Dropbox inventor determined to build the next Apple or Google
latimes.com
latimes.com
Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.
Even when you count out the cloud future, how can Dropbox stay competitive against Google's infrastructure? They have peering contracts and their own servers.
I didn't try Bitcasa yet since I got today an invitation.
It's not that convenient, but that's the tradeoff when you want client side encryption.
What does Google do? Web search. Someone else is doing it, but they just do it better.
Yes, what Dropbox does right now does not add up to much, but if they keep expanding their usefulness they could end up reaching a critical mass. Dropbox' business is not a niche: everyone needs effortless backups and file sharing. Everyone. Tomorrow they could be a major cloud storage company indeed.
Replicating Apple's brand/image is what's hard. That brand has taken years of focusing on Apple's/Steve Jobs's particular style of doing business and building products. We see people trying now to replicate that, but it took Apple all of the 2000s to get its brand to where it is.
Not many, because it's hard and risky and - drum roll - difficult to replicate! Which brings us back to why I feel a direct comparison between Dropbox and Apple/Google is flawed: Dropbox presents comparatively little consumer value that is difficult to replicate. Hell, they don't even handle their own storage, Amazon does.
I don't think so. IMO, companies do not focus on their image and consumer experience because most CEOs are not entrepreneurs, and lack vision. They have risen to the top not only because of their performance, but mostly because they have been very good at office politics. Think about companies who have a strong personality instead: don't you realize they are run - have been run - by entrepreneurs (Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, etc.)? OTOH, for CEOs who do not own their company, focus is most exclusively either on their company's stockholders or their company's board of directors.
> Hell, they don't even handle their own storage, Amazon does.
It's called "outsourcing". The most successful fashion companies do not own any factories (Nike, etc.).
EDIT: Actually, it has just occurred to me that some companies which have a strong personality without having an entrepreneur as their CEO are companies which do not own their assets, that is companies whose main product is marketing.
Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)
Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.
As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".
Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox
Admittedly around 6,000 things aren't that interesting:
>As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing
the amount of digital data i have is not growing, it's shrinking at an alarming pace. i don't have any documents. google has documents that i have authored, and i can retrieve them from google any time i want to, but i don't have them and i don't have to worry about where they're stored. i don't need a service to keep them synced between my computers because they're not on my computers. i let google worry about delivering them to me.
>there keeps being new kinds of data beyond binary files
this is what i'm talking about. dropbox keeps track of binary files. it doesn't currently handle new, less tangible types of data, and until it does its potential is pretty limited.
> the amount of digital data i have is not growing, it's shrinking at an alarming pace
You then list how you have new digital data in the form of Google documents :-) They used to only have a few types of data ("documents" and spreadsheets). You now also get presentations, drawings, forms, tables and collections. And guess what, Google do indeed provide a crappy subset of their experience. Have you every tried to edit/view a Google doc on an Android device? I'd be delighted to have those docs also sitting in Dropbox available on all my devices at all times and to the many local programs I have that provide better viewers/editors than Google ever will. (Note this doesn't mean I want Dropbox to be the primary location for them, just that I want Dropbox to provide enhanced access and backup.)
> dropbox keeps track of binary files. it doesn't currently handle new, less tangible types of data, and until it does its potential is pretty limited
It does handle photos and sharing. I agree that binary plus photos is limiting, but the whole point is that by expanding beyond that they will have the opportunity for growth.
You should really automate backups of your google docs to local storage. I've lost data when documents inexplicably disappeared.
That's why Dropbox will continue to annihilate any service that doesn't locally save data. If my files are in Dropbox I can freely access them on the laptop I used to create them whether I'm sitting in a hotel that has so many stars you have to pay for WiFi or on a beach in Thailand. And the next time I have my laptop on within the range of publicly accessible free WiFi, it's all in the "cloud". If the internet connection is extremely intermittent I can have my updates save asynchronously without the endless frustration of browser error messages (or even worse, an Ajax smokescreen concealing the failure of an app to update server-side).
And even if I'm sitting in my office with a perfect high-speed connection doing average office work, the chances are that at some stage I'll be using a program with functionality not available in filesystem-less SaaS. In which case I don't really begrudge the extra few gigs of disk space Dropbox takes over pure cloud hosting.
I see dropbox files as MY FILES. I don't like when
they are obscured behind some application
I hate it when I'm on my iPad and have to do all sorts of stupid tricks to move files between applications. It's just stupid. But I'm sure Apple will fix most of the nightmare in iOS 6. But I must side with Steve Jobs when he said "When you try and teach someone to use a Mac, everything is fine, until you show them the file system." Average computer users have extremely cluttered and unorganized folders and desktops. Dropbox does not help that.
