault there at all.

The iCloud Drive folder is indeed "just files" but it’s stored sort of hidden in a wickedly long path†. Firing up a terminal and cd’ing into ~/Dropbox is arguably easier than having to drag and drop a file in there from Finder just to have the correct path.

† "~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs"

How about ~/Desktop? That's mirrored in iCloud for sure. Possibly also other paths, but that's sort of hidden knowledge.

Usually when I use it I just drag files into the shortcut in Finder, but I guess that's a point for Dropbox. Of course you can just make symlink with ~/iCloud (I'm not at my Mac right now, but as I type this I have a feeling that there is some path in your home folder to iCloud or maybe I've already linked to it.)

While it does 'just work' (i.e. the best product currently in the space) it's more a factor of how much better it is than its competitors, and how much the price premium is.

Better is a relative term, some argue that iCloud is VASTLY superior since you can set it up with your own private key that apple does not have access to.

Dropbox can always view your files without you knowing.

I do agree that as far as usability and cross platform support, dropbox is better. For security though I would say it's middle of the pack at best.

Paying DropBox user here. Reasons I loved them since day one:

- It Just Works™.

- It's bullshit-free. A folder that syncs. No upselling, no storing documents as JSON links only accessible through a web interface (hello Google Office Suite w/ Google Drive).

- Works on Linux.

- Relatively lightweight.

- The "Public" folder, which unfortunately they now retired, was a huge thing that convinced me to use them. With it, sharing anything to people was trivial, and the sharing was bullshit free - no web captive portal or anything, just a direct-to-file link, which I could (and did, a lot) use to e.g. embed images in posts on on-line boards, etc.

Axing the "Public" folder made DropBox lose significantly in my eyes, but I still like the service enough not to switch (and I don't recall anyone else even offering the equivalent of the "Public" folder).

>- Works on Linux.

>- Relatively lightweight.

I was once asked to backup all the data in our Dropbox for Business account. 30 users, around 400GB (total).

I installed the Dropbox client on a VM in our data center and waited more than a week while it tried to sync files.

It used a lot of memory, and good lord the download rate was poor. Under 10MBit/sec for a VM which had a Gigabit connection to the internet.

The nail in to coffin for me was that Dropbox for Business administrators don't have access to all the data within the organization. No, every single shared folder must be shared with the account you are using to sync the data.

If a user creates a folder in Dropbox and doesn't share it with the backup user, that data won't be available.

Sadly, in spite of the above, my company is still using Dropbox. We've just given up completely on having a backup of the data in it (IMHO, a decision they will come to regret).

But the experience (also with Dropbox for Business support, who took multiple days to respond to a customer paying them over $5k/year) ruined them for me.

For personal files I use syncthing now.

But your points are valid. The reason others in the company like Dropbox are the client "just works" and their web interface is nicer than OneDrive/Google/NextCloud.

Is it not possible to just create a folder, call it Public and then set share-options to "everyone with the link" or something like that to get the feature back?

AFAIK you still won't get direct file links this way - only links to a landing page, from which you still have to initiate the download. Being able to get a direct link to file (the kind that works with e.g. wget, or as a src attribute of an <img> tag) was the most useful feature of the Public folder.

I think they still have the most polished product, particularly when it comes to the web interface. I don't even have the Dropbox client installed and instead use the service via Arq to backup my music library which is about 500 GB and growing. However I hear the client is flawless and can sync files partially which is significant when it comes to large files.

Occasionally I host and transfer large files and the web interface simply works for that. All in all I need about a TB of storage and saving 3 bucks on Amazon Drive won't convince me to give up the advantage of a carefully designed and very clean, solid product.

Web storage feels like an afterthought on most other platforms - has anyone seen Amazon Drive online? It looks horrible, like a prototype or proof of concept. It's similar with OneDrive, though not as bad. Frankly, I prefer to stay with the company that has been making storage their core product for a decade.

Furthermore Dropbox has a healthy eco system and serves as syncing platform or default storage option for many apps.

> However I hear the client is flawless and can sync files partially which is significant when it comes to large files.

Yes, Dropbox is one of the rare ones that handle rsync-style rolling checksum syncing.

It’s also the only one to sync FS-specific xattrs properly (like hidden extension on MacOS). Google Drive fails on both points.

One issue is that it gets slow when there are a lot of files.

> For those of you that are paying for their consumer offering, I'd be very interested in reading about why you've chosen to stick with em instead of migrating to another service.

