The Dropbox Comp
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Dropbox is the only cloud service that I absolutely love since it was released, the only one I really want to support... and the only one I am not paying for. I pay for iCloud and for Google Drive, 2-3$/month each.
As a normal user, I do NOT need 1 To of storage for 10$ a month. I need a few hundreds Go, and am happy to pay 2-3$ a month for those.
I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still... My money is just waiting to be taken and has been for years. This year, I gave up on waiting for them and started paying for Google Drive, and unloaded some old files from Dropbox to Drive.
I would just like the exact same features I've been using since years, but with a few more Go of space available. That's all I am asking for. And that's 25$ a year I would be willing to give Dropbox, instead of me being a free-rider since years.
I want to support them, but not at 5x the price of competitors.
The fact of the matter is, if Company A doesn't meet their needs but Company B does, they will pay Company B, and no amount of great software, service, and wages for very talented people will change that.
http://www.syncdocs.com/2011/09/backup-your-files-to-google-...
Seriously. I am still surprised that to this day none of the big players can compete at Dropbox’s level. Not even Apple can make iCloud “Just Work™” the way Dropbox’s client apps and service work.
As a customer I use Dropbox because of how well it works, not because of its $/GB.
Not surprising. Apple's main business isn't building a file syncing service and while they're a much larger corporation I'd bet that Dropbox has more resources dedicated to its core product compared to Apple's iCloud file syncing offerings.
If Apple iCloud worked as well as Dropbox, I’d switch in a heartbeat.
But Dropox? Always works great. Always. Never had a problem. So I use them more and more. Too bad I can't encrypt my entire Dropbox like, say, Spideroak but oh well.
You might give gocryptfs [1] a try, with it you can keep [part of] your content encrypted in Dropbox.
I think the true reason you don't see too much fierce competition, is because of little profit you can make off of offering a raw storage, even with awesome client.
Even the almighty Dropbox alone may never be profitable...
https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-for-a-500-million-i...
That makes no sense. That's like saying a restaurant won't server a single to somebody, because they serve the best steak! Families are a good example where Dropbox are pricing themselves out (I ended up up going with pcloud because I couldn't justify paying Dropbox for all that space we don't need).
Donate it to the FSF, or EFF or Wikipedia or something. Otherwise this sounds like “I’m cheap; give me a discount”.
Not wanting to pay is fine. Complaining about it in this manner is cheap.
Imagine if airlines only had first class tickets, would it be cheap to say "plz sell me a cheaper ticket with less leg space and alcohol"?
If you want a pay per GB service, setup a S3 account (or similar) and get one of the many decent frontends to it. Its what I do.
My personal use case involves files stored on a NAS, which is accessible via VPN and any client with a file browser (so, basically every platform). NAS is backed up via rclone to cloud storage. Its not sync, but I dont really want files synced to all my devices.
I think $10 for a windows/mac/linux desktop app, $5 for a android/Ios version. (Maybe get all versions for $20)
You drop in an S3 or Azure storage key, it lists the files, create containers, lets you upload/download to whatever device you are on at the time.
Not necessarily a dropbox killer since you'd have to have a cloud storage account and no how to use it, but it would definitely serve a certain niche.
However I don't think storage is really their concern, their product is the syncing capability, the apps on all devices, Dropbox Paper etc.
Additionally I'd be really interested in knowing what % of paying customers actually use their 1TB allowance, or even half of it. This is probably where the majority subsidise the cost of the "whales", like at an all you can eat buffet
I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still...
The reason is not the focus on enterprise. It is that most of their competition makes money on other products (Google - Ads, Microsoft - Windows/Office, Apple - Hardware), so they can sell storage at cost price or even as a loss-leader.
You want to pay $2-3 for a few hundred GBs of storage space. But this is highly redundant storage, generally requires plenty of bandwidth, and they need to hire developers to improve the Dropbox backend and apps. Oh, and throw in support for some customers. Obviously, charging only $2-3 per month would be a terrible business choice.
I don't pay 10 Euro per month for the storage. For me the product is the absolutely stellar sync (with LAN sync, partial file sync, etc.), combined with wide platform support (including Linux), the file request functionality, and the fact that they are not in the business of selling my private data. I have paid for Dropbox a couple of years now and I am using 'only' 290 GB. I would still use Dropbox for 10 Euro for 500GB and probably even 10 Euro for 100GB.
The cost for dropbox to host your 10MiB vs 1TiB is likely the same. Those numbers are so small, the fixed costs of the infrastructure (engineers, hard drives, networks) is way higher than the difference in storage space.
My only choice is to get a business plan that costs x4.5 as much and provides me with 3 users accounts that I don't need. They're going to force me to switch to a competing provider like GDrive or SpiderOak
Meanwhile Dropbox has a CLI client for your headless servers.
Is there a reason? I just want to understand.
If you want $/GB, try Backblaze's B2 or Amazon S3.
You're asking them to change their services just for you before you've even started paying. Just imagine the headache you'll be to deal with once you feel entitled as a paying customer.
