To quote Jobs about Dropbox - Yelp is a feature not a product.
Steve Jobs made the comment because he probably realized that storage was a big business and he also realized that Dropbox is a direct competitor with iCloud.
Apple out performed Dropbox, but Dropbox is certainly a real company.
File syncing and storage is just a feature that Microsoft and Google give away as part of their other offerings.
It's likely you could build a very healthy business selling people file syncing — I personally use a tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor that seems to be doing just fine. The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.
what is it? I'm lookin for alternatives
In the beginning, there was the 3.5" floppy disk, trudged along in my backpack in its little box with the 4 blank ones (which only ever got used by the slackers who forgot their own), used for little notes on the single README.txt featuring a .LOG at the top so each time I opened it, Notepad would insert the time/date.
Then along came the 1GB Kingston DataTraveller flash drive, what an amazing device! It held not only that increasingly read-only README.txt file, but also a portable knock-off of Onenote 2003 which name I forget (Agilix? Wikidpad? I no longer remember)
Then in 2012, Dropbox rolled into my life and I was in hog heaven, getting up to 5G from various referrals before moving in 2013 to Skydrive (now Onedrive) because a recent HTC purchase included 25GB of free storage space in addition to the already commodious 7GB(!) of free sync space. Clearly I want to be offline first, so I'll keep syncing the briefcase on the flashdrive (now a 4GB SanDisk) and carry that last floppy disk...after all if I still have an IBM USB floppy drive, might as well carry the disk right?
Fast forward several years. The 1GB and 4GB flash drive are keeping each other company in the retirement home of the electronics drawer, ready at a moment's notice to hand me a zipped up copy of Sim City 3000 or Timone and Pumba's Jungle Arcade or other such digital hoarder file from old CDs I dare not read any more but still want their contents.
In my pocket is a whopping 32GB Samsung stainless steel drive, and in my bag where the floppy disk used to live in honor is now a SIXTY-FREAKING-FOUR GB SanDisk extreme pro flash drive featuring Hiran's boot CD, DBAN, Ghost, Kali Linux, Peppermint OS, and more at the touch of a fingertip.
But the files? The briefcase has been synced oh, 4 months ago now? These days I don't plug it in as much, the old habit of plugging it in to work, home devices as soon as I log in long gone. Why do that when I can use Syncthing, an amazing tool that syncs the files with any and all devices however you want to slice n dice em. All you gotta do is introduce them with a handshake and boom, files are synced all over the wire, automatically and without being uploaded to Google's, Microsoft's, or Apple's cloud servers for heuristic analysis and advertising targeting.
I have arrived at file portability nirvana, and it is with Syncthing.
The only caveat I've found so far is that you may have to increase the number of filesystem watches if your default value is too low, otherwise unison won't be able to monitor all of the files you are trying to sync.
It’s the HN equivalent of “less space than the Nomad, No Wireless. Lame.”
It just fucking works. Took a few minutes to set up and it's been working great. Several TB of storage for the price of hardware I already had lying around doing nothing.
This.
The local pizza joint is probably a great family operated business with a enough profit to support the owners + employees (but probably not enough profit to support the owners, employees AND investors).
If you take that same pizza joint and give them $10m from investors, the pizza joint will attempt to franchise their store to a dozen new locations, and they'll probably fail in the process.
Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.
Well, according to some quick searches the founders seem to be doing pretty alright by themselves. It depends if your objective for founding a company is "do something useful" or "get filthy rich as soon as possible"
Social media fits. Syncing documents, maybe not-so-much.
So Dropbox invests in areas where there are possible network effects, like collaborating on documents. Because that's what fits its funding model.
But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.
On its own, probably not. But you could imagine several avenues they could naturally grow into, that would _eventually_ turn them into the equivalent of a full OS. Its not something I would personally bet on, but also not something that, if it worked out, would totally surprise me. E.g. maybe _they_ should have invented Google Docs, and then...
——
Analogy: I offer to cut your lawn every week, and to shovel your driveway/walk when it snows, all for an annual fee you find attractive.
I get a lot pf customers, put together a pitch deck, then raise a bunch of money to expand.
With the money, I buy a fleet of massive snowplows, trucks that can carry ride’em mowers, equipment for doing landscaping, and while I’m at it, I start up a property management company that specializes in AirBnB owners.
“Sorry,” I tell you, “But I have to raise my fees, your property is too small for me to take a advantage of my equipment, and Also it’s inefficient to have lots of small customers so I’m tacking on a per-invoice surcharge.”
Lawn-cutting can indeed grow into a bigger business, and for me, that’s great. But for you, maybe the best thing would be to hire a teenager who is happy cutting lawns for a decent price.
Summary: If a company is in business A, but it isn’t happy doing A and really wants to do B, C, and D to satisfy its investors’ ambitions, that may be an excellent play for the company, but a terrible play for its existing customers.
At one point he and his partner are getting excited that they are on the road to profitability in 6 months. One of their VCs gets upset by this saying that targeting profitability is a sure way to end up with a lifestyle business.
If you're not aiming for this kind of territory, you're not really compatible with the VC financial model, which is designed around high risk and high reward. 30–40% of startups end up in liquidation, and 95% never meet their projections. Unless some your successful companies have fantastic returns, your fund will fail.
This is something you should understand before you take VC money.
But there is probably a reason I'm not drowning in money like most investor types.
Is the problem that it's not enough to sustain a company, or that it's not enough to sustain investors who unreasonable expect constant growth?
I'd posit that Dropbox has a sustainable business, and that their changes will likely hurt the long-term viability of that business.
With Dropbox for instance with the free account, if you have 2GB of storage and use a shared folder with 2GB of storage you still have a total of 2GB.
If you are immersed in the Apple ecosystem, iCloud Drive will be a better solution once they add shared folders in the fall.
- Dropbox "just works" in 99% of my use cases
- OneDrive's synch usually works, but when it doesn't it is because of non-obvious and inconsistent reasons which take time to troubleshoot
Well, what is Dropbox doing wrong that they have to charge so much more? (Given that offering more products for the same price basically equivalent to charging less per product)
If anything, it's likely Dropbox's prices are closer to the true cost of providing the service.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-commercial-cloud-re...
Commercial cloud revenue was $9.6 billion in the third quarter, up 41 percent from a year ago. Revenue in Microsoft's productivity and business processes unit was $10.2 billion as commercial Office revenue grew 12 percent.
Dropbox's entire business relies on reliable file sync. Microsoft on the other hand, has OneDrive as one of many services. If I'm setting up cloud services for businesses that need years of guaranteed service with little change and good customer support, I know Dropbox will be there. Microsoft on the other hand... not so sure.
Remember when OneDrive offered "unlimited" file storage then took it away 1 year later?
The OneDrive client sync (until maybe the past year) was extremely slow and unreliable once you hit 100k+ files. Dropbox was the only one that would get the job done.
Maybe they could give you more devices if you get people to sign up, like they used to give away additional storeage if you got people to sign up for dropbox