Dropbox for Business
dropboxatwork.com
dropboxatwork.com
So, for all those whinging about the price...it is not really that bad.
That's a crazy weak argument. I'm sure glad JPEG's aren't limited to only work with apps created by JPEG Inc. Dropbox's new image app would be pretty worthless if every company was as insistent about keeping things proprietary.
FWIW, I've never really had any issues with it being bogged down even when using the desktop sync tool. So your mileage probably will vary.
Last year there was the 'great space race' where they were promoting to students, I think I got 8gb for that. (https://www.dropbox.com/help/390/en)
Before that there was a beta for testing out their new photo system. Which gave a max of 5gb free. (It appears this is still available to give you upto 3gb https://www.dropbox.com/help/287/en)
I really like the product, but I don't know if any product in a commoditized space can sustain such a price premium.
Dropbox don't even own the hardware they store your files on.
Google own the data centre, the hardware, in many cases the device (Android devices, Chromebooks, Chromecast, Google TV etc.) you use to access their services, and increasingly (with Google Fiber) the connection between you and them.
If you're comparing Drive to the Reader fiasco, keep in mind that Drive for business is a paid offering.
Dropbox is more likely to go under before Google Drive does.
Obviously, Google Apps gives you much more than just Google Drive so the comparison will greatly depend on what other services you need/use, what your employees and contractors already know, and whether you have Linux clients since Goolge Drive still doesn't support Linux.
I'd be willing to wager that someone at Google has figured out that 30GB/user covers > N% of users, where N ~ 80-90. This makes Drive more attractive than Dropbox for that N%.
We allocate big users as much as 200GB of space without even looking at the allocation ,because most user needs are very light.
In the real world you have netowrk congestion and security costs that scall with "unlimited" in this context.
so its more about practical needs.
Dropbox for Business also includes their unlimited backups (older versions of files).
Versions are not backups. I wish I could find a simple web page that I read quite a few years ago. It very starkly explained why some things are commonly confused with, but just are not, backups. The consequences of those confusions are usually bad.
Dropbox keeps version of _existing_ files. You won't get back the files deleted and synched by mistake/misbehavior of some script. A backup would keep the files.
You'll also have different behaviors if you need to bring back a set of data (i.e. all your files as they were two days ago). You'll be in pain to do it file by file with Dropbox's version system.
Or for a different view, hit the "Events" link on the left navbar.
* An exaggeration for natural disasters, wars, lock-downs, fires and so on.
Err, that is exactly what they provide. You do have to use the web interface to see them, and it is trivial to restore directories and files. (A bit painful if you want to only restore some of the files in a directory.)
Before posting I actually deleted a file and went to the web interface to check but couldn't find anything looking like that feature. I know they basically have a git like file management, but thought they just didn't expose past deleted files (clicking on the events timeline just moves to the folder the file belonged without any further information).
For anyone making the same mistake, the trashcan left to the search box in the action bar, it's not to delete stuff, like it does in the OSX Finder bar. It's to show past deleted files in the current folder (they then appear grayed out in the listing).
Fairly OT, but even knowing what the icon does, the is a thrill going to my spine when clicking this trash icon. But to be fair, the image is not wrong, it's just the habit of the OSX Finder.
Description and video showing accessing old files is at https://www.dropbox.com/help/113/en
Not from a technical point of view but from a usage point of view especially when we talk enterprise.
Dropbox is great for small teams or personal accounts. As long as there are very few owners of the files stored there.
The problems starts to arise when larger groups of people use it as a place to store files. At that point it basically looses it's value namely because its no longer possible to find what you need simply by going to dropbox.
Instead what you now have to do is to find a given person working on a given project and then ask them where they put their files.
Dropbox will have to solve this problem either by adding some sort of history trail or by providing a better contextual search algorithm (files that James Jameson worked on in 2013 on project X)
From what I have seen in that area they are currently solving the wrong problems (again from a usage point of view)
Dropbox even have most of the necessary meta data and have the potential to solve it via their large app install base.
