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Comment by gabegottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Gotta love Amazon, at $5/user/month that is 1/3rd the price of Dropbox for business ($15/user/mo or $13.25/user/mo if you pay for the year upfront.)

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> Gotta love Amazon, at $5/user/month that is 1/3rd the price of Dropbox for business

Or, probably more relevantly, exactly the same price as the limited-storage tier of Google Apps for Business when the latter is paid monthly, but with 6+ times as much storage, and half the price (again, using monthly rather than annual pricing) of the Google Apps for Business unlimited storage + Vault offering.

Google Apps does, however, offer slightly lower prices with annual commitment, and I don't see anything in the Amazon Zocalo description that makes it clear that it has any compelling features that Google Apps doesn't (it seems like its just a competitor to Drive with enterprise admin tools of the type Google also seems to have in its Google Apps for Business offering, at least at the higher tier, without any of the other things that come with Google Apps.)

The main compelling feature is that nobody uses Google Apps.

Dropbox is in a challenging situation. They've grown too large for an exit and without large partner, they are fighting an uphill battle againt giants like Google, Apple and Amazon. I would not bet on them.

That's what IPOs are for.

IPO may help the founders cash out, but it won't be enough for the company to overcome heavyweight competitors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple.

Yes it will. An IPO can either cash you out, or it can raise cash. In fact, once you've had your IPO, you can raise cash quite easily. Amazon could never have competed with WalMart if they had kept private.

And once they have the cash from an IPO, where do they go from there? The problem is much more complex than you're suggesting

This is hackernews, nobody thinks about what actually happens after an exit event. :-)

They still have a very strong brand though. Even folks that are not super tech savvy know about Dropbox.

Surprised no one has pointed out (maybe it's obvious) that Dropbox runs on AWS. So they are pretty much not going to beat Amazon on price :-)

Count the number of times that a company has hosted with AWS, gotten reasonably (or very) successful, and then had Amazon enter their vertical and completely undercut them. Netflix and now Dropbox, at least.

And still startups flock to AWS like it's mana from heaven.

Serious question...what would you suggest as an alternative?

The answer to that depends both on your scale and also probably on the business model (ie, if you're selling a storage solution you have different needs than a dating website).

I'm intrigued by Rackspace's new OnMetal service, but at any reasonably large scale it's usually a big win to own the hardware (as long as you can afford redundancy).

Azure?

And Microsoft is known for playing nice with partners, right?

If AWS allows you to startup and scale without unnecessary overhead, it is mana from heaven. Being successful enough for Amazon to want to compete with you is the sort of problem you want to have...

Also, not sure I understand the "Amazon Prime Video undercuts Netflix" argument. $7.50/mo for Prime vs. $9/mo for Netflix Streaming is pretty much the same ballpark, and you have to pay for Prime up front. I have both (gotta get my free shipping), and I find myself using Prime Video only for the HBO shows.

>> using Prime Video only for the HBO shows.

Remember when you only went to Amazon to buy books?

Both Amazon and Dropbox Business seem to provide 200 GB/user (although DropBox claims you can request more, whatever that means (free?)).

It is hard to say how they compare on functionality (e.g. versioning, auditing, integration (e.g. Kerberos, AD, etc)). The Amazon web-site is very light on details. It isn't even clear if Amazon has some kind of desktop sync application which is DropBox's bread and butter.

I'd need to wait for a LOT more information on Amazon's offering before jumping ship. Things like versioning (rollbacks, etc) are non-negotiable for many business users and while Amazon's offering might have that the web-site could do a better job letting us know as much.

They have a sync application,

"You can install the Zocalo client application on your desktop and laptop computers running Windows 7 or MacOS (version 10.7 or later) and designate a folder for syncing. Once you do so, saving a file to the folder will automatically upload them to Zocalo across an encrypted connection and sync them to your other devices. You can also access Zocalo from your iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets."

This post has some more details https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/zocalo-doc-storage-sharing/

Yeah seriously. Cheaper and it looks like there is more functionality, unless Dropbox provides collaborative editing tools(I haven't used anything beyond the simple sync with dropbox).

I thought the whole "x money for x GB" thing was effectively toast via Google Drive's unlimited storage... http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249382/Google_trumps...

If anything, I hope this pressures Dropbox to lower their pricing or add a lower-priced tier. I think they're leaving money on the table with more casual users who would gladly pay $5 for a bit more space, but balk at $10/month for 100GB of space when they only need 10GB.

One can get three Dropbox accounts upgraded to 18GB for a one time fee of $5 on fiverr.com.

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