Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Their "business accounts" implementation is incredibly poor for people who already use Dropbox (ie the people to best please and most likely to spread the good word). For some bizarre reason they decide on this weird merge of one business account and one personal account. If you have more than one of either then tough luck. If you don't want your personal stuff and your business stuff co-mingled then tough luck too. If you want exceptionally confusing web pages with hostile flows, then they have you covered. (Yes, I just set up another one today and it was beyond painful.)
What they should have done is how Google etc handle it. You login with multiple accounts, have a selector between them and everything just works.
Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.
When companies build on open source, they generally don't make it easy for you to use the base product without their extensions.
So for all intents and purposes in terms of a platform, OSX != BSD and ChromeOS != Linux.
Does Apple have a history of publishing applications built for non-Apple BSDs?
CUPS was first released in 1999 and was adopted by most Linux distros soon after. Apple first adopted CUPS in 2003. It wasn't until 2007 before they bought the rights to the source code, hired the main developer and took over the development.
Edit: never mind. They have published specs. Are they not good/stable or have no devs stepped up yet? https://developers.google.com/drive/web/about-sdk
They can and have done packaged Linux software.
I think one of the main issues with DB is that it is too little space and too much cost to add more. Considering what they pay for bandwidth, any paid plan really should be unlimited.
Google Drive's desktop doesn't support multiple accounts, but you can always visit web version of your other account and get files from there.
But fun fact: I visited the dropbox office once (it was like an adult playground) and recall seeing a cultish motivation poster that said something along the lines of "the linux client was written by one person on a plane in two hours".
I worked on a similar project that even shipped its own FUSE filesystem for osx and Linux (windows used cbfs iirc). Our client had very little platform-specific code.
(The analogy is incomplete since you'll also get people who don't want to get locked out of Linux even though they don't currently use it)
Also Linux users are very overrepresented in the propellerheads group that you are targeting in the takeoff phase of a DB/Drive like product.
Pretty much. First class support for Windows, Android, and Linux is the only reason I'm still with DB. If OneDrive (for example) were to deliver proper Linux support, they'd be done for me.
They must have had their reasons for stopping the free service, probably financial, so what happens now I don't know. How many free customers converted to paid?
I mentioned Wuala mainly because they claim to take seriously security of your data and because it works well on OS X, Win & Linux.
My second such comment in 1 minute on this but nonetheless, SpiderOak works well with Linux.
Disc: not affiliated with them
We trialled it for several months at work, and it failed in all sorts of ways. Not enough admin control, confusing to add employees, and -- worst of all -- sync failures where some employees sharing the same set of folders would just randomly not sync a bunch of the files.
This led to things like Alice telling Bob to look in the shared folder for a file, Bob telling Alice it wasn't there, Alice telling Bob yes it was, Bob telling Alice no really it isn't, Alice coming over to Bob's PC to see that hey it really isn't there, and then finally just emailing the file to Bob.
I myself got to deal with their business support a few times, regarding a bug that corrupts some PDF documents shared via Dropbox if they contain Japanese text. The "within 12 hours" response the website promised never happened -- it took days/weeks. They don't have any mechanism for me, as the customer, to follow or get updates pertaining to our support ticket for this issue (and it was kind of a show-stopper, since I work for a Japanese company). Finally, the fact that they have this type of a bug at all -- can't display international text? what decade is this? -- and that it goes un-fixed for 8+ months, didn't give us confidence in Dropbox.
If our experience is typical, I don't think Dropbox is going to do nearly as well in the business space as they've done in the consumer market.
It might have changed, but the one thing that summed up how useless it is for business is that you can't effectively run it on a server.
That's really disturbing. Is Dropbox not just moving bytes around? Why are "PDF" or "Japanese" even relevant?
What happens is, when you share a PDF file via link, instead of presenting the actual PDF file in the browser (which would work fine) Dropbox instead presents its own PDF viewer inside the web browser and shows the file.
This "PDF view" has problems with many PDF documents containing Japanese text, and either doesn't render the Japanese, or renders bogus data instead.
Depending on the contents of the document, this can result in it looking like gibberish, but it can also result in a document that looks correct to the recipient but is actually totally wrong.
