
Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up - adventured
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-24/dropbox-is-struggling-and-competitors-are-catching-up
======
rogerbinns
My experience is that Dropbox is currently "lucky" that they support (and work
well) on Linux, while none of the competitors do. That at least means everyone
can use it together, without requiring multiple solutions.

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.

~~~
rodgerd
> My experience is that Dropbox is currently "lucky" that they support (and
> work well) on Linux, while none of the competitors do. That at least means
> everyone can use it together, without requiring multiple solutions.

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.

~~~
kagamine
One competitor that has excellent support for Linux is Wuala by LaCie, the
hard drive manufacturer. Although no longer free they take security seriously
and in my experience of using it for about 2 years I have never had a problem.
In fact I didn't begrudge paying for storage when it went non-free as I was by
this time happy with it. I use it almost daily on Win, Linux and OS X.

~~~
subsection1h
Wuala hasn't updated their social accounts or blog since January, and recent
comments by Wuala's users seem to be mostly negative. Does Wuala have a
future?

~~~
kagamine
That i cannot answer. Late last year they killed the free service and gave
everyone time to either move their data or become a paying customer. They had
a "whatever plan you pay for we'll double the storage" offer on. I only use it
mostly for moving files between the 3 main OSes and some document storage. I
found that I was quite happy with the free service so why not pay and continue
using it?

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.

------
veidr
I think the key to this story is that Dropbox has been a good product for
individuals, but Dropbox for Business has been and remains absolutely
terrible.

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.

~~~
defen
> a bug that corrupts some PDF documents shared via Dropbox if they contain
> Japanese text

That's really disturbing. Is Dropbox not just moving bytes around? Why are
"PDF" or "Japanese" even relevant?

~~~
veidr
Sorry, I should have been more clear -- that sounds worse than it is (although
it is still bad). The original file data in the Dropbox is not corrupted; it
is only the PDF presented in the web browser (to the user with whom you shared
the data) that is corrupted.

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.

------
dools
I used Dropbox for ages, until it came time to get serious about team
accounts.

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.

~~~
gregpilling
We also gave up on Dropbox and went to Google with the unlimited apps plan. It
seemed easier, solved the problems, and reduced by one the number of systems
we needed to understand. $120 per year per employee is easier to deal with, if
it includes all the other Google Apps integration.

~~~
_pmf_
Just pray you will never need any kind of support.

------
jmuguy
One thing that's almost made me switch is how they handle sharing links now.
Putting whatever you're sharing behind a (imo deceptive) sign-up/sign-in pop-
up. So I've gone from something really clean looking when I share a file with
someone to something that looks like I'm asking them to sign-up for Dropbox.
Does the paid version get rid of this?

~~~
sanderjd
I'm confused – when I click Share, copy the link, and open it in an incognito
window, it doesn't seem to be behind a sign-up/sign-in pop-up.

~~~
greyboy
My account has the same "problem" as jmuguy. It's really unfortunate as I
often need to share files with non-technical/older people, and it creates
unnecessary confusion.

As well as anyone that shares files with me, I see the same pop-up (icognito
window or not).

------
akoumjian
The real challenge is how to compete with a storage platform when online
storage is turning into a sort of commodity. Companies like Google and Amazon
are racing to the bottom on cloud storage pricing, so competing in this space
completely depends on the value you are adding on top of storage.

------
pserwylo
Genuine question, as I am not well versed in valuations:

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?

~~~
nikhizzle
Valuations are generally at an equivalent of what you would get investing the
money elsewhere. For example, if you believed you could get 5% on your money
elsewhere, you may be willing to value a company at 20x it's profit (price to
earnings).

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".

~~~
doublerebel
I understand this concept, but never heard it explained quite this way. Thanks
for this concise example and especially for the connection with the "efficient
frontier".

------
codesushi42
They should have sold to Apple when they had the chance. It's funny that they
didn't have enough foresight to see that large players like Google would amass
the infrastructure to easily out compete them. And that infrastructure came
for free from Google scaling out other efforts.

