Dropbox – A nebulous future | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox – A nebulous future

economist.com

40 pointsCaptainZapp54 comments

I am no expert in online synchronized storage. I am merely a consumer who has used ICloud, Dropbox and Google Drive. From my perspective iCloud has been a disappointment, Google Drive has been ok (we also use Google Apps in my company) and Dropbox seems to be the easier and more popular setup with my staff. The only issue I have is with their pricing (I find their company plans confusing), but we all know that is a new landing page away if they decide to change it.

The equation is not about $dollars per Gb storage per year, it is more about $/Gb/MyPain which is a more subtle equation. If my employees like Dropbox better than Drive, the few dollars in cost difference is inconsequential. The employees time costs many multiples more than the storage.

I think the article fails to acknowledge this.

I really like iCloud, but it's not a competitor to Dropbox/Google Drive or even a feature itself. I have and iPohone, 2 iPads, and 2 Macs. (Home/Work) I really like how everything is just synced without thinking about it.

We use Dropbox at work a company of about 10. We don't have any servers or IT. Everything just goes it Dropbox shared folders. Works very well and never have to think about it.

Since Dropbox is for work, I moved all my personal files to Google Drive. On feature lists it should be the same or better, but I find it just never works reliably. A lot of times I find it just sitting there unable to connect and there seems to be no option to reconnect other than exit and restart. The UI on Dropbox seems a lot more polished.

> Since Dropbox is for work, I moved all my personal files to Google Drive. On feature lists it should be the same or better, but I find it just never works reliably

Three months ago I decided to put all my pictures on a cloud provider. I really liked Dropbox but I chose G. Drive, because of the price. I put my 15k photos on my G. Drive and then the client went crazy. My old (2007) MacBook couldn't cope with it, it rapidly used 100% of my computer's 2GB of RAM and my CPU was also at full capacity. Thus, I decided to try the same exercice on Dropbox. I moved the whole pictures folder and Dropbox handled it perfectly using a few MB of RAM.

Since then, I'm a happy paying Dropbox user.

Dropbox's price problem has nothing to do with the price per GB. The problem is that the lowest non-free tier is a whopping 100GB.

There is just no way I'm going to use anywhere close to 100GB. There is no way I'm going to use even a quarter of that space. With the bandwidth I have access to is just to inconvenient.

I'm probably going to switch to an alternative next may when my subscription runs out, it's annoying because I like dropbox but their prices are getting too inconvenient.

Are you saying $10/mo is too much for how much you use Dropbox? Or that you would feel better if they gave you less space...

Well for Google Drive you pay almost $30 annually for extra 25GB space. $10 per year for 20GB if you use SkyDrive. Plus both Google Drive and SkyDrive support online doc editing. So yes it is really too much for paying $10/month for 100GB space which I may not use fully for foreseeable future.

> Are you saying $10/mo is too much for how much you use Dropbox?

Yes, I think 8$/mo are too much for storing 9GB of data. Because I can pay 2$/mo for the "same" thing on Google Drive or 0$/mo for git-annex-assistant on the VPS I already pay for.

Dropbox still works better than both solutions, doesn't require giving even more info to Google and takes much less hassle to setup than git-annex-assistant but I don't think it's worth the 4x premium.

It's "nebulous", not "nebolous", dear submitter :) BTW "nebulous" comes from Latin "nebula", i.e. "cloud". No pun intended, The Economist!

In the case of the Economist, you can absolutely assume that the pun was intended.

Aah, title has been fixed.

Jobs had it right.

Dropbox is obscenely overvalued, and has no place in the future.

I take your point, but while it is here, it is very useful!

The phasing out of direct links to the 'public' folder for new users recently suggests a need to find revenue streams.

A possible alternative...

"I'm funded by a Kickstarter project in 2012-2013 to build something not unlike DropBox, based on git-annex, that automatically version controls and syncs files between computers."

http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/

Sure, but a $5-10bn valuation for a freemium file hosting service with ~100m users, 96% of which pay nothing?

Someone let me out of this bubble.

I'll take 100m users of which 96% pay nothing any time. My email is in my profile.