I'm a freeloader so I guess I don't fully qualify.

That said, what I like about Sropbox is how it works (and works well) everywhere.

Windows, Linux, Android. At home, at work, on my NAS and in "the cloud".

All other services have major shortcomings if you want universal platform-support.

I've only used Dropbox and Google Drive, but Dropbox is much less buggy and also supports Linux. Shame it is so much more expensive.

Although I use Google Docs almost exclusively for most of my work, I still use Dropbox for document storage.

Reason is simple: I've been burned by Google Drive before. Lost some important documents because I thought they'd synced when they hadn't. Drive - at least back then - was simply unreliable with its synchronization.

Never had that problem with Dropbox

Dropbox user since 2010 here. Although I haven't 'thoroughly' compared Dropbox to other cloud based storage providers, the reason I've stuck with Dropbox this long is:

1. Backups all the photos I take with my iPhone automatically.

2. Service integration (E.g. Slack, 1Password, Alfred prefs).

3. Paper is pretty nice, I've been using it lately.

4. User interface is nice and clean.

5. Photo album creation/sharing is nice, but they are removing that feature on the 17th.

6. Screenshot sharing is nice.

7. Enjoyable & clean interface.

Having said that, I have noticed their drift to more enterprise based offerings. Their pricing is a bit steep as well. The only other two providers I've considered are iCloud and Google Drive. I'm not opposed to switching as long as those primary features are matched in another service. I'd also like to compare bandwidth, price per GB, security/privacy in other services. Anyways, just my two cents :)

8 and 9 would be "faster" and linux support. Not insignificant for me, at least.

I for one won't be using iCloud for the foreseeable future. It had a lot of issues with syncing and kept asking me for my password on various devices.

I keep using Dropbox for now, but without the app installed on my machine, just using the website. The reason being the sneaky way the Dropbox app tried to get Administrator rights to install some tooling on OS X [0].

---

[0]: http://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-dir...

Linux support

Same answer as always: It just works.

While we're here and speaking of consumer offerings: Has anyone found a satisfactory solution to displaying photos from Dropbox on their TV? Everything I try is clunky.

> Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating.

Any idea why?

Box has the admin controls, customizations, APIs and workflow tools that big enterprises actually want and need.

Dropbox didnt even have Groups to manage users until just 18 months ago and had silly things like invites for group folders which are all holdovers from their consumer roots.

Customer managed encryption keys are supported by Box, so they also have a much more compelling security story than dropbox.

Dropbox is bulletproof, period.

Box has always been better, with less baggage. No dark UI patterns. No creepy Bush-era board members. And overall just a better application.

I just went to the Box website to look for a Linux client. I'd like to report back, but on Safari[1] I can't read anything on the page. It's just black.

[1] Version 10.1.1 (12603.2.4)

As I expected - it looks like no-one remembers the "Drop Dropbox" boycott campaign that came right on the heels of Brendan Eich's ouster at Mozilla. I strongly believe had Mozilla's board showed him the same robust support Dropbox showed Condoleezza Rice, Mozilla would be in a much better place today.

Eich was far more closely tied to Mozilla than Rice to Dropbox, though. No one in their right mind thought Rice had much to do with Dropbox beyond being a name they could drop and a bit of lobbying help.

http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ and the HN discussion from back then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069

I was a pretty early user of Dropbox back when it was featured on this site. As much as I'm loathe to admit it since I don't like the consolidation of huge tech companies, I've pretty much completely abandoned them for Google offerings.

Google drive is just there, whether I wanted it or not. And that goes for anyone who's signed up for Gmail or YouTube (i.e. collectively 40% of the people I know). It's not quite as nice as Dropbox, but it's right there in that weird 9-squared popup menu every time I check my email.

Kudos to Dropbox for having made it to this point, but how long can they survive against free + connected to your email + everything you save on an Android? What if chromebooks get more popular? I wouldn't short them, but it's really hard to see a big win for them given the market dynamics.

Not everyone uses gmail...

I love Dropbox, but where's the growth potential? They do an amazing job of storage and syncing, and as a user I'd love for them to focus on that.

Can they use their early success in sync to bootstrap other products? "Evernote" by Dropbox?

EDIT> This is an honest question, and I'd appreciate informative replies.

Dropbox Paper is the best implementation of collaborative text editor that I've ever used. I keep going back to it because it's easy to use. I never use Google Docs because Google's account management systems are such a hassle and I hate Material Design.