For instance, one real-world case was a document with a long list of work items for a project. The items happened to be in English, and in Japanese many of them said 'CANCELED' （中止）in the right-hand column.
The Dropbox PDF viewer failed to render only the Japanese in the right hand column, so to the recipient it looked like e.g. a list of 100 work items, when in fact the point of the document was to communicate that 60 of the 100 items had been cancelled.
In this case, there was no hint at all to the recipient that there was anything amiss.
It's a bad bug, and dramatically reduced the utility of Dropbox for our company. But, to be clear, the original data stored in Dropbox was not corrupted.
Of course I had problems all the time with outsourced contractors using their personal Dropboxes for files. Stuff went missing etc.
Team accounts are the solution -- however when your team involves up to 35 people (including software testers, VAs, project managers etc.) the per user cost is utterly insane monthly.
Also you can't share folders that are sub-folders of shared folders which is a stupid restriction.
The only reason I was using Dropbox and not Google Drive in the first place was because a) the web interface for Google Drive sucked 4 years ago and b) they didn't have a good link sharing feature.
Now Google Drive kicks Dropbox's ass not only in terms of their web interface, but also with more flexible link sharing, better permissions control (ability to share sub-folders of a shared folder) AND no per user cost.
And you can pay them $1.99/month for 100GB storage.
OneDrive is a fucking debacle. I can't believe even one person uses Microsoft's cloud services, but it's all part of the cascading requirements that start with Excel and end with $5,000 servers being used to run archaic business management software written in VB ... so Microsoft may have a fair bit of the market, but it's by default. Their products stink to high heaven.
Google Drive is the only logical choice for cloud storage now, they've already eaten Dropbox's lunch, we just have to wait for everyone to realise it.
Google keeps doing UX things with photos and Google Drive that confuses my #1 usage scenario (finding photos). It also has some strange integration with Google Docs. It all sorta works but, again, the UX changes pretty damn frequently. OneDrive has reliably stuck with "here are a bunch of files."
I didn't really use OneDrive but had a bit of a bash at OneDrive for business... It has all the same basic features as Drive implemented in a slightly clunkier interface. Workarounds possible but really, why bother when Drive is better? Example: I wanted to show a list of thumbnails and allow someone to "flick through" them. Impossible. There was some app/plugin thing called ImageViewer that I had to get from some store that sort of worked a bit, install process was arcane, and it wasn't a folder it was in some weird menu.
I can't talk about OneDrive really cos I never used it (I signed up before realising that OneDrive and OneDrive for business are different things.... Zapier has recipes for OneDrive but not OneDrive for business....) oh and not to mention the OneDrive app that ships with windows 8.1 is not OneDrive for business so if you are an office365 customer and you buy windows and try to use OneDrive, it won't log you in.
It is an utter atrocity. An abomination. Also in office365 you can't add custom spf records, and when I finally got OneDrive installed on windows 2008 server it just wouldn't synch some files. I ended up installed Drive instead.
Every foray I have into the world of Microsoft is fraught with nonsensical, arbitrary restrictions and inexplicable bugs.
OneDrive the consumer product is awesome and fun. It is incredibly transparent, IMHO more so than other solutions out there on the market. (Admittedly the differences are minor, just the added touch here or there)
Awhile back all the different consumer cloud storage providers kept one-upping each other on storage capacity, so I am sitting at some stupid high amount of GB for my OneDrive account.
As well as anyone that shares files with me, I see the same pop-up (icognito window or not).
How can a company be "valued at $10 billion" when it is sharing the "$904 million global market for business file-sharing"?
Is it because of the term "business" file-sharing, whereas there are non-business customers who are also paying for these services that make it worth substantially more than $904m? Or is there something else about valuations like this that I am missing?
Also, when people speak of a market, they're speaking annually.
Okay, so this along with your sister the comment from raldi points at what I probably missed: The duration for which the valuation is made is unspecified, at least in this article. Thanks for pointing this out.
It is likely an inflated number, but it's hard to tell because it isn't in an open market. It could be $1M or it could be $100B.
(Of course, the calculation for a business valuation is a lot more complex than a simple distance = rate * time.)
