Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)
forbes.com
forbes.com
Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts.
Imagine these scenarios:
- A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account. Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing sites.
- A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services.
- A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services.
- A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on youtube...and video takes up a ton of storage.
Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist.
And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a crowded space competing with companies who are making it necessary to have their file sharing services because they're tying all kinds of productivity applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.
Once Dropbox tries to become Flickr/Soundcloud/Youtube, they have the same problem those services have: massive money loss. Playing media at scale is hard and expensive. Especially when Dropbox's niche is easily mutable data. Dropbox doesn't exactly have a massive advertising empire that could subsidize and take advantage of Youtube.
So the one place they did expand into is productivity tools. No one's going to massively share a text document/slideshow/spreadsheet, nor do those things eat very much bandwidth, and it plays into their mutability advantage very well.
Also, Dropbox does support partially syncing large files, so mutability is not necessarily that big of a problem (depending on the file format I guess).
That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now. Change a bit and it tries only sync a bit. Now imagine how difficult that would be to serve with multiple layers of caching.
True, good point.
>That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now
I think OneDrive can do that as well now.
While you are correct that there are technical challenges with delivering lots of media to lot of consumers, these challenges have been handily addressed many times by many companies. In addition Dropbox relies on people installing clients on their devices. For people who are "in their network", why not just use a bittorrent-style method to move the files between users directly?
Most media that people put online isn't consumed. It's a power law distribution. So most of the vacation photos or cover-band songs aren't going to really use any egress bandwidth. But putting those things up consumes space, which pushes users over tiers, which encourages them to upgrade.
When the latest dropbox-tube influencer's videos get watched by 100 million people, that's all 100% advertising to viewers that this person is a "dropboxer", some percentage of which will feel inclined to also start using the service, creating a virtuous cycle of customers who then go and make reaction videos to the first person's reaction videos, which mostly likely will get 10 views but will consume that user's storage -- which sells dropbox's primary service offering.
Finally, why wouldn't dropbox turn a network of people's shareable media into an advertising network?And generate more revenue? It seems hilariously obvious to me that they would do that. After all, isn't that how Google funds 98.999% of all of their offerings?
The power law distribution is problematic because unless you can predict which content becomes a hit, you either treat all the content like it would (extremely expensive), as if it wouldn't (extremely slow and still expensive), or some smart predictive in-between (which is a very hard problem that you can see Netflix/HBO and even Youtube suffers from). You can see Dropbox is working on smart-sync too, because it's pretty critical for keeping costs down.
Besides, you really don't want things to go viral. Viral is expensive to serve and expensive to engineer for.
I think torrent-style distribution is a brilliant idea. Not sure how people will feel about their phone data or metered connections being used, nevermind the engineering challenges of getting torrenting working on a cellular connection.
You're asking Dropbox to essentially become Google without the profitable part (search ads). Way easier said than done. There's very little profit to be made from being a commodity, it's not clear that becoming an umbrella of multiple commodities is any different.
Dropbox is certainly positioned to make a good product, so is Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple. But until people actually start paying for good products so they're profitable products, they won't be built or will keep disappearing to be replaced by subsidized/free mediocre products by Google.
Then they stopped and focused on segmentation to chisel more margin and missed the boat. It’s a shame.
The enterprise sales force that I dealt was a bunch of overpaid folks who didn’t seem motivated to sell. Microsoft and Google gobbled up the enterprise market. And eventually, Adobe will steal the creatives too.
> A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services.
Considering that Amazon offered this exact functionality, and decided it wasn't even worth maintaining, I don't think it's obvious that Dropbox missed something by not doing it at all.
I recently dumped my music collection that previously was on Google Music on Dropbox; I'd easily pay twice what I'm paying for space to get a music app from them that played my stuff on there.
The first two scenarios might have been huge selling points a decade ago, but Spotify replaced music downloads with streaming (not that Dropbox couldn't have made a stream your own music app), and Flickr faded away. I'm not even sure how people save their photos, these days. Just leave them on their phones?
