
Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO - cvander
http://fortune.com/2017/07/02/dropbox-hires-underwriters-ipo/
======
prklmn
A major difference between between this tech boom and the dot com boom of the
90s is the general public had a real shot at investing in serious growth
potential during the dot com boom. Now most of the growth is experienced under
private ownership, then the grossly overvalued company is pawned off for the
public to invest in. VCs have figured out how to extract most of the exciting
gains.

~~~
sgustard
"Investing" in those days was "speculating." Hundreds of dubious companies
made it to IPO that would never make it that far today, and most of those lost
all their public investors' money.

[https://mattermark.com/technology-company-ipos-then-
now/](https://mattermark.com/technology-company-ipos-then-now/)

~~~
sah2ed
John Bogle's investment philosophy [0], which I agree with, boils down the
difference between investing and speculating to the time horizon: _" The main
difference between investment and speculation lies in the time horizon."_

So in a way, I think you and the parent are both right -- you are talking
about different sides of the same thing.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Bogle#Investment_philo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Bogle#Investment_philosophy)

~~~
hellworld
Another one of Bogle's self serving comments. He's a legend but rarely
unbiased. The key difference is the speculator buys it purely in the hope of
flipping it. The investor considers the fundamentals of the investment. Time
horizon is irrelevant. You can have special sits which you are in and out of
in a month or so; but it's definitely an investment.

~~~
toomuchtodo
We are all hoping to flip our investments in the equities market; no one is
holding forever. Unless you intend to die and pass your ownership interest to
heirs.

~~~
concede_pluto
Buffett's favorite holding period is forever. Cuban points out that non-
dividend stocks aren't much more than baseball cards. Kiyosaki argues that the
reason people suffer financially is that they purchase liabilities and list
them under the asset column.

The difference between investing and speculating is whether you get paid for
_owning it_ or only for finding a greater fool to relieve you of it. The
wheels have come off the equities market because management has realized
putting on a convincing show for speculators nets more dumb money than
actually succeeding as a business worth owning.

~~~
hellworld
Cuban doesn't know anything about public market investing. But what do I know,
I've just worked at a hedge fund for most of my career.

Buffett holds LT due to tax deferral benefits conferred by the US tax system.
If there were no capital gains taxes he'd be a different animal.

------
flunhat
They've come a long way from their Show HN 10 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

From a demo hacked together over a few months (written in Python, IIRC) and
posted on HN to an IPO. Pretty cool, honestly.

~~~
Scea91
Thanks for the link, it was really enlightening read. It is interesting to
read the elaborated comments of some naysayers there who are stuck in their
old ways and can't see the value of it yet.

One of them describes his solution with FUSE and FTP that 'basically achieves
the same' and has doubts that anyone would want to use Dropbox if they can use
FTP.

Same stuff surely happens here today.

~~~
mattmanser
Though most of the comments are positive, it's only really BrandonM's comment
which looks silly in hindsight. Quite a few valid questions and thoughts too,
where is this stored, how are you handling locked down corp accounts, etc.

It's a pity they hide the vote numbers these days.

~~~
chii
> Quite a few valid questions and thoughts too

all of which are "merely" implementation details and polish. The analogy is
that you've built a crude engine that can sit on a box in an axel to move
rather than using an animal, but the nay-sayers ask how do you deal with the
bad weather/water, and how do you brake and turn smoothly?

The idea is fundamentally good, and it takes someone with vision to see
through the smog of implementation details and problems.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I used Dropbox for a few years, but ultimately switched to another big-name
company service. Consumers now have great options available from all the big-
name companies: Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft
OneDrive. Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating.

Given this, I think it's reasonable to ask: what's their value proposition in
2017? I hadn't been following them for a few years, but looking at their
landing and pricing page, it's clear they're transitioning away from being a
consumer product and focusing on enterprise customers. For those of you that
are paying for their consumer offering, I'd be very interested in reading
about why you've chosen to stick with em instead of migrating to another
service.

~~~
akg_67
> what's their value proposition in 2017?

I have been paid user of Dropbox for now 4+ years. The reason I have stuck
with it because "It works! plain and simple." I have tried other storage
services like Google, iCloud and Box. But none match the simplicity,
consistency, invisibility, cross-platform, seamless features of Dropbox.
Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any
service. They have no concept of customer service. They might well be running
by robots. I experienced Box at work, forced by the work IT group. IT wasn't
very willing to hand out Box accounts unless you can justify business use case
, people who used it didn't like it. Box interface was always in your way if
you wanted to do anything stored in Box, few extra clicks to do anything. Most
people who needed to collaborate used free Dropbox to get around all
restrictions. iCloud is okay but only seems to work with Apple ecosystem. I
still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and iPhone.
Works great for photos and contacts but not so much for files. While Dropbox
has released new features, I have never bothered with any.