4m * $10/mo is about $500MM/year or 10x-20x valuation, or 8x the valuation in the article $4bn. Is that so out of whack?

Me and many of the people I know use it everyday. It's the easiest 'cloud' storage out there and certainly the most popular. I'm not sure why you say it has no place in the future.

Think about what syncing as a whole really means for us ... seamlessly moving between laptop and desktop, upgrade devices just by signing in on your new one, etc... the promise of our Google and Apple accounts, but delivered properly and without platform lock-in.

Dropbox as it is now is going to look like a toy when someone really solves syncing for us. An abandoned toy if they're not the ones doing it.

If you remember Steve Jobs at WWDC 1997, he was talking about exactly that, extolling the virtues of having his home directory mounted via NFS.

It's a little surprising that, fifteen years later, there's still no good way for consumers to have that. iCloud may eventually evolve in that direction, but for now it feels incredibly half-assed.

Is this sarcasm?

I don't use a ton of software to keep myself productive, but Dropbox is easily one of the most valuable out of those I use.

Apple, with its considerable engineering talent and resources, still can't even see Dropbox from where they stand right now with iCloud.

Jobs saying that was just sour grapes because he couldn't buy it.

Dropbox is invaluable for me. I've tried to move away but there is nothing out there that's even close.

Remember when you needed to pay for email storage? Competition drove that price to zero as companies used it as a loss leader for other revenue streams (eg, advertising).

I suspect a similar outcome. The question is when, of course.

Unlimited email isn't free. Since limited amounts of synchronized storage is free, I'd say we are there today. It's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.

Email is free if you like to be targeted by ads and want to contribute to advertisement research. Also, next to no customer service and no choice regarding you contract.

Which is still a great bargain. But not one I choose.

"If you are sharing files with a dozen other people on Dropbox, a move to Google or Microsoft would require all 12 to move with you."

I don't get what. I'm just sharing a link anyone can access from Google Drive. Why would they need to "move" to Google Drive? I don't see this as a problem. If anything it's just the mind share momentum that Dropbox has. Everyone keeps recommending Dropbox because they know it's the most popular. But I don't see any technical lock-in. The others can beat it through higher integration with their own operating systems and others as well, therefore higher convenience, through better functionality, and through better/more marketing.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy, as it's usually very hard to beat an established market leader, but it should be possible. I'm not sure why Google hasn't integrated Google Drive as a core app of Android. It seems like the logical move to do, especially with Apple already doing it. Same goes for Google Wallet.

I assume they are referring to sharing a folder with read / write access, which requires everybody to use Dropbox.

I think their future might be brighter than painted. I work at large corporation (50,000+ employees) and they love box. The reason: the company has very stringent security requirements, and box lets them store files on their own servers but using the box UI - it is a very big deal for the enterprise market.

How do you get this feature? I don't see it advertised anywhere.

That's a good question - I wonder if they have enterprise sales people that handle that?

Box != Dropbox. See: http://box.net

>A bigger long-term worry is the plummeting price of digital storage.

They mention that Google offers their service cheaper. But not the fact that you can have your own personal terabyte cloud for a couple hundred bucks, one you personally own and control, and never have to pay a subscription for. That is what threatens Dropbox and friends the most. Once storage becomes cheap enough to price personal NAS clouds below $100 (and upstream bandwidth gets faster than molasses), why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

> [...] why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

Not only that, but a business with questionable security credentials, that has already had one absolutely spectacular security cock-up (referring to the June 2011 incident in which any account could be accessed without a password for four hours)

Never used it, never will.

I've wondered why nobody has done a good Dropbox clone where you run the server yourself. I'm guessing there is no business model.

This is an interesting take on that: http://spacemonkey.com/

Aerofs is something like that https://www.aerofs.com/

It is a really nice product, somehow I keep falling back on Dropbox in actual use though.

I wonder when they're launching. They've been invite only for a really long time now.

I've been using it for a year (I know some people there); it is by far my favorite of the cloud storage products.

Pretty much my needs are something like AeroFS, PLUS some kind of local SAN/NAS (big, fast), PLUS something like Sharepoint, Kerio Workspace, or Atlassian Confluence. None of them really cover all my needs alone.