Stated another way, very roughly, at most 33% of your money went to storage. The real number is probably lower than 33% because the 33% includes support, but let’s use 33% for simplicity.
That means of $100 per year for the 1 TB plan, very roughly[2] $33 is spent on storage. If one wanted to ask “How much less would it cost Dropbox to provide me with 250 GB than 1 TB?” the answer is probably at most 75% of $33 [3], or about $24.
So, if your argument is that Dropbox should offer a 250 GB plan that incorporates their decrease in cost, that 250 GB plan would be priced at about $76/year, not $25.
(These numbers may be a little off because the S-1 doesn’t have per-plan COGS, but they probably aren’t far enough off to change the conclusion. Maybe it’s $70 or $80, but it’s not $25.)
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Dropbox add a less expensive plan, but I’m guessing it would be 10 or 25 GB, not 250, and thatthe plan would be significantly less profitable than their current consumer plan (that is, they’d intentionally ignore the conclusion above). IMO, they’d do so because they thought enough subscribers to this new plan would (a) upgrade to the bigger plan (or business service) eventually, and (b) stay on the free plan forever otherwise. This plan’s entire purpose would be to get users used to paying for something.
1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518... page F-4
2: This is inferring based on company-wide COGS and revenue, even though COGS almost certainly varies by plan.
3: In practice, the decrease in COGS is probably less because the average usage on a 1 TB plan will be much less than 1 TB.
I've built dozens of HTML/Flash/Java uploaders on dozens of different infrastructures, and there's always a host of issues that need to be dealt with. When a product's UX doesn't work with FTP, it requires a lot of extra engineering.
But allowing your customers to move files around with their Dropbox account completely eliminates this problem. The HTML5 File API has largely solved this (though it still exists, I still have to occasionally restart YouTube uploads. YouTube!), but Dropbox could have been the solution, and I can't imagine how many startups weren't built on top of Dropbox because they didn't want to be in the replacing-FTP business.
Paper has been a huge change in the way my team collaborates on documents, between the very easy sharing and super fast interface. I'd love to see what they can do for email and calendars.
What I think the article gets right is that Dropbox focused on files - which are being abstracted away. At my current company, we have Dropbox and Google Drive, but it's clear that if we're going to use G-Suite then Dropbox needs to go.
What they could do: with their new-found public status, they could buy Smartsheet to get a solid Google Sheets competitor. I'm sure they can find a calendar provider.
Of course, I'm not confident that they should point their ship into the eye of Office 365 and G-Suite - I just don't see what their other options are.
And the support for equations makes it great for sharing research notes as well.
Dropbox has a lot going for it. While the concept of a "file" is constantly being abstracted away by The Powers That Be, its still the most general form of data storage and sharing, and its something every power user will always need. Dropbox has proven that they have unique organizational expertise in this area; competitors have had years to come up with something as powerful as Dropbox Sync, and no one has yet. I'd argue Google is the only company close, and its still not as good.
I might be in the minority, but I am fine with Dropbox's product development speed. They could go out and buy new companies, but I'm afraid they'd start approaching "Atlassian-style" product development; silos of products that only work together through tightly defined integration paths, bad user experiences, promoting a piecemeal "we use Jira but nothing else because they're not the same product" approach instead of a single "Dropbox Experience".
What I'm not fine with is their product direction. Enterprise features are great! But Showcase? Why did they have anyone working on that? They should be focusing on attacking the team collaboration space. Maybe that means building out knowledge base functionality like Quip or Confluence. Maybe that means more Paper-like document types, like powerful spreadsheets or spreadsheet/database hybrids like Airtable. Maybe that means enterprise chat like Slack! Or, maybe foundational PIM tools like email, calendar, contacts, custom domain management, etc. I don't know. But they definitely do feel like they're in a period where they're not sure what direction they should be moving in, and I hope they fix it.
They have all of the tools needed to do it well.
I haven't used Paper, but based on the video it appears to be much more straight forward in team approach than Quip or GDocs. To me Gdocs feels like it's a more full featured replacement to Office and Quip is too simplistic of an approach. Paper seems to perfectly hit the middle ground.
Quip is a definite competitor. It tends to do better for knowledge base style collaborations, whereas Paper is better for ephemeral collaboration. But it is lightweight and focused enough to be useful for both.
As a sidenote, I really think Google is missing an opportunity here. Drive could really use a Paper-style competitor. Start with the collaboration foundations of Docs, but remove all the cruft. No font changing, no formatting beyond what's in markdown, remove all the menus, streamline the interface, add some integrations like embedding Sheets-style spreadsheets. They'd capture a lot of marketshare that has G-Suite domains, but reaches out to other tools to manage ephemeral collaborations and knowledge bases.
But Carousel was really consumer-focused, whereas Paper is clearly (presented as) a business tool. I think that they realized with Carousel that most Pro users use Dropbox for work, so that is where the money is.
As someone who also uses Dropbox for work, I think that they could make Dropbox even more attractive by adding some services. They should not try to compete heads-on with full office suite, but I can imagine that Paper + Calendaring + Chat could really be awesome for work.
