A letter from Drew and Arash
dropbox.com
dropbox.com
Between 2012-2016 I was studying for my PhD. I kept all my files in Dropbox (as well as some other places, but Dropbox was the one place I trusted with everything at once). I was paying for a premium account at the time, and had dozens of GB of stuff stored in my account. I stopped paying for it in 2016.
Yesterday I wanted to show someone a protein model image [0] I made during my PhD. I logged into my old Dropbox account, and found all the content preserved there. I haven't paid them for two years, but they archived all my stuff and asked politely for me to reactivate the account in order to sync it again. But I can retrieve individual files if I don't pay. That's an extremely gracious and dependable service, compared to my experience of other companies.
Congratulations Dropbox on your IPO, and on creating a product used seamlessly by hundreds of millions that really makes people's digital lives easier.
Having experienced such high-trust service, I'm going to start paying them again.
0: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3...
Now if only they would offer client side encryption[0] - at least optional. Maybe with slower search or some missing features or an inferior experience to those customers who want this.
It would just become even more awesome :)
The UX design (which they are usually praised for) is pretty subpar for this page in general. The "..." button seems to be broken(on firefox on linux) and there's a useless comment pane that isn't autohidden and has a grayed out "enable comments" button for no reason. (EDIT: It seems this only happened because I am on a 4k resolution monitor so I guess it's forgivable)
... But I tried looking up Paper just now and saw that their register page, https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register, has broken UI too:
https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png (blue text on blue background)
I really don't get why Dropbox gets praised for their attention to detail.
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[0] - Also, if we're talking about publishing through Dropbox, then RIP Public folder.
Sincerely, though: congrats on the IPO. I always liked the main product. The Linux support is a differentiator I appreciate.
Mindful design, as I define it, is a theory designed to preserve connection, respect/grow attention, responsible use emotion as an input, and be anti-addictive. It starts with human centered design (where innovation practices currently are, to my knowledge). From there, we add mindfulness, nonviolent communication, category theory, and computer science to hack our language so we can better communicate with each other.
I'm tired and know I'm leaving things out here, but this is where I started researching over a year ago. I'm now working on a programming language for humans to program themselves through with the written/spoken word being the only technology required for it to work. I'm looking for help from anyone interested.
From my perspective, Dropbox actually facilitates an old, broken way of creating and sharing documents using desktop applications from the 1990s and earlier. Google, by combining drive with docs, allows users to completely escape desktop applications, which to me is really the next generation of computing. To make this more concrete, if a company adopts Google Drive, they can issue employees much cheaper computers (lowering capex) because they don't have to be able to run heavyweight OS and application software like Windows and MacOS. Dropbox isn't even an entrant into that space, and I don't really see how they could compete.
When I look at a company and find out they're using Dropbox, I always think to myself that they probably made that choice either because they've been using it for a long time, or because they didn't want to go to the effort to change their business processes to really embrace network computing. I imagine office workers running Word instead of Chrome, and that bothers me. Either way, I see Dropbox positioned as a stopgap to allow companies to avoid plowing ahead with new work paradigms while still enabling sharing of files without using things like USB keys.
I don't work for either company, never have. But I remain confused about Dropbox's mission. Short of being acquired by someone, I can't see the way forward for them. But, they just raised a ton of cash, so I'm as excited as anyone to see what they try.
EDIT: I want to briefly respond to the argument in this thread that it's a _good_ thing that Dropbox doesn't tie an office suite to sharing files. I simply disagree. I don't see how that is a real concrete negative to anyone unless it's for political reasons ("I don't want Google to be too powerful"). I _do_ however see how it's a problem for the vast majority of office workers who, using Dropbox, have to either keep using desktop applications or (shudder) create documents in something like Google Docs and then reupload them into Dropbox. So, at best Dropbox's independence strikes me as neutral, but for most people it seems clearly negative.
"Imagine all the people sharing all the world...I hope some day you'll join us. And the world will be as one."
- John Lennon
Drew, you picked worthy source material.
Geez. You are a file hosting service. Stop pretending like you fixed the world's hunger or something.
Nah, you're just enriching someone else while building chat apps less capable than what existed 20 years ago while telling yourself you're doing good. That same effort would probably have a bigger impact somewhere else. You can tell yourself that but it's a justification for cash. "Wealth" and "progress" aren't inherently good.
I know people who build stuff that people around the world use, they don't talk about how Einstein would've used their stuff or drop "enlightened" multiple times in posts. They shut their mouths and work. I know people who volunteer their time and money to make other people's lives better. None of them are billionaires.
This puffy stuff associating yourself with some kind of moral and technological revolution is the worst part of tech and is the justification for the same kinds of abuses we've seen at Facebook this past week. It'd be better if people would just say "yeah, we wanted to be rich, we made a great app". The overwrought language is the stuff of parody and is tone deaf.
Remember, this is a self-congratulatory post celebrating the founders becoming incredibly wealthy. This ethos of not only needing to be incredibly wealthy but also acting like you're great people because you are wealthy and needing other people to know that you're both wealthy and good is empty and vain and ultimately destructive because at the end of the day, there are lots of people who are just greedy. The cryptocurrency scams and Juicero people use the same language and are empowered by doing so. I've seen rooms of non-tech academics (whose work actually has changed the world) laugh about stuff like Juicero, the tech world often doesn't realize how they look to outsiders.
It's surprising and not surprising that VC money has become so central to the hacker ethic, but it's distressing we can't just talk like people and be realistic about what we're achieving and enabling.