I think Apple's strategy will work better for them (in the long term) than that of Dropbox's... “A lot of us have been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system so the user doesn't have to learn about it.” (Jobs, WWDC 2011)
And this is my favorite quote about Dropbox:
"Dropbox... It's a feature, not a company"! (Steve Jobs)If documents, files and folders were intuitive and efficient, you wouldn't have relatively huge administrative staffs at medical clinics, real estate offices, banks, law offices, government institutions, schools, et cetera.
"Dropbox... It's a feature, not a company"! (Steve Jobs)
Plus it is not like dropbox has set it's goal to do the one and the only thing that is file sync. That was a good goal to achieve until this point.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html
I don't think current technology (i.e. actual implementations) comes close to getting past this sort of psychological barrier yet.
Just my thoughts.
http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm (Windows) http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmai... (Linux userland FS driver) http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/ (Mac)
It's not really where you are now that matters, but where you end up going. And Drew's a really smart guy and maniacally focused on his company. It's quite possible he sees things about their market that we don't.
evil laugh
https://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
They also sell extra space, shared with Picasa.
With Dropbox, 100GB would cost me $199/year.
I've been with Dropbox forever (I have account #315) but man, it is tempting to snag 80GB for the price of half a tank of gas.
Convenience is obviously the primary loss. But I'm a nerd. It would likely be easy to figure out some way of auto-syncing my whole music folder.
My other primary usage for Dropbox (and incidentally the motivation for its inception) is as a way to transfer files to other people. There's nothing like being able to host your own .html file within your own dropbox with literally zero effort. That said, a hybrid of the two seems best -- ridiculously cheap bulk storage, combined with the convenience of Dropbox when needed.
How about Open Graph or the Facebook Platform?
Think if dropbox has a platform. (like word processors saving directly to Dropbox - the defacto cloud storage network)
Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
For example, http://leanpub.com/ uses Dropbox in an interesting way. As Dropbox beefs up their API and adds features, I think there are many interesting growth/monetization possibilities. I think the main danger is the competition from Google/Apple/MS.
I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate.
In the end, they're selling storage, not their technology. Which is another factor that will drive down their revenues: storage is reliably getting cheaper.
They are selling ease-of-use. Filesharing between multiple PC's you owned along with potentially PC's of colleagues was always difficult and cumbersome.
Dropbox pioneered an easy way to make file sharing among machines as simple as dragging files to a pre-defined location on your PC.
And even this concept wasn't entirely new, Microsoft's "Briefcase" in Windows95 was basically an early version of this.
Dropbox's success is all about the simple execution of a task that impacts millions of PC owners, and removing the difficulty of performing that task.
Will filesharing make Dropbox the next Apple or Google? Doubtful. BUT, there are still several pain-in-the-ass little nuances about the multi-device world. IMO, they might look next to the overall interaction and data management among a household of PC/Tablet/Laptop/Smartphone users.
One example: I have a set of contacts on my laptop. Call it "Everyone I know", My wife has a similar set of contacts on her PC. Some of these contacts are duplicates (family members), others are unique to each of us (personal friends or business associates). On each of our phones we have a subset of these contacts. I'm not a fan of having an over-filled phone contact list, I want to keep it to the most commonly-contacted people. My iPad has a completely separate contact list that is all disorganized.
I'd like an easy way to manage a contact pool among multiple users and devices much like Dropbox manages files. I'd like to be able to edit or update certain info in my company address book, and sync certain contacts to certain devices.
Dropbox has a huge opportunity just in making all sorts of information appear and share in just the locations we want it to be, among many other things.
My Android phone lets me easily sort and categorize my contacts, and only see what I want to (while keeping all of the data I still may want to get to in the background).
Why is this a job for Dropbox again?
I'd tend to agree with you but I'm not seeing the competition emerge. Sure, I've got 50GB on Box.net for free but I have to go through their website to get anything done. I've got SpiderOak, who seem quite technically impressive but they're more of an online backup system. I've tried a handful of others (Ge.tt? Amazon, Apple's cloud thing) and they all do what they're designed to do but they seem to miss the brilliant simplicity of Dropbox, that it works like I work, with files and folders.
On that point I disagree with you, Dropbox is not selling storage, they're selling an easy way to do something that was hard.
Maybe these other companies are not trying to compete, maybe they're looking to differentiate elsewhere. I keep seeing companies and even projects on Github that claim to be competing but seem to miss this essential point, that they're competing with seamlessness, with elegant simplicity, not with an online storage product.
That's because they were able to monetize search enormously through ads. How precisely does Dropbox plan to monetize storage to the same extent?
> If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it?