Businesses are theoretically valued at NPV of future earnings, so it's entirely plausible to get to a $10B valuation on the back of a huge market share in a fast-growing ~$1B/yr market.
In cases where the market is growing then you may be willing to give a higher multiple in the belief that your future returns will be higher. In cases where there is high growth and little profit, some investors choose to use a multiple on revenue instead. Revenue multiples of 5x-20x are pretty common for high growth companies. (Price to Sales)
I am leaving risk adjustment out of this explanation on purpose, but if you are interested look up "efficient frontier".
To give an example, if I were to give you $100 every year for all of time, you would certainly pay more than $100 today. Maybe even $500. And if I were to say I would give you $100 the first year, then 10% more every year such that you'd get 100, 110, 121, 133.10, etc... you should be willing to pay a lot more because in 30 years you'd be getting $1700 / year and growing.
That's why businesses that are expected to make money for a long time are worth a lot, and those who are expected to last a long time and make an increasing amount of money every year are worth so much more today.
That and company value is the present value of all future earnings, where "industry size" is typically understood to be an annual revenue number. Apples and oranges.
Online storage is such a commodity now. They've got nowhere to go but down, unless they can offer a really innovative solution that offers more than file storage. Otherwise their interface just seems really dated now and their mobile apps are terrible.
Anyway, I'm also surprised by the series of very bad moves of all sorts by the Dropbox crew. They're focusing on various areas these days which to my understanding just spells dead end, like being a place for photo storage (competing with Flickr), etc. They lost any good will they had built by having Rice on board, and then sticking with that decision even after seeing the bad reception. It's surprising because I thought Drew Houston et al. were very strategically smart folks who couldn't make these types of mistakes.
Google (within the scope of photos) has given every person unlimited photo storage. That's how much cloud storage is worth...nothing.
I'm already far too dependent on Google to willingly give them anything I don't have to, especially when there are better alternatives.
I ended up just buying a VPS with git support and using that. It's obviously a very technical thing that most people won't do, but it's way more flexible.
I think the problem with dropbox is it's very easy to get started with them, but the advanced use cases are not only not considered, it's clear they just have no interest in those uses.
The solution I've come up with is putting a symlink in the dropbox folder to the folder that needs to be synced. That way dropbox "sees" all your files, but your programs can just continue like normal. (I'm guessing you are on OSX/Linux).
Or does Dropbox not support symlinks on Windows?
We looked at all the usual suspects: Dropbox, box.net, google, amazon, etc. For some strange reason, no one seems to offer this service except for some niche companies that have immature products. I don't get why these companies aren't aggressively pursuing enterprise services.
Not sure if you're still reading this thread or not, but I'd love to chat with you more and see if we may be able to help you (or you can just sign up at aerofs.com -- we keep it free for up to 30 employees, so you can try us right out).
Shoot me an email if you'd like, yuri@aerofs.com
If anyone on this thread has further questions about Egnyte I'd be more than happy to answer them here.
I love Dropbox and still have an account, as it has a great user interface and always worked on Linux, however I won't use it for anything that I don't consider "shareable" anymore. I prefer Spideroak [1] for actually saving my important documents. Sure, it may not look as nice, but for zero-knowledge guarantee I'm OK with that.
How can you guarantee that when the client isn't open source?
Which is so disappointing because for a moment there they were getting my hopes up about Spideroak, but I can't get behind that in light of their proprietary client. Not even interested in trying it, its a non-starter in my books.
It's a matter of degree of trust. This is what Spideroak's business is built on. Sure, I'd like it if their client would be open source, however in the mean time they're still a better option than Dropbox for security conscious people and they have been working for a while to make as much as possible open source. [0]
I really admire this company.
Pen drives are not comparable with data sharing services (which is one of the Dropbox's usage). FTP is not secure and if FTPS were available sooner then Dropbox would have been a much tougher sell now!
I feel like this thread is just general discussion of things people don't like aboit Dropbox as a response to the headline, rather than a discussion of Dropbox.
While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No. 2 Box and No. 3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.