In both the comments on HN and the original thread pricing keeps coming up.
And the response is that this is a great product and pricing is acceptable.
I don't think so.
Businesses switching costs are MUCH higher than consumer.
EG to switch a business service lots of co's have to incorporate multiple stakeholders, decision makers, etc.
Which is why VC's pour buckets of money into proven SAAS models around business services - because businesses stick almost no matter what!
So is DropBox's pricing scheme out of line with their potential to grown more quickly?
In my experience from the consumer perspective I am actively seeking alternatives to DropBox due to their current pricing.
I was an average 100GB user very happy with the product for years.
Then I had kids.
And BOOM I have a million pictures, videos, etc that are PRICELESS to me.
And now I'm on a $600/year plan for 500 GB / mo.
And Google drive is now offering 2x as much storage as that for $10/month.
So 20% of the cost for twice as much.
I gotta say it is very compelling and I can't believe that the GOOG product a few iterations out isn't a direct comparable.
Dropbox's pricing is making this very loyal consumer unhappy, and seems like especially WRT to handling business users they should be aggressively pricing to own the market.
That sounds more like you need a backup service than a sync-things-conveniently-to-all-your-computers service.
You wouldn't expect a convenience store chain to be competitive in the market Costco operates in; they're two different kinds of business, serving two different kinds of needs. Convenience stores can get away with charging a lot more for e.g. soda than Costco, because Costco won't sell you exactly one bottle of soda.
Just as well, you shouldn't expect Dropbox to be competitive in the consumer digital archival storage market. (Though they could certainly branch out there, it's currently just not the market they serve.)
OTOH, the cost of a new MacBook Pro always comes up when looking to buy a new laptop, but that hasn't hurt Apple at all.
> Would you use your personal email account to message important customers?
> Would you make lengthy personal phone calls from your work phone? If not, then
> why would you use your personal Dropbox account to store critical business
> information?
[1] - http://www.rochester.edu/it/box/assets/pdf/migratedropbox
If you're thinking in terms of cost per gigabyte, you're missing the point for the audience this is aimed at. If you're thinking "how can this replace email threads" and solve business issues (like employees getting fired and files not being migrated), that's way better as a comparison.
Seems like that depth is 1-2 years out for Dropbox and ...well, not sure for Google Drive and their roadmap for business.
Sounds awesome!
Minimum 5 users
Well, phooey. This seems...arbitrary. Do they enforce this limit just to reduce support queries from low-profit customers?
Almost certainly. To quote patio11: "Pathological customers: they get things for free and then ask for their money back." The more money a business has, the more professional it can afford to be (literally) in dealing with you. If you want 80% of the money with 20% of the effort, draw a line between the head of your profit distribution, and the long tail of pathological customers who think they're owed support because they pay $coffee per month, and then keep raising your rates until everyone in that long tail leaves.
Though there's also the fact that for ≤ 5 people, using your personal Dropboxes and having a Shared Folder for your business works just fine.
Re: personal + shared folder, that starts to get a little messy when you're sharing folders/joining shared folders with outside people. Doable, but messy. Another option is one account for the business, with e.g. 2 people logged into it. I do this, plus a hacky workaround to also have a personal account logged in on my laptop.
I've gotten close (~850 GB), but never over so I'm not sure if it's a "no-questions-asked, 1,000-GB-is-just-a-sanity-check" type of conversation, or if they start to get more hands-on and want a really good reason for going over.
I've implemented the same kind of workaround, and for two reasons.
It's actually a lot easier technically. I mean DB already has a limit for free users, so all they have to do is rev up the limit and all their clients "just work". They don't have to add magic if-then logic to change how clients show and enforce the limit.
Secondly, it prevents a disaster scenario where some script - either malicious or accidental - smashes your monthly quota with 1s an 0s. Yeah you could try to rate-limit it or something, but it's just easier to prevent the whole scenario by changing a database column.
Selling to the enterprise is a very different thing though. Quality comes way down in their priority list. The bureaucratic strongholds in enterprises require compromised quality at every level in order to maintain their fiefdom. I know Dropbox needs to make more money, but maybe this is not the right direction in which to probe?