This is absolutely critical. I have a few hundred gig of old data on a paid dropbox. Some old photos and videos etc. Lots of old Word documents.

But everything new I do is on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which I love. All my photos now go to Google Photos.

The future seems to be google drive like web apps. Dropbox needs to get into this market. I hope Paper can expand...

While I agree that paper is great, I believe this product stemmed for an acquisition of Hackpad, a company with a nearly identical product.

I'm not saying acquisitions can't help them grow, but I wanted to make it clear that this stemmed from an acquisition.

Dropbox actually did have other sync products, such as their now-discontinued Firebase-like Datastore API. https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2015/04/deprecating-the...

Their focus is wholly on owning the file management space, with most profit coming from doing so for enterprises. While the Googles and Apples of the world have found significant success in building entire suites of related products and services (including physical), there are plenty of successful public one-trick pony software companies. Dropbox's key has always been the magical quality of their service, and that's as good a reason to be on the focused-side of the spectrum as any.

I would guess the Enterprise side, granted I'm not sure what/how much they have there. Picture this box[1] that's inside the company firewall... But seriously, they could have on prem, active directory integration, more permissions, user edit tracking/audit logs, etc.

My work changed entire email/storage/etc providers almost entirely for the file management system...

[1] https://cdn2.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2016/05...

Do they have to?

Sync can still be improved a lot, and I think whoever does it best will be able to take over most of the market. Dropbox's Infinite could potentially do that. https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2016/04/announcing-projec...

Replace everybody's hard-drive with a dropbox, shared across every device they own.

Why shouldn't they IPO, it's basically the last funding round? Even if they were done growing and ready to start paying dividends now, what would be bad about that?

I'm having trouble understanding what the benefits are of going public for Dropbox. Increased financial reporting and the fiduciary duty to shareholders.

I suspect, as the article implies "there is increasing pressure to go pubic as investors look to cash out.

What features or new products could Dropbox develop with a few hundred million at they couldn't without?

I think the investors just want to cash out. If there was huge throw potential wouldn't they continue to raise VC money?

Yes VC fund vintages are likely maturing.

We might get some solid clues when they file their S-1. However I'd venture to say international user growth both Consumer facing and Enterprise.

75% of Dropbox users are located outside the United States. They have invested heavily in expanding their PoPs and in Europe and Asia. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/19/dropbox-announces-massive-...

The last few years Enterprise customers have been a major target.

https://www.recode.net/2014/3/20/11624780/dropbox-zeros-in-o...

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/dropboxs-latest-announceme...

Again S-1 should provide a peek at the rate of adoption. Anecdotally I can share reports of wavering between consumer and enterprise focus.

Nowadays I think IPO means "We honestly don't know how get any more money. Let's just let the public pay us a little more, then move on to other businesses."

The strange thing is, that there are still people paying for IPO shares. But as long as they do, why not use it to squeeze the last penny out of the business before starting the next.

The only comment I will say about Dropbox is the price, I wish they would do a 100GB tier or something for £1.99 a month.

I really cannot justify paying £7.99 a month for 1TB of storage, especially when I'll most likely use less than 10% of that space

This often comes up regarding Dropbox. It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a cheaper tier than $10/month. It's that they don't want to.

$10/1TB is not a ratio to be arbitrarily divided, no matter how much people want to assume it should be. Dropbox would lose more revenue from customers downgrading from $10 to $2 than they would gain from the few customers that care about the difference between $0 and $2.

$10 is the floor for Dropbox to care enough to serve any customer. It's a version of "fire your pathological customers", or rather to never acquire them in the first place. SaaS vendors know that the cheapest customers are the biggest headaches. If you care about the difference between $5 and $10, Dropbox doesn't need to care about serving you.

I also pay dropbox, but I never checked the size. I think when I started it was like 50 GB for the same amount of money. You pay for the service and softwaredevelopment. The storage is just what they can give you cheaply.

I use 6% of the 1 TB and it definitely feels like they could have a smaller tier. I gladly pay for it though, for now. As recently as last week it saved my ass after I deleted ~200 files that I thought were tracked in git.

Dropbox is like twitter. An over-engineered solution for a very narrowed use case. Don't get me wrong, the product works very well. I actually use it everyday, but from an investor/growth perspective, I fall back into what Jobs said - "it's just a feature".