IMO, Dropbox need to continue focusing their service seamless. There only
mistake was to not go after business/enterprise earlier. They could have
killed Box easily. While Box was hiring consultants and Enterprise sales
people to pitch to IT groups (top down) Dropbox had the mindshare of employees
(bottoms up). They were Dropbox champions, just Dropbox failed to leverage
that in enterprise.

~~~
nextlevelwizard
>I still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and
iPhone.

On Mac I just open the iCloud folder and the files are there, just like
Dropbox

On iPhone I open the iCloud Drive app and the files are there just like on
Mac, much like in Dropbox pp expect Dropbox uses list format.

Personally I like iCloud currently more, but as you said it only works in
Apple ecosystem (which I'm currently fine with). Recently I also setup
OwnCloud on my RPi and it seems to fill my niche usage just fine as well, but
I still don't quite trust it.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
FYI, there's also iCloud for Windows [0], and some people claim to have gotten
it to work with Wine [1] on Ubuntu.

[0] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204283)

[1] [https://askubuntu.com/questions/195603/are-there-any-ways-
to...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/195603/are-there-any-ways-to-access-
icloud-based-files-with-ubuntu)

~~~
nextlevelwizard
I have the Windows client installed on my "gaming pc", but it doesn't seem to
sync well enough. For example I can't find my password manager vault there at
all.

------
sangnoir
As I expected - it looks like no-one remembers the "Drop Dropbox" boycott
campaign that came right on the heels of Brendan Eich's ouster at Mozilla. I
strongly believe had Mozilla's board showed him the same robust support
Dropbox showed Condoleezza Rice, Mozilla would be in a much better place
today.

~~~
ceejayoz
Eich was far more closely tied to Mozilla than Rice to Dropbox, though. No one
in their right mind thought Rice had much to do with Dropbox beyond being a
name they could drop and a bit of lobbying help.

------
xiaoma
I was a pretty early user of Dropbox back when it was featured on this site.
As much as I'm loathe to admit it since I don't like the consolidation of huge
tech companies, I've pretty much completely abandoned them for Google
offerings.

Google drive is just there, whether I wanted it or not. And that goes for
anyone who's signed up for Gmail or YouTube (i.e. collectively 40% of the
people I know). It's not _quite_ as nice as Dropbox, but it's right there in
that weird 9-squared popup menu every time I check my email.

Kudos to Dropbox for having made it to this point, but how long can they
survive against free + connected to your email + everything you save on an
Android? What if chromebooks get more popular? I wouldn't short them, but it's
really hard to see a big win for them given the market dynamics.

~~~
kobeya
Not everyone uses gmail...

------
JabavuAdams
I love Dropbox, but where's the growth potential? They do an amazing job of
storage and syncing, and as a user I'd love for them to focus on that.

Can they use their early success in sync to bootstrap other products?
"Evernote" by Dropbox?

EDIT> This is an honest question, and I'd appreciate informative replies.

~~~
nihonde
Dropbox Paper is the best implementation of collaborative text editor that
I've ever used. I keep going back to it because it's easy to use. I never use
Google Docs because Google's account management systems are such a hassle and
I hate Material Design.

~~~
kwijibob
This is absolutely critical. I have a few hundred gig of old data on a paid
dropbox. Some old photos and videos etc. Lots of old Word documents.

But everything new I do is on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which I love. All
my photos now go to Google Photos.

The future seems to be google drive like web apps. Dropbox needs to get into
this market. I hope Paper can expand...

------
djhworld
The only comment I will say about Dropbox is the price, I wish they would do a
100GB tier or something for £1.99 a month.

I really cannot justify paying £7.99 a month for 1TB of storage, especially
when I'll most likely use less than 10% of that space

~~~
T-hawk
This often comes up regarding Dropbox. It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a
cheaper tier than $10/month. It's that they don't want to.

$10/1TB is not a ratio to be arbitrarily divided, no matter how much people
want to assume it should be. Dropbox would lose more revenue from customers
downgrading from $10 to $2 than they would gain from the few customers that
care about the difference between $0 and $2.

$10 is the floor for Dropbox to care enough to serve any customer. It's a
version of "fire your pathological customers", or rather to never acquire them
in the first place. SaaS vendors know that the cheapest customers are the
biggest headaches. If you care about the difference between $5 and $10,
Dropbox doesn't need to care about serving you.

------
bsvalley
Dropbox is like twitter. An over-engineered solution for a very narrowed use
case. Don't get me wrong, the product works very well. I actually use it
everyday, but from an investor/growth perspective, I fall back into what Jobs
said - "it's just a feature".

~~~
jakozaur
Also many platforms are adding storage as add-in (Amazon, Google, Microsoft)
which decreases available market.