I tend to share similar sentiment in general, but this is a bit rich, talking about Dropbox, whose biggest feature is that it does one (useful) thing and does it well better than anyone else in 2012, and better than anyone else now. And they've made a huge impact worldwide - by covering something almost every computer user needs with a solution that's easy and reliable.
I actually liked their letter, because it suggests they'd like to build something other than bullshit-but-shiny, acquihire-ready web apps. I applaud everyone who tries that way instead of the typical startup playbook.
In the context of this conversation, the poster was justifying working at megacorps and "having to believe" that they were making the world a better place. Some of those megacorps are not doing that, so forcing yourself into belief is the step towards delusion and unreality.
I actually liked their letter, because it suggests they'd like to build something other than bullshit-but-shiny, acquihire-ready web apps. I applaud everyone who tries that way instead of the typical startup playbook.
Is it too much to just underpromise and overdeliver? By couching their goals in those terms, Dropbox is not just trying to make a better product, they're seeking some kind of enlightenment, something which is utopian. It's unachievable. It's the same kind of speech you'd give to soldiers before they're going to go off to battle to die in some pointless war.
I'd rather see people say specifically what they aim to achieve, be realistic about it, and then do it. The tech world likes to talk about itself too much (I know, that's rich), but the people I personally respect don't talk about how great they are, they're just great, and everyone knows it.
Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king.
Yeah. That fragment irked me the wrong way, too.
> I'd rather see people say specifically what they aim to achieve, be realistic about it, and then do it.
I'd rather see that, too. I guess, with so much phonies in our industry, I'm willing to cut some slack for people actually doing something useful when they go too pompous with their marketing copy.
Best of luck to you.
Yet it took off and two years ago played a large role in deciding the world's current political situation.
So as a service's sphere of influence grows, so must their company vision, in order to ultimately maximize growth and profit for their stakeholders.
I'm sure Dropbox started as a solution to an annoying problem. But today its userbase is massive, so their business strategy must adapt to that as well.
And in tech, if you don't keep moving forward, you get killed.
The features are all there (that I notice), but the performance has horrible. If Dropbox is about user friendliness, they can render the HTML on their server.
The hype has to be perpetuated, lest this fact become reality: the OS vendors can wipe this business out with a single update.
Speculation: momentum of people who were early on the cloud adoption curve who are implicitly/behaviorally entrenched by accrued data volume. That doesn't sound to me like the foundation of a solid business with growth potential (see: IBM). Those kinds of users are ultimately going to be fairly price sensitive given the substitutability of the product and therefore not marginally monetizable. They may already also perceive themselves as paying an 'inconvenience penalty' vs GDrive/iCloud.
Honestly, this looks like exactly what it might very well be: rich Silicon Valley investors dump a squeezed, has-been company into the frothy public market to tap into 'dumb' liquidity.
I should clarify I don't have anything against Dropbox itself. I do have a problem with pushing a dud into the public market at an irresponsible valuation to effectively defraud uninformed people and desperate institutional investors with low accountability who are facing a drought of good return opportunities (e.g. mutual fund and pension fund managers). You can hem and haw around it all you want ("oh they'll build new features", etc), but the growth expectation baked into their valuation is more or less predicated on extrapolating a pattern of success they are unlikely to be able to replicate. Cloud storage is commoditized and they're competing against monster platforms that are better positioned than them to capture new business and siphon their existing users (applies even in enterprise, arguably they lose against Box but certainly against Microsoft and now even Google). So they're being paid to try to tap into new verticals as very late contenders (e.g. Dropbox Paper)? There's no there there. It's wrong. In my opinion, it's fraud and only slightly less awful than the behavior surrounding the dotcom bust.
They're in the "file sync" market. They want to be in the collaboration market. Hence the John Lennon-esque post.
I think the fairly obvious answer to this is "Yes". Or you can continue to believe your conspiracy theory.
- It came first.
- It does one thing and does it well.
- It does it across all platforms.
- It isn't tied to other product offering. That's a feature, not a bug. It means Dropbox isn't pushing other bullshit on you, unlike GSuite/Office356, where file syncing is a second-class citizen meant to encourage you to use relevant company's cloud office suite.
- Therefore, it's free to offer integrations between usually competing companies. It integrates with GMail just as well as it does with regular Word documents. But integrations are still a side story, they don't interfere with the core competency - being a folder that syncs.
Seriously, I'm not sure why would people use OneDrive or Google Drive, when there's Dropbox.
Also, I use Google for some purposes but not for file sync. I don't want all my eggs in one basket.
Gdrive has some really backwards folder integration and Ive been told inferior API compared to dropbox from developers who have used it
Dropbox handles complex folder structures easily compared to gdrive and other services
Dropbox came first as well
Dropbox gives you exactly what you put into it. Gdrive and onedrive this is not the case. More so onedrive if anything it feels close to PUPware since it forces itself in the OS. Gdrive integrates automatically with google services, giving you less refined control over folder structures.
Theres many cloud software solutions out there but have you tried putting them under stress tests? They have always given me problems (e.g. high CPU usage , long sync times, no revision history, lack of integration to common applications such as wordpress, forced integrations on install, poor UX UI upfront on website, poor mobile integration, lack of easy sharing and collab). I think users who consider cloud storage a commodity dont put high valuation on their data (e.g. users who think cloud software A is better than dropbox because its cheaper per GB storage). Its like going to the grocery store and buying the cheapest meat possible(ground beef), stating there all nutritionally similar, and missing the point on key differences on higher quality meat / taste.
I don't work for dropbox, but they're clearly doing something right or they would not have been able to keep so many customers happy enough to keep giving them their money.
That said, just because they were successful their opinions should not necessarily be treated as gospel or the path to riches for others. Survivorship bias is something to keep in mind: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440