I use git-annex for pretty much that. It's rapidly gaining features that make it a Dropbox replacement.

http://owncloud.org/

www.powerfolder.com

Wait, are you really comparing a personal NAS lying somewhere in your office (or even DC) with a proper cloud storage system? what about redundance, reliability, downtime, just to name a few? a personal NAS is obviously a very good solution for a limited subset of use cases compared to something like dropbox or Google drive, but not a definitive alternative solution, in my opinion.

I think before that can happen we need really good open source software for it, and make it easy for anyone, and I mean anyone, to set one up, and set up all their data to be synced with it.

1tb is already $100/month on EC2. (Of course, you'd need a running instance to do anything with it.) The real gain with Dropbox is with their incredibly seamless client. DMCA and FISA do not matter to most users.

Bare storage is $95/TB/month on S3, too (plus i/o charges), no running instance required.

The rest of your comment is well-taken; there are otherdesktop clients for S3 but nothing that I've seen is anywhere near as convenient as Dropbox (which is itself using S3 for the actual storage, of course). User experience matters.

>That is what threatens Dropbox and friends the most. Once storage becomes cheap enough to price personal NAS clouds below $100 (and upstream bandwidth gets faster than molasses), why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

Because it's not the price, it's the convenience.

Plus that very very few people understand what "DMCA/FISA-encumbered" and even fewer care about it (for example, I understand what it means, but still don't care).

What still amazes me is that people (around the world) are willing to let these US companies store their personal data, email, etc. I'm not trying to be a troll but I think it's worth pointing out that many non-US citizens would have a BIG problem with this. Or so I thought. The other thing that surprises me is that so many techies use these services, where most of the functionality can be easily achieved using existing tools, which would be under your personal control. If its a choice between giving up freedom and having the responsibility to backup my own data, I choose the latter. Sure my grandma may choose the former but I would try to convince her otherwise.

For the vast majority of users (myself included, and I'm very much a techie), my personal email and whatever stuff I've got squirreled away in Dropbox (which isn't a full backup of my computer) just isn't compromising. Yes, it would be inconvenient and embarrassing for me if it was made public, but for the US intelligence and law enforcement to have a slightly easier way of getting to it, it's just not worth the inconvenience.

It amazes me too. I hardly view Dropbox as a stalwart company. But good on them for hitting the jackpot in the short term.

Amazon AWS, upon which Dropbox relies, is open to all, not just Dropbox. Even Xen, upon which Amazon relies, is open to all, not just Amazon. Things are still very primitive and there's ample room, and plenty of motivation (e.g. data privacy), for experimentation.

Besides prgmr, who else is offering Xen-based "cloud" (=hosting)? Are there a wealth of Xen-based alternatives (that could support "Dropbox" like functionality)?

The original title: "Dropbox - A nebulous future"

The title of this thread: "Dropbox - A nebolous future"

Moral: For God's sake, either learn how to spell or COPY your titles, don't presume to type them in.

Since spelling is beyond you, here's a copying primer:

1. Use your mouse to select the title from the original page.

2. Press Ctrl+C (Copy).

3. Open a new HN submission form.

4. Press Ctrl+V (Paste).

Very simple. Apparently simpler than learning to spell.

A quibble? Not at all. A misspelled word in the title of an HN submission prevents searching by keyword and therefore consigns the entire submission to the great bit-bucket in the sky.

I've said it before - Dropbox to Apple would have been an amazing fit since iCloud is meh. Damn you Internet over-valuations.

Had Apple bought dropbox, they would've made support for other platforms secondary. Dropbox is still the only cloud storage service that works beautifully on both linux and mac (and windows).

This is true. It's actually in my interest they didn't in a way as I'm on a bunch of platforms - iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac.

"...a feature, not a company," is high praise. That's how it should be, as long as that feature can be combined with other such features to create new things.

Very few users are well served by being locked into a single vendor's constellation of hastily slapped together aquihires.

I thought you were coining a neologism in the title.

"cloudy + flesheating?!?!?"

Clicked just for that and was disappointed.

Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft swept in and replaced their SkyDrive with Dropbox?

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