And then for that last remaining few, there's Amazon's free photos storage (if you have Prime)
You need to build an ecosystem/experience around the files rather than just straight up only doing storage.
Third party apps would have helped them remain focused. That ship has, almost certainly, sailed though.
If you're going to be a storage company, why not be the biggest you can...
Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ quote on monopoly businesses, except it happened before they got a proper monopoly. https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg In fact, the early success may have been a curse there, thinking they have the genie in the bottle when they really had not.
> For Party A to have superior bargaining position over the other party (Party B), Party A does not need to have a market-dominant position nor an absolutely dominant bargaining position equivalent thereto, but only needs to have a relatively superior bargaining position as compared to the other transacting party. When Party A has superior bargaining position over Party B, who is a transaction counterpart, it means such a case where if Party A makes a request, etc, that is substantially disadvantageous for Party B, Party B would be unable to avoid accepting such a request, etc, on the grounds that Party B has difficulty in continuing the transaction with Party A and thereby Party B’s business management would be substantially impeded.
Secondly, it doesn't scale, because Android and Windows own the worldwide market share of consumer platforms.
Dropbox was one of the products that grew during the PC and digital wave. Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.
I wish it were true, but neither Google nor Apple have the most basic, brain-dead feature: "Give me a link that I can give anyone, and they can download the thing without jumping through any hoops."
They both require people receiving a file to jump through the hoop of having accounts with them in order to do this most basic action. It's the reason I'm still regrettably paying Dropbox. Anything calling itself a cloud drive should have basic feature where you can send anyone a link and they can download the file with no other requirement than an internet-connected browser.
Admittedly, the s3 console isn't the easiest thing to navigate if you aren't used to it, but I don't really need to do it very often.
...
Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
I have about 300GB of photos there. Some of the files change, sometimes generating quite a lot of space - e.g. I think calculating the deleted files it is quite possible that I have few terabytes of data at any given moment. I looked into getting that space on Digital ocean and it would be way more expensive.
That is not including the price of my own labor, how much time would I spend on managing my own solution? Can I guarantee the same level of safety as Dropbox does? They have people thinking about security, I don't even have time upgrade my servers - beyond automatic update..
We did not even get into weird corner cases... Couple of months ago I was running some machine learning experiments and misconfigured the logging process and ended up with about 15m small log files in my dropbox folder. I had contacted the support and it was dealt with. Had I been using something like SVN I would have to manually purge the history or something like that.
IDK, I am very happy for the value I am getting out of my money. For me the biggest value is that it works and I don't have to do anything about it.
Isn't Dropbox infamous for deleting your files?
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting Dropbox's success.
I say this as a Linux user and paying Dropbox customer.
Dropbox is a result of Google and Microsoft breaking email attachments. It was clear that was the problem even back then.
There's no bloody technical reason why you can't send a couple hundred megabyte attachment nowadays.
I certainly do not want anyone sending me attachments that are a couple hundred megabytes. I don't want to have to prune my mailbox or choke my mail client downloading the attachment. IMAP and POP3 suck for downloading a lot of data. I'd much rather have a resumable HTTPS link I can download whenever I want. Better yet would be a service that let me preview the document before downloading it. Some sort of dropbox-like service maybe.
Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan.
I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".
That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need pushed me away. After their horrible rebranding, I got sick of looking at the ugly new icon on my iPhone. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I now pay something like $10/mo for iCloud storage which works pretty good. Maybe Dropbox no longer needs (or wants) me as a customer, but it’s something I would’ve happily continued to pay for potentially decades to come.
I like the app, and would happily have paid something for it, but as a mostly private user, the lack of a plan between 2 GB / free and 2 TB / $10/month just didn't make sense. $3/month for 5 GB would have been an easy choice.