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.

~~~
bane
Just think about this:

Google (within the scope of photos) has given every person _unlimited_ photo
storage. That's how much cloud storage is worth...nothing.

~~~
olefoo
But it's only unlimited if you allow them to manage the compression; if you
want to manage the files yourself ( the "originals" ) you're constrained as to
storage on both Amazon and Google.

~~~
bane
Think about this then, for a specific type of computation (image compression)
Google is _also_ saying compute resources cost nothing.

------
overgard
So I'm still a dropbox customer, but I haven't really used it in months. The
problem is the "just one folder" thing is really limiting. I really really
need the ability to map it to different places on my hard drive. A lot of
programs are finicky about folder layout, and dropbox does not work well with
them.

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.

~~~
nemothekid
I've never really found it all that limiting, and I'd argue I prefer it that
way.

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).

~~~
overgard
I'm a weirdo that still uses windows (on my mac, of all things), because its
graphics drivers are better for graphics programming and visual studio is way
nicer than xcode. I use OSX too, but I can't really depend on symlinks
existing across my machines.

~~~
sapek
[https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc753194.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc753194.aspx)

Or does Dropbox not support symlinks on Windows?

------
jayess
I work at a very large enterprise and we've been in need of a cloud storage
solution for the enterprise. Not where everyone shares the folder and all
files are stored locally, but server-based cloud storage, so multiple servers
can synchronize their folders for sharing in the local office. With A/D
integration. And granular permissions.

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.

~~~
cjjoseph
Definitely worth taking a look at the hybrid solution from Egnyte. Can
leverage cloud and on-prem for scaling, performance, etc.

~~~
puttergi
Thanks for the shoutout cjjoseph. I'm a product manager here at Egnyte. The
OP's use case is right in Egnyte's sweet spot. Our storage sync technology
allows you to synchronize files among multiple on-premises storage servers and
the Egnyte cloud. We support granular sub folder permissions and easy AD
integration. Your Egnyte account will scale easily to thousands of users and
many millions of files/folders.

If anyone on this thread has further questions about Egnyte I'd be more than
happy to answer them here.

------
chrisfosterelli
I think Dropbox lost a reasonably large share of its market when the crowd
that is both technical and privacy-conscious starting moving to more secure
alternatives.

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.

[1] [https://spideroak.com/](https://spideroak.com/)

~~~
TD-Linux
>but for zero-knowledge guarantee I'm OK with that.

How can you guarantee that when the client isn't open source?

~~~
click170
You don't.

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.

------
edpichler
Dropbox is one of the best software/services I ever used. Think on this: they
competitors are Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Pen drives, FTP, etc, and they
succeed! This seems really difficult to me, to build a huge service on a very
hostil business. They are more alive than ever, and it's not because they are
lucky, it's because these guys are really really competent.

I really admire this company.

~~~
restalis
"competitors are Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Pen drives, FTP, etc"

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!

------
habosa
Is it just me or is this a totally uninteresting article? There's no evidence
stated for how Dropbox's competitors are "catching up" or how Dropbox might be
"struggling" other than maybe some troubles scaling sales.

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.

~~~
wj
From the first paragraph of the article:

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.

------
farslan
They have products like Carousel, which is not even capable of sharing photo
albums with others with a direct URL, which was the number one core feature
Dropbox had since one day.

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.

~~~
gcr
Carousel has always supported that. Select some photos, "Share", then "Get
Link". The recipient doesn't need an account. They can also download as a .zip
file.

(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.)

~~~
farslan
Unfortunately this is not true. There is no way you can download a .zip file
from an Album shared from Carousel. Here is even a support case with users
complaining:
[https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/202143075-How-
do-I-share-an-Album-in-Carousel-via-a-link-)

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.