Strawman. Nobody is saying Dropbox is a bad idea. They are saying it is likely not an idea capable of being an "Apple or Google." Edit: also, a Hacker News reader should be well aware of talent acquisitions.
You can agree with what I said _and_ make an ancillary point, you know :)
Well, that's quite the accusation.
I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?
Mach Code Injection!
(talked about at 15:30) http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how...
Besides Dropbox being a great service, what got Steve Job's attention was the fact that the internal cloud team was impressed on how Dropbox managed to do this, since they themselves couldn't get the OS X team's cooperation for a similar feature.
Edit: found the article - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/...
I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
> I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
Have you ever paid Google a dollar?
Are you suggesting that Dropbox is going to hit multi-billions through advertising? To successfully complete your analogy, you need to fill in the gap between "hosting files for free for most of their customers" and multiple billions of dollars.
To be more concrete, there are at least two possible ways for something like Dropbox to make money without users paying Dropbox directly:
* Data mine the files hosted for users. Even anonymized data like this can be very valuable for third parties. Edit: or for other separate services inside your own company.
* Ads that become an integral part of the Dropbox service, preferably targeted using data mining from the previous point.
Are these good ideas? I don't know.
The plural of anecdote is not data. How many people did you refer to get the free storage you needed? How long do you think it will be before you need more and pony up?
But my point wasn't "they're losing money and making it up on volume"; more that true juggernauts like Apple and Google have business models that derive at least some additional incremental revenue from every user they acquire. Google obviously plays a longer game to receive that revenue through advertising than Apple does selling hardware, but the revenue does eventually arrive.
Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are:
* compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way. * compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.
I have been a long time user, and recently I joined a company which is 100% virtual. We are all consultants who work from our homes - but travel regularly to client sites.
While we are working from our homes - we collaborate and work on the docs needed for our client visits.
Everyone has their own account, and quickly a couple gigs would fill up, due to what i feel is poor logic on dropbox's part, and it is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue.
The issue is that we have ~10 people all sharing project folders. But with the free account, this means we get a lot of duplicated consumption.
If 3 people have 2GB space, and they each share .5GB with eachother, then that .5GB is taking up .5GB from everyones account.
This sucks.
Personally, I have a paid 50GB account, and I created a shared public folder. Everyone on my team joined the public folder - which is always 50GB to ME - but to them it consumes THEIR space - and soon their syncing stops because the folder I made is larger than their box.
This is retarded, I think that if they visit MY folder, this should not count against THEIR storage - especially when I am paying for it.
I do undestand the complexities of this - but then the problem is that the cost to fix this issue is that everyone needs to upgrade their account.
I have looked at the team offering, but then that is too expensive.
I think what is best - is to have one corporate DB account, and have everyone login with that userID - and pay for the upgraded space for that one account.
With this said, based on the current design of dropbox and the fact that it is simply a feature - there is no way this company will be the next Apple, let alone google. Unless Drew is referring to emulating their culture, or maybe brand recognition. certainly he cant be talking about product diversity....
Anyway - I love dropbox, and am happy to pay for it, but as it currently stands, is a half-feature.
I dont even know what kind of use-case model for teams such as mine they are looking at. Perhaps I should send them an email.
The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent, and the product is overpriced and relatively shallow at an enterprise level.
Still pay for a personal 50gb account, but canceled the team account...well we will as soon as they actually return my call.
I couldn't agree more -- I also pay for a 50 gig plan. About a week ago, I had to rebuild one of my machines and somehow my new Dropbox folder (which of course was empty) synced out to the cloud and to the rest of my machines. Suddenly my backup consolidation was completely wiped out. I submitted a support ticket and even now, nearly a week later, it is still unassigned. So, I spent a day undeleting 3500+ files through their web interface. Although quite limited, I will say I was thankful that functionality was there.
After being so impressed with Dropbox, their lack of customer support has been a huge disappointment.
2gb * 50,000,000 = 100PB. That would qualify them for S3's over 5PB pricing of $0.055 per GB-month. So that's $66 million per year just for storage.
But again... they're probably actually using far, far less than 100PB on their free customers.
sigh Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?
I don't believe dropbox is going to do that, but it is an interesting idea.
mobile devices are powerful enough and desktops/laptops are cheap enough now that the computation can be done locally, with the data still being stored on a central server. a decade or two ago, the computation was also done on the servers. microsoft did it with windows terminal server, sun did it with the ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray), but the concept was basically like vnc'ing into a central server and having your entire session preserved, no matter where you logged in from.
and of course, before graphical desktops were big, unix and dumb terminals did the same thing. you could use a vt100 connected to a modem from anywhere, run 'screen -r' and restore your saved session to access all of your applications, data, and email stored on the server.
Really? Drew runs Windows?