Dropbox for Teams
dropbox.com
dropbox.com
2. The pricing page is confusing, it looks as if there are two Dropbox for Teams plans, but really they're just comparing it to standard Dropbox.
Reading the "Dropbox for Teams" FAQ, I don't see if this problem has been fixed. It seems pretty essential for a lot of "team" functionality.
Email works the same way. I think transitive sharing what people expect. The alternative is:
"You can see and edit files in this folder, but if you want to share it with someone else, you must duplicate it and then share the copy."
Okay, as soon as I note that Alice shared the folder with Bob, I can stop using it.. but what's the point in that?
In addition, some teams really need separation of knowledge. Perhaps I have some financial or contract files which most of my employees should not read, but I want to share them with my accountant and my lawyer. This feature reeks of "enterpriseyness", so I understand that Dropbox probably doesn't want to deal with it, but it is valuable to small businesses as well.
Just because an employee can copy out all files does not make it acceptable for software to re-share out confidential data without so much as sending a notification to the owner. There's no such thing as perfect security, but raising the bar and making malicious behavior more difficult is not a bad thing, especially when it improves the UX.
Specifically, if someone has malicious intent, software is not likely to stop them.
You can't solve people problems with software is a often used mantra.
Sure, she can do that if all she wants to do is copy it once.
But what if the folder's contents are frequently being changed and she wants to keep Bob abreast of them? If files in it are being changed, and new ones are added?
Then she has to make the effort to track changes and repeatedly email them to Bob.
It's a matter of the amount of friction involved, and there can be a big difference in friction between being able to share-by-copy things and just giving access to the folder.
The nightmare scenario is: (1) Alice re-shares my folder with Bob, and I don't know about it. (2) I don't have the "preserve modifications infinitely" option turned on in my Dropbox account. (3) Bob starts to make malicious changes to my files. (4) I discover this more than 30 days later, which means I can't recover the original files.
At the end of the day, Dropbox can do whatever it wants, but that feature basically eliminated many potential customers from ever using it.
Dropbox is the absolutely easiest cloud storage service out there, that's certain, and I'm sure many people will find this a fair package with a fair price. But I suspect most teams of up to 5 people will find this price way above the opportunity cost of setting up and getting used to a different cloud storage service.
It bears repeating: I'm not saying it's a bad package, and it would be foolish of me to assume that the market will perceive this price the way I did. But I do think they should have started offering something simpler and cheaper, and worked their way up to plans like the one they just launched.
And it comes with 200GB per user and the unlimited version history feature turned on, so this is actually cheaper than five 100GB personal pro accounts ($19.99 per user per month) and it comes with twice the storage and the Teams features! A bargain!
The only remaining question is why Dropbox presents the data as they do. Perhaps they did some A/B testing? My hypothesis would be that individuals and companies simply think of prices in different units. I predict that the discussion here on HN will bear this out: Someone will complain about $795/year but be happy to pay $13.25 per month. ;)
They really should advertise it as such.
And the way A/B testing works is that you have to take the data. Hypotheses are just hypotheses. They can be wrong! They can be really wrong! The data will surprise you sooner or later.
Here's a hypothesis: If you put up this chart instead of the one that is there:
2GB: $9.95 per month
100GB: $19.95 per month
200GB plus Teams: $13.25 per month per user, min 5 users
A. On the margin, people with very small companies will tend to buy more Teams subscriptions.
B. However, that effect may be partially canceled out by the large companies that are subliminally turned off by a page that mentions only monthly pricing, not other kinds of pricing. Monthly pricing is great for individuals with credit cards, but company purchasing departments can work... differently. It might in fact be much easier to buy a year at a time than a month at a time just because of the administrative overhead and the culture of purchasing departments, and you'll absolutely have to use purchase orders and invoicing and get approvals, and if the vendor isn't set up for such a thing the whole process will be a huge ball of red tape, and gosh look at the time let's go out for lunch and talk about Dropbox tomorrow, or maybe next month...
C. Meanwhile, some of your potential 100GB customers will be furious that they are being charged so much money! They will stomp their feet and emit furious tweets and threaten to hold their breaths until they turn blue unless they get the $13.25 price.
D. And other potential 100GB customers will look at this and say "hey, bulk discount!". And they'll figure out how to band together with four trusted friends, and pull together a year's worth of cash at once, and buy a Teams account instead, and whoops now Dropbox is making less money on one Teams account than five 100GB accounts.
...and thus I wouldn't be too surprised if the results of A/B testing say: Leave the pricing page as it is.
...or, maybe Dropbox didn't actually test this page, and the more-straightforward hypothesis is actually the one that is right, and they could make even more money by switching to all-monthly pricing. ;)
Wow, this is actually a great idea. I should do this with my friends.
But in this case, Dropbox is competing with people who are going to buy a Windows server to host files. And $795 is cheaper than a server+windows+vpn+...
Failure to support traditional accounts payable is a blunder that half the cloud makes.
It's simultaneously too much for me to do on a whim and not enough for my superiors to care. Drop it to $35 and bill it monthly and we'd buy it in an instant.
So on the one hand, you have DropBox with unlimited storage and a limited, upgradeable number of users. On the other hand, you have Google, with limited, upgradable storage, and unlimited users.
If only Google's storage was a bit more usable. (Also, I have a hunch an AWS-based solution may be cheaper depending on some other variables.)
Like I said, the problem is not so much the package and price as it's the fact that it's the only package they're offering right now. I see very few use cases in practice for unlimited storage and limited users.
EDIT: s/unlimited storage/200 GB per user/ where applicable
Has Dropbox solved this yet?
To an end-user, the directory tree is a system of record. Many types of files need to "freeze" at a certain point in time -- say a letter that needs to be crafted by multiple people, or a budget worksheet.
In the case of the budget sheet, I don't mind if you copy the file and change some numbers to figure things out -- you're on the Team, after all. But I may mind if you decide to modify a file after we have a consensus that it is "done".
Saying that access control is unnecessary for Dropbox "for Teams" is absurd. Here's an easy example: My law partner and I share our documents via Dropbox. I want him to see my docs, be able to read them, save new versions, etc. I don't want him to be able to change my directories.
Not far-fetched at all.
Anyone who doesn't understand what this means wouldn't use the "advanced" sharing features, and many more small businesses would be able to start using the product.
Does that mean client-side encryption yet? Businesses are expected to use this without it?
Any comments from Dropbox staff here?
Most hardware companies don't know software and most software companies don't understand hardware. I am interested in finding out whether we could develop something together out of this...
a) use Selective Sync to only synchronise a few folders onto your computer, such as syncing the important documents folder but leaving the gigabytes of videos folder, or
b) have Dropbox throw an error at you and stop downloading files when it runs out of room.
It's super easy to setup and you don't need to be technically minded to use it. Everyone understands the folder concept.
And the pricing now seems generous (1 TB to start). I wonder how long they can sustain that price. I'm worried that they might be biting off more they can chew with the unlimited offer. In beta, wasn't it 350 GB?