The couple of thousand dollars is fairly trivial amount of money - you need to look at price per headcount. Salesforce and other SAAS services that we use cost a lot more per person and yet we still happily pay for them. I can also see a simple feature like 'Track logins, devices, and locations ' being a must have depending on the security requirements internally.
In comparison, Salesforce Sales Cloud starts at $25/user/month, and Box for Business starts at $15/user/month.
So AWS S3 does a big price drop, and Dropbox Business raises prices by 44%. Sounds good :)
Another plus is they offer a real external drive that doesnt duplicate data.
https://www.bitcasa.com/pricing
Disclosure: I am a happy bitcasa customer.
Name brand recognition. Same reason why Tide detergent still exists when others are around half as expensive.
Tide does not "subsist on brand recognition".
"Tide is a perennial powerhouse in Consumer Reports' laundry detergent Ratings." [1] (although as of 2013, other brands are catching up in quality)
[1]http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/06/wisk-kirklan...
They are awful with cars. If it's a Honda or Toyota, it's awesome, period. They'll list negatives like "road noise" or poor OEM tire choices.
I own two Hondas, one a 2006 Odyssey minivan -- it's a decent car. If you know anyone who owns a 2005-2010 model of this car, ask them about trouble with the sliding power door. I betcha 5/10 times, they'll start spewing about a ridiculous $500-800 repair to replace a broken door hinge, because of a defective $0.50 plastic wheel that breaks.
When I read my CR review back in 2009/2010, not a single mention of this issue.
http://www.androidcentral.com/mediafires-new-cloud-storage-p...
This feature is still missing as far as I can tell.
Yes, as long as they have their own Dropbox account (free version's fine for this purpose). You can otherwise share read-only access to folders with anyone.
With Google Drive, you can give write access with just a link.
Recently, my organization did an open feedback forum. We wanted everyone to be able to add comments via DropBox, but their was no easy way to add a random list of 50+ people. Ended up switching to Google Driver as a result.
Worth checking out.
* I've had two instances of near data loss where I could only recover data from the local hidden cache folder that gets deleted after a week. It had to do with a user error with moving out files from the Dropbox directory when the client was off - previous versions in the webapp can easily become corrupted this way.
* the Mac client is a total CPU hog since Mountain Lion.
On my Macbook Pro, the "average battery impact" (last 8 hours) as reported by Activity Monitor is 1.2 (not sure what's the unit, but it's a low value compared to other apps), and we use it daily for work so it's kind of active the whole day. I wouldn't call it a CPU hog by far.
2) The CPU hog thing is very inconsistent - it probably doesn't affect all OS version/hardware combinations or they would have solved it since long ago. All I know is that I regularly see the client go to 80-100% usage of one core for a rather long time, meanwhile taking forever to sync just a few files - which clearly shouldn't happen in an application that mostly does IO. There are probably certain file types it has some problems with, but I didn't have the patience to analyze it yet, I simply switched to SpiderOak.
So no, I just can't trust their code quality.
Not present in any of the 114 comments here so far, either.
Might be a problem.
I love dropbox for personal use. But hey! ever heard of Google Drive and know their pricing?
Previously if you had to develop against Dropbox business features like SSO you had to shell out $$$
I could see this being really interesting while collaborating on a complex 3d model or scene. I change one spot of the scene and it propagates to everyone else using the application.
They're just blocking the whole domain.
(Edit for those of you who think I'm just trolling for effect. I work at a LARGE fortune 500 (think 250,000 people) and http://www.dropbox.com/ is blocked at the proxy. If your company is going to offer business services, to, hum, businesses, one should insure that one should be accessible from businesses, no?)
Yes, companies should be able to use the product. How is that at all related to your point? Your company blocks the domain, how is that in Dropbox's control?
Do you shut off your router and whine about how you should be able to use GitHub if they plan to make money?
Dropbox has no control over your IT department, any more than you'd have control over my wireless internet.