Also many platforms are adding storage as add-in (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) which decreases available market.

My office got a call on a great deal for a renewal on our subscription and our new pricing .. and our sales rep would give us a good deal since we had a subscription for a while... it would only be 2x what it currently was. We cancelled it and went to box. Easy and much happier.

Similar thing happened at MPOW. We've been Dropbox for Business subscribers for several years and all of a sudden they informed us of some astronomical price increase. We're migrating everyone's data before the end of the year and moving to a locally hosted Seafile-based storage solution.

Another Seafile user here, also moved from Dropbox. I moved before the big price hike, and I did so for a few reasons:

1. It kills machines on startup. My machine had the CPU and HDD maxxed out for 30 minutes every time I started it, rendering it unusable

2. You can only sync a single folder, which is really limiting

3. The syncing algorithm is crap (well, it was for me anyway) - I was constantly resolving conflicts incorrectly

4. Probably a continuation from point 2 - it actually deleted files it shouldn't have

I'm mostly happy with Seafile. I've had a few issues from time to time with the Windows client, but overall a much better experience than with Dropbox.

> 2. You can only sync a single folder, which is really limiting

That is easily worked around as Dropbox follows symlinks.

E.g on my desktop ~/Dropbox is on a small SSD so on that machine ~/Dropbox/Photos is a symlink to a folder on my large capacity HDD.

> 4.

Perhaps you already aware of the symlink solution :) It works for me, but is a little hacky. And you need to make sure dropbox is not running when moving and soft linking folders.

> That is easily worked around as Dropbox follows symlinks

Not on Windows :(

You're sure a well-placed `mklink` won't do the trick?

Yes, I did try this but it didn't work

Good luck to them. Been an excellent service from day 1.

Dropbox has a great product. Before dropbox I had a special email account to store files to share with people. It was annoying if I needed to update stuff. Dropbox has without a doubt saved me time and money.

While one of Dropbox's strengths is its simplicity, one thing that I think is currently keeping many enterprise customers away is detailed configurability – currently you only have manual folder-level control over what to sync. However, a very common use case is to autosync everything except certain types of files (certificates, keystores etc). They would probably see some quick adoptions if they covered detailed configuration and enterprise-level management in a good manner.

The day dropbox can read and follow .gitignore in my folders I would be happy.

If I don't want version control over it I also don't need to back it up.

Continuously manually disabling syncing of e.g. binary build files, temporary log files etc from my projects. But you can not do it before they exist, only afterwards whilst dropbox is busy syncing megabytes of unneccesary files...

Though the linux client has a CLI that helps a little with disabling certain patterns but no mac equivalent.

I see no value in Dropbox since using GDrive (have it anyway because of GSuite) and using a decent sync client like InsyncHQ. Never looked back at Dropbox.

If I had anything to do with Dropbox I'd be scrambling to cash out ASAP.

It’s a matter of time before Apple rolls out iCloud file/folder sharing (which currently exists in some form already). In addition, they recently announced iMessage "Business Chat" which will likely later include other enterprise functionality.

> It’s a matter of time before Apple rolls out iCloud file/folder sharing

And that solution won't work on my work-machine running Windows, nor on my home-machines running Linux.

Nor on any machine owned by anyone in my greater family. Because most people don't have Macs.

It will be completely irrelevant outside some niche Apple-only circles. Like most services Apple make.

I'd be surprised if it disrupted Dropbox noticeably.

Microsoft might follow Apple's lead of OS developers including cloud sync. That's gonna leave a mark on Dropbox's business.

I'd guess that Dropbox make most of their revenue from businesses that have large numbers of different computers. If you have a network of computers all running the same OS then sharing and sync'ing is relatively easy; Dropbox solves the pain where you don't have that. Any service that's Apple-only, or Windows-only, or even just perceived to be limited to a particular OS, isn't going to have much of an impact on Dropbox's bottom line.

There's value in cross-platform, sure. I stuck with Dropbox because they have Linux and Mac clients.

But aren't there whole government departments and other very big customers that are pretty much single-platform, usually Windows?

> But aren't there whole government departments and other very big customers that are pretty much single-platform, usually Windows?

Would be interesting to know how much that class of customer uses services like this. I would assume primarily as part of a bigger package (e.g. if it comes with Office365 or Google Suite (or whatever that is called right now))?

> Microsoft might follow Apple's lead of OS developers including cloud sync.

You mean OneDrive?

