
Dropbox Versus The World - kajham
http://www.fastcompany.com/3042436/tech-forecast/dropbox-versus-the-world
======
arikrak
I only started the article, but it's too over-the-top to continue. I wonder
how you get media to write about your startup like that?

> Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the
> only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion
> market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173
> billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).

> Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the
> desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight
> years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007.

> No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the
> most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more
> problems for its users than any other.

~~~
shanemhansen
It's called native advertising and unfortunately it's what publications are
betting on to survive in an era of ad blockers.

~~~
Angostura
So you're saying that Dropbox paid Fastcompany to run this piece?

~~~
shanemhansen
I'm not saying Dropbox paid Fastcompany to run this piece. I was responding
to: "I wonder how you get media to write about your startup like that?".

Native advertising is a thing, one I wasn't aware of until recently.

------
pronoiac
> Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service--and perhaps the
> only startup--ever to compete simultaneously against Apple, Google,
> Microsoft, Amazon, and Tencent.

If you're wondering who Tencent is, you're not alone:

[http://www.thestreet.com/story/13095109/1/how-tencent-
up-140...](http://www.thestreet.com/story/13095109/1/how-tencent-
up-14000-since-its-ipo-is-still-a-relatively-unknown-chinese-internet-
giant.html)

They sold games on feature phones, then smartphones, then made WeChat, which
is IM, I think, and massive in China. They also have a payment service, and
the short version is, they're a competitor to Alibaba.

~~~
jsnk
Tencent also is the majority interest of Riot Games. Riot Games is the creator
of League of Legends which is probably the biggest selling game right now.

~~~
adventured
Candy Crush likely still owns the distinction of the biggest game when it
comes to on-going revenue generation. King Digital did $2.2 billion in sales
last year ($586m last quarter), almost entirely on Candy Crush. Estimates put
League of Legends at the $1 billion ballpark for 2014 (up from $624m in 2013).

------
notsrg
"Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains
Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist
. . . anything that’s ‘mine.’

I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information
on Dropbox...

~~~
rconti
Of course they are. When I was buying a house, it was a nonstop game of
scanning and shuffling financial data everywhere. Office scanner, office
email, office computer, cloud storage provider, personal email... and because
of cloud storage provider, all other linked machines in my house, .. not to
mention the email accounts of the bankers...

You can try to get away from it, if you like. But then you're just wasting
your time, faxing the same amount of data over immensely slow connections to
your bank, who's just going to digitize it anyway and put it god knows
where....

And anyone who has done this knows it's ALL time sensitive, and you have other
responsibilities in life, so the most convenient/fastest method is the only
real way of getting it done.

~~~
api
Special case of a general principle: user experience trumps everything. it
trumps freedom, security, privacy, openness, cost, flexibility, ...

------
yalogin
Glad I am not the only one thinking that its almost a paid advertisement for
Dropbox. It looks particularly suspicious given the Amazon unlimited storage
announcement.

------
kijin
> _From the start, Dropbox was almost magically simple: Install Dropbox’s
> folder on your desktop, and by simply dragging files into it you could
> suddenly access them from anywhere._

That was simple in 2007, but this kind of synching model (also used by Google
Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) doesn't feel simple anymore to me. Most
applications still save files in other locations by default. Having to save
them in your Dropbox, or having to move them to your Dropbox afterward, turns
out to be a massive friction.

If the goal is that "Your whole computing environment ought to follow you
around", you need to remove that friction. I know at least one person who lost
access to some important files when she needed them because she forgot to drop
them off in the right box.

One possibility would be to do what Microsoft does with Office 2014 and
OneDrive, and try to force you to save all your files inside the synched
folder. But that quickly gets annoying, especially since most people already
have mountains of files stored and organized elsewhere.

That, and the lack of client-side encryption, is why I'm a loyal customer of a
Dropbox competitor that allows me to sync any folder on any device with any
other folder on any other device. I set it up to sync my entire $HOME
partition, so I don't need to care where my apps store their files. That, Mr.
Houston, is how you get me to hand over my "whole computing environment" to
you.

~~~
sandipc
symlink your home directory into your dropbox folder?

~~~
pronoiac
I'd be wary of a Dropbox folder that contains a link to a parent directory of
itself, with the possibility of an infinite loop.

~~~
grinich
They've taken care of that edge case (and many others).

------
adventured
The retort for Houston is:

You mean in the same way that IBM dominated personal computing (besting that
little start-up Microsoft), and Microsoft dominated search (besting that
little start-up, Google), and Google dominated social (besting that little
start-up, Facebook)?

Turns out, no matter how big or successful you are, you can't dominate
everything. That is something Dropbox has going for it in battling Google,
Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

------
inevrela
Proud user of Dropbox, lot of people around me using it as well, even received
50gb of storage with my S3. I guess I know what it does, but thinking about
Business version - anyone here with any cons? Especially in terms of sharing
stuff in/out of the company?

~~~
brymaster
Found some cons [http://www.drop-dropbox.com/](http://www.drop-dropbox.com/)

------
dandare
I only wish competitors (Drive in my case) would copy their sleek OS
integration and the public folder functionality. Sadly since Condoleezza
Dropbox is not an option for me.

------
pierotofy
Cloud storage is good for many things, but storing financial records, health
information and other sensitive data is not one of them.

------
Cookingboy
Love this following paragraph:

"Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection
of peers, at all levels of the company. It’s a philosophy that appeals to many
Dropbox employees. On a chilly night in San Francisco’s Financial District,
Ilya Fushman, head of business and mobile products, and Agarwal join Houston
and me for dinner at the Battery, an exclusive restaurant and private club.
Despite the posh surroundings, Fushman and Agarwal wax poetic about the
egalitarian culture Houston and Ferdowsi have created. "It’s really hard to
pull off creating an environment of peers," says Agarwal, a former engineering
director at Facebook who oversaw the development of its News Feed. "We hold
ourselves accountable to expectations, and at a bunch of companies, that ends
up being centralized. Drew’s my boss, but I prefer to think of him as a peer
and friend.""

I really don't know if the author was being facetious or the surroundings
really did distort his perception of reality. But either way, as someone who
grew up in a communist country, I really can't believe how people in SV are
spewing these kind of second rate propaganda while keeping a straight face.

~~~
dguaraglia
This is purely a PR piece. I'd guess there's not much editing going on, so
claims like that will go through to the reader as long as they make it through
Dropbox's PR (which is originating the piece to begin with.)

So, yeah, those are some extraordinary claims there, and nobody's going to
check on them. Journalism is mostly dead in this country (except for some rare
exceptions.)

~~~
vonklaus
A HNer made this same point in a different thread today. The child comment
pointed out that (i'm paraphrasing) "people don't pay for journalism or
content, so the only way to monetize it is as a vehicle to drive traffic and
push ads.

~~~
dguaraglia
Absolutely. My thinking is the problem in today's world, specially on the web,
is that you can't tie people down to consume the advertisement, so you have to
fool them into consuming it.

In the good ole' days of pre-cable/pre-TiVo TV, people who wanted to watch a
program would have to sit through the ads because they didn't know when the
next segment of the show would start. Websites can't constrain you the same
way because you are free to take an action against the ad: close the tab,
change tabs, install an ad-blocker.

So what's the solution? You mask ads as content. You get a press release from
a company, do some basic editing on it so it doesn't look exactly the same as
in the other 50 or so blogs affiliated with the PR company, and you are good
to go. You get paid, the client company gets good publicity and the PR company
gets their slice. The consumer is none-the-wiser and thinks s/he got something
for their time. Win/win/win/kinda-lose.