Meanwhile the competitors all support it (Flickr, Google Photos, etc..). I'm clueless why they neglect it but it's just silly not to do. When you think of how everyone is trying to get the Photos scene right.
(The recipient learns your full name though, so I don't want to give you an example link... But this has always worked great for me.)
I've discovered this when I shared an Album with my friend with over 300 photos. He was not able to download them all, I've just stopped using it at that step. Because they imho want users to sign up and include the photos in their accounts. So they value new user signup more than user experience.
I have found that Google has the best for collaboration, but the money is made in enterprise and OneDrive is making in-roads because of what it is bundled with.
Google Drive has a fatal flaw that kills its enterprise growth: you have to register your primary domain, no sub-domains allowed. This is fine for start-ups, but in enterprise, if one team sign up for Google Drive, no other teams can sign up separately! In a large company, it's next to impossible for our team to find that original team to pair up for Google services, if they're willing to share the services at all, budget issues and all that.
I've worked with Dropbox and OneDrive and despite many people having access to a nominal TB of OneDrive storage via Office365 subscriptions, the creaky, Sharepoint underpinnings of the latter still make it a poor alternative to Dropbox for simple collaboration and sync. You can't just drop a bunch of files into the relevant folder on your HD and have them shared and synced; things like file name limitations will crop up, stalling the process indefinitely, and users don't see why it's their responsibility to work around those sort of things.
As far as collaboration is concerned, the ubiquity of Dropbox across platforms will keep it in front for some time to come.
I'm itching to leave. I'm currently trailing Spideroak and it seems OK so far.
Have you tried creating and moving a bunch of folders? Something about the sync causes them to jump around, you get leftover "untitled folders" all over the place, it's just not a pleasant experience.
If you move folders (full of folders), the web interface reports that you "Deleted 4118 items" (!) then you "Added 4118 items" (aaah). Stupid.
I've been a Dropbox user forever and only recently have I lost faith that it "just works".
[Edit: stated that I "hated" the new Mac client. Realised that was perhaps too strong an emotion for a bit of software.]
I'm actively looking for an alternative.
Dropbox is doomed for these simple reasons.
Dropbox has a team of people whose only job it is to write AI software against the data being saved there. They have software agents rummaging through everything you upload (which is maybe not surprising, but also not a service I want to pay for).
I think if someone could combine the sharing aspects of DropBox with some of the more secure cloud backup products (like CrashPlan) they would have a winning business model.
The secret sauce would be figuring out how to do this without becoming a pure infrastructure provider, where the margins are a race to the bottom.
So if you're measuring your net worth in Dropbox shares, be very very careful.
Now I happen to like Dropbox, but I'm not a business user, just a personal user. And having recently been exposed[1] to some of the sorts of things a large enterprise player wants in a shared storage solution I can see that there are a lot of missing pieces relative to that market.
[1] By virtue of being acquired by one.
I exclusively recommend Dropbox for file sharing. It solves problems for families and small businesses, especially at its free tier.
Even on a strictly philosophical level it excels. It's not that it solves problems (all the competitors do), but HOW: with folders. Everyone knows folders. People working together really ought to keep it simple and share a folder. It really idiot proofs what is otherwise a nightmarishly IT-esque process you get from Google Drive and Box.
Like where do your Google Drive files live? Do they live in Drive? Do they live in Docs and Sheets? Why is it called Sheets now? Am I emailing a copy of the document, a link to the document, did I share it with this person? What does "anyone with a link" mean? Why are there forty ways to do the same thing?
I think so many of us are missing the point on usability. I've only seen one poor experience with Dropbox: When a mom tried to install it by Googling, and somehow ended up in some kind of keywordspam site and installed some other garbage.
Then there are the features that are great not because competitors lack them but because they're easy to explain. "View previous versions" and "Show deleted files" have saved the people I "IT" for. More importantly, it's trivial for me to explain, "Right click on the file and click, Show Previous Versions." But explaining to people how to interact with the hilariously multi-modal UI that's constantly changing on Google Drive? Sure it works, but it's so difficult to explain.