------
jonthepirate
My office got a call on a great deal for a renewal on our subscription and our
new pricing .. and our sales rep would give us a good deal since we had a
subscription for a while... it would only be 2x what it currently was. We
cancelled it and went to box. Easy and much happier.

~~~
mdm_
Similar thing happened at MPOW. We've been Dropbox for Business subscribers
for several years and all of a sudden they informed us of some astronomical
price increase. We're migrating everyone's data before the end of the year and
moving to a locally hosted Seafile-based storage solution.

~~~
GordonS
Another Seafile user here, also moved from Dropbox. I moved before the big
price hike, and I did so for a few reasons:

1\. It kills machines on startup. My machine had the CPU and HDD maxxed out
for 30 minutes every time I started it, rendering it unusable

2\. You can only sync a single folder, which is _really_ limiting

3\. The syncing algorithm is crap (well, it was for me anyway) - I was
constantly resolving conflicts incorrectly

4\. Probably a continuation from point 2 - it actually _deleted_ files it
shouldn't have

I'm mostly happy with Seafile. I've had a few issues from time to time with
the Windows client, but overall a _much_ better experience than with Dropbox.

~~~
flurdy
> 2\. You can only sync a single folder, which is really limiting

That is easily worked around as Dropbox follows symlinks.

E.g on my desktop ~/Dropbox is on a small SSD so on that machine
~/Dropbox/Photos is a symlink to a folder on my large capacity HDD.

> 4.

Perhaps you already aware of the symlink solution :) It works for me, but is a
little hacky. And you need to make sure dropbox is not running when moving and
soft linking folders.

~~~
GordonS
> That is easily worked around as Dropbox follows symlinks

Not on Windows :(

~~~
striking
You're sure a well-placed `mklink` won't do the trick?

~~~
GordonS
Yes, I did try this but it didn't work

------
brightball
Good luck to them. Been an excellent service from day 1.

------
divenorth
Dropbox has a great product. Before dropbox I had a special email account to
store files to share with people. It was annoying if I needed to update stuff.
Dropbox has without a doubt saved me time and money.

------
Etheryte
While one of Dropbox's strengths is its simplicity, one thing that I think is
currently keeping many enterprise customers away is detailed configurability –
currently you only have manual folder-level control over what to sync.
However, a very common use case is to autosync everything except certain types
of files (certificates, keystores etc). They would probably see some quick
adoptions if they covered detailed configuration and enterprise-level
management in a good manner.

~~~
flurdy
The day dropbox can read and follow .gitignore in my folders I would be happy.

If I don't want version control over it I also don't need to back it up.

~~~
flurdy
Continuously manually disabling syncing of e.g. binary build files, temporary
log files etc from my projects. But you can not do it before they exist, only
afterwards whilst dropbox is busy syncing megabytes of unneccesary files...

Though the linux client has a CLI that helps a little with disabling certain
patterns but no mac equivalent.

------
therealmarv
I see no value in Dropbox since using GDrive (have it anyway because of
GSuite) and using a decent sync client like InsyncHQ. Never looked back at
Dropbox.

------
synaesthesisx
If I had anything to do with Dropbox I'd be scrambling to cash out ASAP.

It’s a matter of time before Apple rolls out iCloud file/folder sharing (which
currently exists in some form already). In addition, they recently announced
iMessage "Business Chat" which will likely later include other enterprise
functionality.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I think your statement is correct but example is not very good. Majority of
Dropbox users are using Windows. Perhaps if Azure were to come out with
Dropbox-like functionality this would be more apt. (I'm sure that Azure has at
least some Dropbox-like functionality but is still a distance away from
replacing Dropbox)

~~~
arethuza
Ignoring OneDrive for the moment, Azure File Storage is rather cool as it
doesn't work by synchronizing copies of files it is literally a cloud based
SMB drive:

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/services/storage/files/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/services/storage/files/)

It's not terribly user friendly at the moment - I have wondered if there is a
market for a nice easy to use front end for it...

------
sidhuko
Their focus on corporate users must be why their sdk's are horrendous for a
migration to their v2 api.

Most users I know are on extensions while their javascript sdk is broken.

------
ramoq
Pitching this as the biggest tech IPO since Snapchat isn't very impressive.
Kind of shocked they used that comparison.

------
j_s
I only use their web UI, mostly for free online storage / sharing.

------
chewyland
I love Dropbox.

------
hprotagonist
Amusingly, I just deleted my account for wholly unrelated reasons last week.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Strangely enough, they actually deleted mine recently. I was using a few
hundred MB and hadn't logged I now for a few years and got a notification that
unless I logged in they were wiping my data. Not something that typically
occurs these days.

------
madengr
So what's the advantage of Dropbox over FTP? Seriously. I have only used it
for sharing large files. What else good is it?

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
The advantage is that Brenda from accounting is capable of using it without
too much trouble.

