Even being a company that spends 50k a year gets you next to nothing wrt feature requests or support outside of what would be given to a free user, aside from speed of reply. If you want any level of control over data and sharing, you're sent over to "sookasa", a shambles of a business, or you can look at non-recommended solutions like boxcryptor (an incredible product that unfortunately carries it's own administrative overhead).
If anyone from Dropbox is reading this, the things that make my life the hardest are:
1) removing shared folders from a user's account. (Impossible unless your IT department controls every shared folder in your organization. Difficult & time consuming if they do)
2) Deleting a corporate account from all devices, removing folders. (Impossible)
3) Offering any sort of encryption (need to use 3rd party, unreliable)
4) Managing/reverting changes. Terribly ugly, difficult, and time consuming process. It's bafflingly inefficient, and in an organization of any size clueless or new hires are going to create these problems on a weekly basis.
5) Management and reporting APIs don't exist.
Also, notice the phrasing: "With separate Dropboxes for personal and work, administrators can have the control necessary to secure company data, and you can still have your most important stuff at your fingertips." That sounds suspiciously like a sentence that says nothing at all, considering it's already easy to run two dropboxes, and all the problems I listed concern fully administered business accounts.
Remote wipe will be nice though.
1) Not only do we let you remove shared folders from a user's account, I designed our remote wipe feature that can go and delete those files from users computers. (It's a best-effort approach.)
2) We also support remote wipe from devices as well.
3) I'm not sure what kind of encryption you're looking for. In general, encryption with cloud storage introduces support difficulties, and makes it hard to do web-based access. We allow you to host your files on your own servers, so that might provide enough security to address your concerns.
4) We do allow reverting a folder to a known date, but you need to contact support.
5) Unfortunately, our APIs aren't public. Our management tools are in use at many large organizations, though.
Dropbox will keep me as a customer purely because my entire business is run on Linux (except for the Mac my business partner uses).
We don't do any of the things you list - not even close - and we don't ever plan to.
We can, however, do this:
pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"
ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe
I think all your points are very solid. I would, however, disagree with you about Dropbox or any other cloud provider implementing their own, in-house, encryption.
They're the one with the data and having the key to open your data as well is, to me, a conflict of interest. I've share my thoughts on this a while back (http://vuongnguyen.com/personal-business-cloud-security.html).
Now, if you haven't had a chance to use nCrypted Cloud, give us a try: http://ncryptedcloud.com. We do client-side encryption and work on top of Dropbox and shortly other cloud providers. We're free for regular consumer. The enterprise clients we have a usually more interested in the integration, management and control mechanisms we have in place.
Thanks,
-V.
PS: Please feel free to contact me if I could be of any help. My email is in profile.
It's interesting to see the changes in the market since when Dropbox pioneered it around 2007 or so.
My first reaction to this was "How can anything justify this valuation long-term ? It's just cloud storage FFS" Then I found they have revenue of 200m 2013 (through growth rate is slowing). Which actually surprised me - and then I realised that I am getting Dropbox links for people who would previously have mailed me a file.
It's slowly dawning on me that "cloud storage" is likely to be something as ubiquitous as smartphones - everyone will have a small slice. I still suspect 10bn is waaaay over the top, but they are the clear leader in what I revisionist style realise is going to be a big (if frustrating) industry.
Which is weird as I started at Demon Internet and we "gave away" 10MB of web space and stopped in the early naughties as no-one used it or cared :-)
It's not about the storage, it's about the client (be it desktop or web).
Maybe, but "Box" evokes "Dropbox". I saw some ads for Free 50GB of storage on Box! and the very first thing I thought was, Is that slang for Dropbox?
So, with the way Box is immediately reminiscent of Dropbox, that may reduce Box's disadvantage in terms of being a household name. Even though it's a new company, it feels familiar.
This http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/1/UK00002215537 is a registration of the trademark "box" for the relevant computer and communication classes (inter alia 9, 38, 42) which was filed about 7 years before Box UK filed their application. TBH I can't see how the later one was granted RTM status except that this one appears to be an image mark.
"Box" is widely used as a trademark and other companies are using it in the same class. Box presumably can't make the case for infringement of their mark without also making the case that they're infringing someone else's - Boks™ belonging to a Norwegian company for example. It's pretty generic as a term for storage/term in computing.
That aside Dropbox would only be problematic if there was genuine confusion. For example Box UK had a series of offerings with trademarks using "box" as a suffix. If Dropbox were considered infringing, for example, Xbox would also be infringing as they operate within the same class - Box presumably haven't challenged the use of Xbox [which probably predates their use anyway].
Box is sufficiently generic that further commoditizing the word box as vernacular with respect to online storage would get people to use the word box (all lowercase) associated with Dropbox first.
I wouldn't want to use it for all my files, but I'm setting it up for syncing photos and content to my PCs (i.e. things which are simple and don't get multiple offline edits and the like).