------
partiallypro
Surprised many people here seem to think Google Drive is the defining
competitor. When the real money is made in enterprise, which I would say
Microsoft dominates with OneDrive. Microsoft's bundling of Office 365 with
OneDrive and internal sharing is something only Google could compete with (but
can't because at least for large corporations, Google Docs does not suffice.)

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.

~~~
holychiz
We have OneDrive but I'm not aware of anybody in our large company using it.
Instead our team spend extra money on Dropbox, and Box. OneDrive is clunky,
hard to use. It does not even integrate well with Office365, let alone other
apps. In terms of UX, OneDrive is a disaster.

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.

------
hughc
If your only value metric is about personal storage, then you might see
Dropbox as 'doomed' by its more-space-for-less-cost competitors.

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.

------
sblom
Part of their problem must be that they haven't done DropQuest in years.
[https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-
Dropquest-2013-2014-a...](https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-
Dropquest-2013-2014-and-2015)

~~~
shampine
Always one of my favorite days.

------
junto
My experience is this. It works well. It does the job but the bottom line is I
don't trust them not to be pumping every file upload (and everybody else's
files) to the NSA. The old Condi Rice appointment was a huge red flag.

I'm itching to leave. I'm currently trailing Spideroak and it seems OK so far.

------
jen729w
FWIW, I really don't like the new Mac client. It may be partially Apple's
fault - changing the way they have to integrate with Finder - but it's just
not as robust as it historically was.

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.]

~~~
WalterSear
Just be glad that you have't had days and days of pegged cpus. :(

I'm actively looking for an alternative.

~~~
xenadu02
I think it's doing something crazy with fsfilters because I notice the DropBox
process kick up CPU usage when I'm copying files in a completely unrelated
directory (or even at the terminal). I think it is trying to observe all file
changes on the filesystem.

------
clemmer56
It boils down to this: You'd have to be dumb to store important stuff on
Dropbox. So you only share non-important things on it. And for that, it's not
worth paying. You might as well us the many free alternatives. Storage is free
now.

Dropbox is doomed for these simple reasons.

~~~
mayneack
Which free things alternatives are better suited for important things and why?

------
shedletsky
The problem with Dropbox is that it is not locally encrypted. This means it
will only ever be used for sharing excel spreadsheets at work.

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.

------
ChuckMcM
You see, there is this: _" Its total 2014 revenue was about 60 percent of
Dropbox’s, according to IDC, but its market value is now only one-fifth of
Dropbox’s private valuation."_

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.

------
doctorpangloss
My mind is blown that so many people report poor experiences. Perhaps this is
the wrong audience.

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.

------
roymurdock
Dropbox entered the market first and thus had a first-mover advantage. They
also did well to give away space for free and with referrals. I have 20gb of
free space because I would refer all my friends in college to Dropbox whenever
we had to work on a group project.

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.

~~~
dagw
_Dropbox entered the market first and thus had a first-mover advantage._

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.

------
pwnna
I'm surprised no one here mentioned Seafile as a competitor. They are
completely open source => from client to server. I host my own for myself and
my family for like a year now and it's super smooth[1]. I have the system
setup with an actual certificate. It also allows you to enable client side
encryption[2].

[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.

------
simplexion
My main issue with Dropbox is their deceptive practices of the past. I can't
trust a company that behaves like that.

[http://boingboing.net/2011/04/21/dropboxs-new-
securit.html](http://boingboing.net/2011/04/21/dropboxs-new-securit.html)

------
wooderson
Dropbox has the most brilliant engineering team in the Valley.

But they've hired fairly weakly on the business side.

~~~
joosters
After reading about all of the product's faults in these comments, I hope they
_don 't_ have the most brilliant engineering team in the valley...

------
_pmf_
I tried Microsoft OneDrive and managed to get the first file I uploaded (a 150
MB ZIP archive) to be stuck in some partially uploaded state so that it cannot
be deleted or reuploaded). This was with the original OneDrive client that
comes preinstalled with Windows 8.1.

------
lubos
Does anybody know how many of their 400 million "registered users" are still
active?

