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Comment by thinkharderdev | Hacker News Reader

They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

I don't think Dropbox ever lost that much per year. $200M was lost in 2016 (once Dropbox decided to not burn money like crazy); $300M in 2015. Source: S1 (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518...). In general losses were shrinking, not growing.

(Don't believe the 2018 annual numbers; something like $450M of that "loss" is the result of accounting issues where RSUs converting to stock at IPO is considered an expense)

I have long thought that one of Steve Jobs' biggest errors was in telling Dropbox "that's a feature, not a company." It sure seemed like he was really wrong, but if Dropbox can't make money, maybe he was right after all.

Well it is now a feature in iCloud.

Perhaps those original comments on the DropBox launch people keep referring to were right all along.

And it doesn’t work nearly as well. He underestimated how hard it would be to solve it properly.

Only major thing missing was folder sharing, and it's coming later this year:

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/11/share-icloud-drive-folders-ip...

Perhaps it won't be as polished as Dropbox, perhaps it will. Either way, Dropbox is playing defense versus Apple/Google/Microsoft.

Onedrive at least works great in my experiences. I bave a dropbox account, but my uni supplied me with a huge onedrive allotment. I sync every user file on my computer and I can access it anywhere with an internet connection. The msoffice integrations are great too, and ms office online is pretty feature rich.

Dropbox had a great idea, but it's not hard for a large company to copy it like microsoft did. Apple just does a lot of things half assed if it's not a priority to them. Nothing stopping iCloud from being better than dropbox in a couple years if apple one day decided they gave a damn about it.

What's more, you can likely (depends on country etc) use Office desktop apps and your OneDrive storage on any supported device, including native apps on Android-supporting Chromebooks, for free as long as you have your student ID, as part of their Office 365 for Education programme -- see my other comment (works for teachers too).

They're really competing hard in this space, and I suspect they're trying to get ahead of Google One here. They've already left Dropbox far behind.

OneDrive and OneDrive for Business (which is really the Sharepoint thing) really has turned out to be good. We’ve been using it for about 3 years now in our small business which is mostly a Mac + Office365 + Azure AD shop.

We have a mix of iOS and Android, and some physical and virtual Windows 10 PCs.

The macOS sync client is generally very fast and keeps out of the way. It gets tripped up occasionally, but no more so than any other. It was really clunky when we first started using it for Sharepoint, but they seem to be iterating fast these days and we see very few issues at all.

For Sharepoint365 the sync client means our people just treat it as our “cloud network drive” with selective folder sync options (we don’t use any of the other Sharepoint stuff).

If you’re an Office365 shop, the integration is incredibly nice. I can start work on a Word doc on a PC and save it in OneDrive or Sharepoint365, and then on my iPad open Word and the document is sitting right there as the last file I worked on in the File>Open screen, with a “Go to where you left off” marker when the file is open.

We tried Box and liked it initially, but it became hard to justify it in the face of easy functionality and pricing from Office365+OneDrive. iCloud isn’t flexible enough for most of our business use cases. DropBox performance was always an issue and we didn’t want to saddle our dev laptops with that performance hit.

iCloud is great for Mac/iOS users. I never felt it worked well on Windows. It never felt right. So yes, Apple still has work to do if they want wider iCloud use. Maybe they don't want to?

But Microsoft and Google are creeping up. Their file sync is almost there with Dropbox.

OneDrive works on Mac and Windows, supports Files on Demand (similar to Dropbox Infinite - essentially placeholder files, very useful for small SSDs), and are working on differential sync for 2019.

The kicker is that OneDrive costs $99 as part of Office 365 Home, and gives you + 5 family members each 1TB storage, GBs of Outlook storage, the desktop Office apps for all devices including Android (they run really well on Android-enabled Chromebooks). And access to phone-based support. What's more, many people can get Office 365 discounted to $70 via the new Home Use Program, or even free if they're students or teachers[1].

Google One (one.google.com) is also a pretty formidable offering where available. File storage via Google Drive, a great photo storage service, tons of Gmail space, and access to Google's support teams.

So yes -- file storage is becoming a feature and the Google & Microsoft offerings will end up tempting many customers. Dropbox still does sync really well and has the best app, in my opinion -- including the only one that works on Linux, but I'm not sure that'll be a massive concern for the average customer.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office

> The kicker is that OneDrive costs $99 as part of Office 365 Home, and gives you + 5 family members each 1TB storage, GBs of Outlook storage, the desktop Office apps for all devices including Android (they run really well on Android-enabled Chromebooks)

For those who haven't looked at Office 365 in a while, it should be noted that Office 365 Personal was upgraded a few months ago. It used to be that Personal was for 1 person, with at most 1 Mac, 1 PC, and one mobile device. If you wanted to put the Office applications on more devices than that, you needed Home.

They removed that limit a few months ago. Now Personal lets you install on an unlimited number of computers and mobile devices, with the only limit being at most 5 can be signed in at the same time.

So now it essentially is if you have more than one person in your household who would like an Office 365 account, get Home. That covers 6 people, each of whom gets 1 TB of OneDrive, and can be signed in on up to 5 devices simultaneously. If it is just you, get Personal, which is $30/year less.

I've not figured out if it is possible to buy additional OneDrive storage if you need more than the 1 TB that is included.

> Dropbox still does sync really well and has the best app, in my opinion -- including the only one that works on Linux

That used to be true, but Dropbox decided they no longer wanted that market-advantage.

I’ve uninstalled Dropbox from all my Linux machines because it no longer supports ZFS (or any other file-systems except ext4).

I still use it with btrfs with the aid of this fix: https://github.com/dark/dropbox-filesystem-fix

Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people

I'd be curious if they simply couldn't compete, and they recognized that. Ie, their competition is heavily Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc which offer competing products as part of their suite. Yet, Google/etc doesn't really care about file sharing/storage. It's just one component in a much larger model.

I'd be curious if, due to cloud prices/etc, Dropbox didn't feel they could actually sustain a competitive price and become profitable. So they're trying to expand to other avenues and find something that works.

It's a lack of focus on increasing sales throughput. They should have looked to resolve bottlenecks between when a lead first hits their website and when a sale is finalised.

There's always something along that process that is poor and holding back the rest of the process. An increase in throughput = increased sales.

You don't think their funnel is optimized already? The truth is that Google and Microsoft have the mind shares and products that integrate well with their respective eco systems already. Google Drive and OneDrive just work and are highly affordable already.

Who provides dropboxes actual storage? That provider could just keep squeezing dropbox until the provider creates a copy of dropbox or has them bent over just to the point of them switching to another provider. Maybe dropbox should have been building their own data centers in the mean time, cutting their overhead. That idea of restraining growth in favor of long term stability probably wouldn't sit so well with the shareholders who want their pie tomorrow.

I believe they have migrated most (if not all) of their storage off AWS to their own infrastructure [0].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...

They do have their own storage infrastructure now. It's just a very low margin business and newer entrants like Wasabi are constantly pushing the edge in raw pricing.

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