Yeah, I guess so. It's had so little impact on my world that I forgot all about it.

That would be a much more serious contender, yes.

But an Apple-only offering? Not at all.

But in the real world, no one has done it better then Dropbox for simple store and sync. Which is sad but true. iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, GDrive, Box aren't any good at all. Dropbox is only better because all of their competition aren't great.

I have six 2.5" HDD sitting here, along with two 3.5" HDD, all with photos, video, files etc, many are duplicated. There are currently no easy way to sort through this mess. I have to sort it locally before I store it online. Why cant I dump it all to the Cloud and let the sorting happen there?

I've been contemplating building such a thing, but without (or making very optional) the Cloud aspect. Not sure whether or how it could be monetised, especially if I also wanted it to be open source.

Essentially this is what NAS from Synology or Qnap should have offered in the first place.

Monetizing it by reselling the Cloud Storage space? ( Using B2 from Black Blaze ) But i really think it is a feature rather then a product.

>It’s a matter of time before Apple rolls out iCloud file/folder sharing

This is still unusable on PC and likely to be just as bad as iTunes was for years if it gets rolled out to Windows.

People have been saying this for years now. Yet here we are and Dropbox still is the most polished product, even compared to big names like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

I think your statement is correct but example is not very good. Majority of Dropbox users are using Windows. Perhaps if Azure were to come out with Dropbox-like functionality this would be more apt. (I'm sure that Azure has at least some Dropbox-like functionality but is still a distance away from replacing Dropbox)

Ignoring OneDrive for the moment, Azure File Storage is rather cool as it doesn't work by synchronizing copies of files it is literally a cloud based SMB drive:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/files/

It's not terribly user friendly at the moment - I have wondered if there is a market for a nice easy to use front end for it...

Microsoft OneDrive for Business is moving in that direction. Online collaboration of Office files, couple of clicks sharing and security controls that Enterprise IT departments love. I'd still say Dropbox is easier to use with a cleaner interface. However with so many Fortune 500 Enterprises already in bed with Microsoft, OneDrive for Business has a leg up.

I use it for mirroring a significant percentage of my disk across Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android. There's no way I'd ever drop it for one brought out by a platform vendor, especially not one brought out by Apple.

iCloud has one of the worst user-experiences I've ever had of any mainstream product from a major provider. I'm not a tech dunce, but I just couldn't "get" it

Their focus on corporate users must be why their sdk's are horrendous for a migration to their v2 api.

Most users I know are on extensions while their javascript sdk is broken.

Pitching this as the biggest tech IPO since Snapchat isn't very impressive. Kind of shocked they used that comparison.

I only use their web UI, mostly for free online storage / sharing.

I love Dropbox.

Amusingly, I just deleted my account for wholly unrelated reasons last week.

Strangely enough, they actually deleted mine recently. I was using a few hundred MB and hadn't logged I now for a few years and got a notification that unless I logged in they were wiping my data. Not something that typically occurs these days.

So what's the advantage of Dropbox over FTP? Seriously. I have only used it for sharing large files. What else good is it?

The advantage is that Brenda from accounting is capable of using it without too much trouble.

seamless integration with loads of apps (especially on mobile). Lets you build a "cloud" feature into apps without actually needing servers.

It's not super useful for big stuff, but nice if you're trying to write stuff just for yourself.

I don't know why people downvote such a reasonable question.

Reasons are:

1. You just install the client and it works.

2. The files are backed up, while your ftp solution might not be.

3. Your space can grow depending on disk prices without you doing anything for it.

4. A lot of possible merge conflicts between different computers are automatically merged by their smart tooling.

Just FYI: instant.io [0] is a nice tool for sharing large files. It uses web torrent, so data can flow directly between you and the recipient.

[0] https://instant.io

* "It just works" folder syncing (not every FTP client does this, none as well as Dropbox) you can get nearly any colleague or family member using

* Very good online file sharing UI

* And no need to run and secure an FTP server

If you use a cloud-based drive locally, it's reduced to the speed of your internet connection.

If you use a local copy, you have to set up something to sync it with the cloud version, or sync it manually.

Dropbox keeps a local copy for speed, and also syncs automatically. It's the best of both worlds.

It's also easy to use.

It also keeps a file version history.

It removes a whole number of barriers to get access to your files, no mounting network drives, no logging into FTP servers, it's just there and works with your local filesystem.

It's especially useful if you use multiple devices

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