~~~
FrankenPC
I know I have a junk account I use only once or twice a year.

------
charleswitt
Given the Condi Rice appointment it would be silly to put important files on
DropBox. I only use it for non important files. And in that case I might as
well use the free competitors. So DropBox has a very weak business case, at
least for consumers.

------
dmix
This was about the time I stopped using Dropbox:

[https://imgur.com/uoShTDo](https://imgur.com/uoShTDo)

Syncthing has been an excellent replacement in team environments. As well as
Tarsnap for more technical set ups.

~~~
AceJohnny2
You really think any other US-jurisdiction-based provider is safer?

~~~
cperciva
Leaving aside the fact that Tarsnap is based in Canada (since really, I doubt
CSIS has any more qualms about asking for data than the NSA does), the whole
point of Tarsnap is that I _can 't_ reveal customer data because -- unlike
Dropbox -- data stored using Tarsnap is encrypted using keys which only the
customer holds.

------
scurvy
I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned Bittorrent Sync as a Dropbox
competitor. We all have several TB's of extra storage lying around between our
work computer, laptop, home machine, phones, etc. Why not sync stuff directly
between all of your machines and skip the cloud middleman (and the chance that
all your files are belong to someone else)? Remember that day or two when
anyone could log in to someone else's Dropbox account?

~~~
sdalfakj
> Bittorrent Sync

Because it is still closed source AND requires all your computers to be online
for syncing to work.

I went with SpiderOak. Happy user.

~~~
scurvy
Not all must be online, just 2. Also, Dropbox isn't open source, nor Box,
Google, Microsoft. I don't think that's really a requirement for success in
this space.

------
thanatropism
Clickbaity title sez > Dropbox is struggling

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.

------
bane
I've been a long time DB user. The company has always given me some weird
feelings, but the execution of the syncing and clients has been better than
anybody else up till now. I have to say though, if I had as easy to use a set
of multiplatform clients that let me just use the storage I have on my home
network I'd drop them in a hot minute.

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]

1 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAfIDUTPJJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAfIDUTPJJM)

------
joeblau
> While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing
> last year with...

> 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.

~~~
delecti
Or they're expected to expand the file-sharing market, either to entirely new
customers, or by converting customers who were using non "file-sharing"
storage options.

------
macjohnmcc
The only thing holding me back from subscribing is the cost for entry (beyond
free). I have plenty of storage space between the different services that I
don't feel the need for as much space as they offer at the starting price.

------
colinbartlett
It frustrates me that the comments here on articles like these consistently
devolve into nothing more than a list of anecdotes for or against. I'd
appreciate more reaction and comments on the actual article content instead.

------
rokhayakebe
300M users, Does one think it would be just easier to charge everyone $1/mo
for unlimited storage and be done with this?

------
sjonnz
I have a hard time associating Condoleezza Rice with leading the charge on
personal privacy. As long as Dropbox chooses to continue working with her, I
will continue to steer my coworkers and friends to use one of the many, many
other competitors. Even though there is no other evidence that others are
better, selecting Ms. Rice shows poor judgement by Dropbox.

~~~
happywolf
Not familiar with American affair (not American but am using Dropbox), anybody
care to shed more light on why Rice isn't the best person on personal privacy?
Google search key words will be fine. Thx

~~~
mikeash
Wikipedia actually has a section just about her and Dropbox:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Criticism_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Criticism_of_appointment_to_the_Dropbox_board)

I'm kind of surprised, personally.

~~~
Grue3
Nothing surprising here, Wikipedia has long been used as a personal soapbox by
some of the more opinionated editors.

------
Aloha
Is there a good replacement for dropbox, for the purpose of filesync between
machines?

~~~
chrisper
If you want to use your own server, look at aerofs. It is free for up to 30
clients.

------
robg
FUD

------
loopdoend
Next time don't put Condoleezza Rice on your board of directors.

------
kelukelugames
I hope the DropBox employees still have enough money left to reserver soccer
fields.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE)