Now I'm using SyncThing, which I don't love, but gets the job done, is free, and doesn't limit me to a couple devices. I have a folder that syncs to my web server that replaces me sharing things on Dropbox, which works, but is a little cumbersome. (That said, sharing links might be a fun thing to hack into SyncThing.)
On top of that, they're losing sight of the deep OS integration that made them so appealing to Steve Jobs. When a screenshot is automatically saved to Dropbox I'm no longer presented with the option to "Show in Finder" but instead "Show in Dropbox" which instead of snapping open a Finder window slowly launches their kludgy app that isn't at all visually or functionally harmonious with macOS.
How many people who currently pay $10/month would drop down to a $3/month plan if given the option?
I'm fairly certain the math on this paints a clear picture: Offering a $3/month plan would cost them more than it makes them.
For me 100 GB or even 50 GB and no device limit (!) is enough. Give me that for $12 a year and I won't look for alternatives.
How many people would use that? I think more than the $10/month plan.
I would have loved to pay for Dropbox; in fact, in 2008 I did upgrade to 50GB for one year because I liked the company and wanted to help it survive the downturn. But if I had kept that up, I'd have paid $1,200 by now to sync less than 5 MB.
Interesting you mention $3/month. I pay almost exactly that at vultr.com to keep an IPv6 Syncthing instance running so that a copy of my stuff is globally available.
MS in particular has great pricing. $99/year for 5 copies of Office and 1tb of storage. I can’t see the value of Dropbox any more.
Still to this day, I find my ICloud sync folders can be fairly unreliable (files will take a mysteriously long time to appear once in a while) - I've never had anything like that sort of an issue with Dropbox (although I haven't used it in a while).
When pigs manage to fly. FTFY
If your premise is that Google will stop being so frequently incompetent at product and deliver a killer competitor for Zoom, then it's far more likely that Zoom's future is a bright one.
> Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020 ... Zoom will probably suffer the same fate
Nobody killed Dropbox either, they have continued to expand year after year. Dropbox has grown its business every year for the past decade plus. You act like the competition wiped them out, when nothing like that has happened at all: Dropbox doubled the size of their business over the prior three fiscal years (2017-2019). I'm pretty sure that reasonably qualifies as thriving.
Zoom is growing even faster than Dropbox did, they'll be larger than Dropbox in another few quarters. So how many years will it take for the competitors to catch up in a way that considerably slows Zoom down and how large will Zoom be at that point?
Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.
Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company.
File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company.
The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat.
These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.
That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations.
For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.
Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise.
Or supported.
Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.
Sorry, but I have to post this now:
https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl
"xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes."
"You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses."
It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.
I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.
Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation).
And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is orders of magnitude bigger than that!
So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while.
Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.
Something to be said about tools you forget that you’re even paying for, they silently make your life better.
Lately, they’re getting slightly annoying though. Designers at Dropbox - it’s a fucking file syncing tool, not a life philosophy. Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido(retired)...ehhh engineers to do their thing.
The problem is the shareholders. Dropbox doesn’t need to grow. It can stay the same and continue to be helpful (and make money, provide a living to many employees). But the goddamn shareholders will ruin a perfectly good product. Public companies get hollowed out and the marrow sucked by the shareholders. I want a Drew Houston & Sons Co.; not Dropbox Incorporated.
I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux filesystems bizarrely - forcing me to reimage multiple machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour on non-ext4. I also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason I haven’t swapped to something else is my life is locked into it from the early days. I’d love to drop it at this point. I don’t even need that much space - just something cross platform.
I think you're referring to this fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209
No, something must be done, and trying to force themselves deeper into their customers’ workflows is something. So they did it.
Why shy away from competition? Should face it.
Guido van Rossum? He retired.
Guido retired last November.
what I don't get is why they don't have a price plan in the 100-200GB range like google drive has for two or three bucks. I've set up like seven or eight of those for family members and relatives, it's a very good price point and size for the average user.
The free plan of dropbox pretty much is super small and the next thing is 5TB.
What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on Dropbox which I have been (a free ) user for 8 years.