I'm not disagreeing that on a whole, Google Drive is a more useful thing. But I'm not talking at some crazy high level of abstraction. People who don't "thing" but write essays, make movies, plan trips, send links, share tax info, share music, do research... It's a one-author-at-a-time each-person-is-a-stage-in-the-pipeline workflow. Dropbox really augmented what people already know how to do without opinions like Material Design, use Android phones, popups that suggest to use this non-built-in browser and non-built-in maps tool. Dropbox steps around all of Microsoft, Google and Apple's synergistic and collaboration-hostile bullshit.
Google Drive makes a ton of sense for an organization like Google or Microsoft, where the prevailing reality of work is: A bunch of people work together to make a report for their manager's consumption and need to toggle on-and-off permissions across a variety of stakeholders. But jeez guys, can't we see that the giant-corporation nightmare isn't the reality of how things are done for the vast majority of normal and productive people?
It would be shame if Dropbox allowed the enterprise mentality to creep in. IT is a horrible thing and I wouldn't want to inflict it upon anyone.
It has been ~2 years since I've referred anyone to dropbox. Now we use google drive for any collaborative projects. The functionality of docs, sheets, and slides is unparalleled.
The service they provide is extremely homogenous. Data storage is a commodity. The only way to differentiate is through the UX/UI/link sharing features. Dropbox hasn't really done anything in this space since I first started using it. They added a feature that automatically syncs my photos from my phone to my box. Great, get me to hit the data cap, I get it - you want my money.
The people who work at Dropbox are very competent. I spoke to a few recent hires from Ivy Leagues on the phone while I was looking at job prospects. They decided to take positions as glorified customer support reps because they wanted to work at a prestigious company with other folks of their caliber. One guy told me that he had no illusions that dropbox was changing the world, but that he would be well set-up for whatever his next job would be in San Francisco.
If I were Dropbox right now, I would be looking to be acquired by Microsoft or Amazon to migrate users (Dropbox's only valuable asset at this point, which is rapidly declining) and dig in for the battle with Google Drive.
Dropbox wasn't first. There where and handful of other companies doing more or less the same thing at the time. Dropbox just offered a much better product and showed everybody how it was supposed to be done.
[1]: the deployment process is incompatible with how i manage my servers, so that was a pain, but mostly figured out. [2]: encryption may leak some information, but it is better than nothing.
But they've hired fairly weakly on the business side.
That's definitely been my impression having observed the company for years from outside and from interviewing there just a little while ago. Given their engineering talent, I can't imagine they'd lose the game entirely, but they might indeed struggle on the business side. I was really impressed with the sample of Dropboxers I saw and turning them down was a difficult decision.
Syncthing has been an excellent replacement in team environments. As well as Tarsnap for more technical set ups.
Of course it's easy to give up other kinds of security in exchange for reduced profile to NSA, that's a whole other issue.
And Syncthing is just a tool that does multi-way sync across devices you own. If a company wanted to replace Dropbox with Syncthing, they would have to run one or more servers to provide the "always on" feature that their employees' "sometimes on" laptops sync to.
Because it is still closed source AND requires all your computers to be online for syncing to work.
I went with SpiderOak. Happy user.
Or there's also OwnCloud, which gives you a very simple user experience; you just need to have a centralized storage server set up.
What I fear losing is previous versions. That saved my bacon once. Well, bacon bits at least.
Also, my repositories are far larger than devices like my phone can use. With Drive I can just pull up the one PDF that I want to read on my phone. Not sure how this works, or if it works, with Bittorrent Sync.
Article clarifies
> Dropbox’s revenue grew more than 50 percent last year.
Storage isn't a network-externality heavy business as, say, social networking or, hell, desktop software. Your use of SpiderOak doesn't alter my utility function between SpiderOak/Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. Unless, of course, storage starts building the application layer in, as Google is wont to do...
At any rate, it's a big potential market still.
And I think that's part of DB's problem. That's really all they do. Sure there's some oddball photosyncing or whatever. But after all these years DB has yet to figure out really anything other than being a "cloud bucket" for people to dump things into. It's a platform at best without a real killer app.
Really obvious extensions of DB have yet to materialize: like file hosting, or web-site hosting right out of your DB. I'm a (very) amateur musician, how awesome would it be if I could distribute/sell my music right out of my db -- as simply as just copying up another song file -- and having a store automatically update with the new inventory (and DB gets a cut)?