I really wish I could agree with the others saying "It just works" for dropbox sync. I have ran into many other issues around filename casing, file permissions, symlinks, etc in the past.
There's lots of 3rd party solutions for .dropboxignore personally I've used many of them and am not a fan of it (perl scripts, 3rd party apps, etc). I wish dropbox would natively implement .dropboxignore, but its probably never going to happen since only a small % of users voice their concerns for it. Average dropbox user probably doesn't care or doesn't know what a .dropboxignore is.
Also dropbox's 30 day version history did save me a couple times when I accidentally deleted something before committing. And not having to worry about losing the day's work even if your computer fails is good for peace of mind.
That said this hits a lot of edge cases with dropbox syncing since it's not built for this kind of workflow. Every time you do npm install it will cause thousands of files to sync. I have had the .git folder get corrupted when I start using it before it has fully synced. Or git would handle syncing internal symlinks/permissions/casing differently and I would need to rely on git to restore.
That and if you have to sync with another PC at home makes your computer sluggish for like half an hour while its syncing
My solution to you is to have your code repos in another storage solution (not dropbox). Unfortunately you would have to pay for that too
Or, you could use a built in IDE that has a autosave local revision history. I know most of the brainstorm products have this feature, such as PHPstorm. This would prevent accidentally deleting something before committing
For incomplete commits / switching computers, I can't really think of any workarounds for this unfortunately. Dropbox is very convenient here. The only solution is to use something like teamViewer and remote into your desktop PC from your laptop
I started out with just one folder syncing everything in '/home/kindone', that takes 30 minutes just to scan every time I started syncthing. Syncing over the LAN would not saturate my network unless it was a large file. That took about five hours to get everything synced when you have 700,000+ 4 - 400KiB c/c++ files. (It seems to send about 4 - 5 files at a time, someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
I removed '/home/kindone' and creating separate folders in syncthing for things like '/home/kindone/build/linux-4.14', /home/kindone/build/wine', and '/home/kindone/Dropbox'. Created about 65 different folder for various things, added them to my other machine on the LAN (that was annoying). Once they started syncing my 100Mbps LAN was saturated. Starting syncthing now takes 5 minutes to scan everything.
- the three host range from pretty fast (Coffeelake @ 5 GHz, 32 GiB, Samsung 950 Pro) to just ok fast (some i5 @ 3 GHz, 8 GiB, files from a fast NAS on 10 Gibps)
- I two syncthing folders, with a 90/10 split. Some 155k directories between them. The smaller one is scanned every 6 seconds, the other every hour.
- I have disabled relaying etc. so traffic is only p2p and LAN-only, static IPs.
Observations: Scanning is slow, which is expected. However, even when the scanning is done and Out of Date files are found, nothing happens. Zero bytes are transfered. The syncthing process is running, but at a fairly low rate. Sometimes pausing and resuming seems to start things going, but not always. Even when data is traveling, it's pretty slow, at most 70 MB/s, and usually way under this rate.
Another frustration with Syncthing is that there are entirely too many knobs to frob. I like how setting up Dropbox is stupidly simple and to set up a new host is 1) install Dropbox and 2) add my userid/password, done.
As I have honestly looked for a Dropbox alternative for what must be a decade (primarily because Dropbox, Inc. can read my files) it's truly astonishing to me that nothing else works as well. Of course I have considered writing my own clone, but there are other projects to work on and I don't discount how difficult the problem really is.
EDIT: rewording
EDIT2: FWIW, another "solution" I'm evaluating is to endorse Dropbox but run gocryptfs on top for sensitive files.
I guess you could ask on the forums, https://forum.syncthing.net about your issues and see what they say.
There is room for Dropbox to expand and grow revenue beyond file storage/syncing. One hopes the billions they will raise after IPO will be applied to a more drop.io-ish offering.
Don't get me wrong - Box's initial S1 also had some very abstract cohort metrics. They took some very early cohorts and extrapolated from that. I think they are more open now as there is more stability in those metrics and they are moving in the right direction.
- He seems to believe Dropbox is superior technically.
- Box is Dropbox's closest competitor.
- Fundamentally there are two ways of making money from storage, enterprise direct-sales and consumer self-service.
- Box has self-service as a loss-leader for direct-sold enterprise accounts, and accounts for the operating costs of its self-service accounts as a marketing expense.
- Dropbox doesn't; we don't really know Dropbox's cost of customer acquisition, which is a big deal for a consumer product.
- A much greater percentage of Box's accounts are paying customers
- Box can put together customized offerings for enterprise customers in ways Dropbox can't and so Box has negative churn.
- On the other hand, running the business this way means that the early investors in Dropbox (including Drew Houston) kept a far larger part of the company for themselves.
- Box is outperforming Dropbox in the market.
- Atlassian is outperforming both of them.
- File storage is probably not the strategic high ground for enterprise computing, something Thompson used to think.
Dropbox is about to go public. An analysis that suggests they're a niche company is a big deal. Dropbox's investors will be betting that they're not.
I think my answer is biased due to the 300GB unlimited account I have though.