I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the worse, I also got super confused about their site which didn’t try to sell to people but instead to enterprise only.
As a person that needs around 300gb and want it integrated with my MacBook/iPhone I ended up paying for iCloud .
For me, OneDrive and Google Drive are not enough simply because of their terrible sync system. Back then when OneDrive was just launched the speed for me was absolutely horrible (like <100KB/s). Sure, I'd like if I could just buy space as I grow, as I remembered it was a hard decision to buy 1TB (back then) when I only needed 50GB.
I currently have >600,000 files in my Dropbox. I don't know if other system can reliably deal with this many files, Dropbox has proved it to me that it can deal with my files on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
much cheaper
works great
The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job to wok on dropbox part-time.
The problem I see with pg's logic is that the founder and YC are not betting the same value on the company. The way I see it, YC is asked to bet some money, but the founder is asked to bet everything they got. If YC was asked to bet everything they had on that one company, they'd say no. In that case, having a plan B is not a sign of lack of resolve, it's a sign of sanity.
But I'm probably missing something. I really don't have the whatsitcalled, entrepreneurial spirit. It all looks like gambling to me and I hate gambling, especially when the odds are stacked against me; which they always are, otherwise it's not gambling. So I guess I don't get it.
I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much effort, it's likely that if you're not able to quit to work on it, you'll lose out to a team that can.
PS: I'm saying this as a founder who quit his job (as did my co-founder) when it looked liked we had something, and I doubt Overleaf would be where it is today if we'd not. So I may be biased in that direction!
Not to mention, the UI is easy and (shockingly in this day and age) gets out of my way so I can focus on the content.
And easy pricing tiers. For just $15 a month I get a 10-collaborator project. Thanks Overleaf team!
Edit: hansvm is right, Overleaf is cool :)
I'm a longitme paid Dropbox user for personal things and I have the exact _opposite_ feeling.
I want Dropbox to a be a single folder that is always synced perfectly to anywhere the app is. Things like link sharing, API access, "smart sync", etc are nice bonuses.
But, they had VC money (and are now public). They couldn't have been content with a complete product, there always needed to be _more_. I'm a paying user, but I still have "pay us more!" banners. They want me to connect my calendar [1]. They want me to use their writing suite with my (nonexistent) team. Their mac app has become increasingly invasive over the years. [2]
I constantly feel "left behind" by them as a customer. Their product motivation so far from the reason I joined them. Each year as my renewal date looms, I look for reasonable alternatives. Ultimately it has the best syncing and I've stuck with it, but I'd almost pay extra to get rid of all the extra junk that's "integrated" with the service now. Just sync my files.
[1]: https://cdn.zappy.app/b874d95cff539ec74d76e9dcd8679dad.png [2]: https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-di...
Slack used to be simple, now it’s a mess of different teams, with a thousand channels, each with threads and document tools and integrations and slash commands to remember.
Google Drive with Insync was better, but had absolutely no bandwidth limiting, so it ate all of my meager upload speed a lot of the time.
There are also the obvious issues of hosting your files with American companies, if you're not fond of various three letter agencies looking through your stuff. I do t have anything even remotely incriminating, but I am opposed to widespread secret surveillance on principle.
So I use pCloud, which is hosted in Switzerland. Their Linux client is great, their pricing is decent, they have reasonable media streaming built in (supports FLAC, too) and their sharing links are easy to use and don't require people to register accounts. They also have good undelete features (30 days standard, up to a year for an additional fee).
I switched to syncthing and so far I love it. Now my data lives on 2 always online servers plus few laptops, vms.
And it could: Dropbox Paper is still the best editing experience I've ever had. If it allowed for better organization and search, it would blow Notion out of the water.
It sucks for them because I was very outspoken about them beforehand because I used it. Then it changed from endorse to absolutely tell people to stay away because it’s unusable.
Penny wise pound foolish.
Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.
Something described as "lackluster" is lacking luster, not lust.