Or let me host a hobby site where I distro my new open-source cat sharing software?
DB's strength to me has always been the ability to get stuff up and on the internet quickly and simply without fussing with ftp/scp/sftp/etc. clients and servers, hunting down hosting providers, building web servers etc.
But the execution of sharing off of that space in the cloud has been fussy, changes all the time and DB severely caps external transfers.
What if the DB client was a P2P client also, so when I go to download the latest Mitch Murder album (which he's hosting out of his dropbox and will revenue split with DB), DB doesn't have to swallow all the bandwidth of the download because all the free DB users are helping split the load and making themselves more valuable than the leeches they all are?
Or how about if paying customers could set up several paying accounts on a system and easily switch between them instead of the mess for multiple user accounts right now (under the excuse it prevents free users from leeching).
Why is a company with 1200 employees worth $10billion unable to come up with these easy ideas and instead get caught up in an enterprise cloud storage provider battle with a dozen other companies?
Why are the clients slowly getting worse?
What the hell are people doing there except admiring the fake antler mounts? [1]
> craft a more detailed business plan that could turn a company with more than $400 million in annualized revenue into one that makes billions
Based on these quotes, Dropbox would me they have to expand beyond file-sharing right?
Edit: Seems like others know arithmetic as well.
When everyone begins to care about personal privacy, how could they chose to associate with Condoleezza Rice ? Is there even a worse choice ?
Edit: I'm using Hubic now, hosted by OVH (very very bad desktop app right now, but they're making progress, and it's cheap, 50€ for 10TB / year)
Not much of an improvement.
I'm kind of surprised, personally.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/23/condoleezza-ric... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04...
* 2001-2005 - Did NOT advise POTUS to spend 1.7 trillion dollars and thousands of military and civilian lives on obviously shaky WMD testimony.
In the 1990s, when he wrote his memoirs admitting as much, anyone who was anyone in the Beltway attended the celebratory launch of his book.
Carly Fiorina nearly destroyed Hewlett-Packard. After she left HP, Bush the Lesser immediately began floating her name for the International Monetary Fund. When that didn't take, she ran for the Senate against Babs Boxer. She lost that, too. And now this: https://www.carlyforpresident.com/
Left wing and Right wing, our elites seem to be selected for their ability to fail at scale.
* She almost definitely did not advise anyone to spend 1.7 trillion dollars on anything. Did she know how costly the war would be? Should she have known?
* "Obviously shaky" is easy to say in hindsight. What did she know when? What should she have known?
* Did she even advise the President to go to war? We don't know what she said behind closed doors. SecState works at the pleasure of the President-- it is entirely possible she opposed the war personally and in private counsel, but played the good soldier in public.
* If she did personally oppose the war to your satisfaction, was it wrong of her to play the good soldier, regardless of the circumstances? I tend to think so. But was it so wrong that she should be blacklisted from public life?
Life is messy.
> Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government and British government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
Should she have known the cost (in $$$ and lives)? It was her job and that of every senior leader involved. They grossly underestimated the effort. Their colossal mistake wasn't just an oopsy-daisy to be waved away.
Incompetence at that scale should follow you around for your whole life.
Nevertheless, I think bringing in her as opposed to some other apparatchik not so terribly tainted has harmed Dropbox more than they realize.
It's the sort of ill-will that sales and marketing heads will never see, and that doesn't show up on typical market research. No CTO of a major company is going to say "we didn't use Dropbox because they have someone on their board who was involved in perpetuating a trillion dollar fraud that cost hundreds of thousands of lives." They might not even think this -- they just know that their many underlings recommended OneDrive, Google Drive, btSync, or an in-house solution accessed via a VPN. None of these lower-rank employees will cite this as a factor either, even if many of them are thinking it.
Nope. People will just silently make a mental annotation: if there are any alternatives to Dropbox, don't use Dropbox because they have a war criminal on their board.
It's like what happens if you smell bad. People will avoid you, but very few people will tell you you smell bad. That's rude. Instead they'll make up other reasons to avoid bringing up something that could be divisive.