
The Dropbox Comp - ingve
https://stratechery.com/2018/the-dropbox-comp/
======
kevinios
I recently sent an email to Dropbox support, asking/begging them to let me pay
for their service. But at a normal price for a lambda user.

Dropbox is the only cloud service that I absolutely love since it was
released, the only one I really want to support... and the only one I am not
paying for. I pay for iCloud and for Google Drive, 2-3$/month each.

As a normal user, I do NOT need 1 To of storage for 10$ a month. I need a few
hundreds Go, and am happy to pay 2-3$ a month for those.

I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still... My
money is just waiting to be taken and has been for years. This year, I gave up
on waiting for them and started paying for Google Drive, and unloaded some old
files from Dropbox to Drive.

I would just like the exact same features I've been using since years, but
with a few more Go of space available. That's all I am asking for. And that's
25$ a year I would be willing to give Dropbox, instead of me being a free-
rider since years.

~~~
ggg9990
I had a lot of people asking me to buy my company’s software for 10% or 20% or
50% of what I was charging. I never responded to those cheapskates and rather,
in limited number, looked at them as evidence that I wasn’t charging too
little. I happily pay much more per GB for Dropbox than for whatever AWS
charges because Dropbox has the best client apps, which is of course why they
don’t charge per GB.

~~~
Pulcinella
_best client apps_

Seriously. I am still surprised that to this day none of the big players can
compete at Dropbox’s level. Not even Apple can make iCloud “Just Work™” the
way Dropbox’s client apps and service work.

As a customer I use Dropbox because of how well it works, not because of its
$/GB.

~~~
wcfields
Google offers 'Google Drive Stream' that apes the killer Dropbox features:
offline files that smart-sync as needed. Unfortunatly, it's only for GSuite
accounts.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Google also discontinued one of their apps to rename and launch it as a
different name. I got confused as to how I was supposed to replace it so I
just uninstalled it and never used it again. Google doesn't spend nearly
enough time working on UX.

But Dropox? Always works great. Always. Never had a problem. So I use them
more and more. Too bad I can't encrypt my entire Dropbox like, say, Spideroak
but oh well.

~~~
FullyFunctional
Ahem, cross-platform case sensitivity issues, symlink utterly doesn't works,
but yes, apart from that, it's amazing.

You might give gocryptfs [1] a try, with it you can keep [part of] your
content encrypted in Dropbox.

[1] [https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/](https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/)

------
padobson
I think one of the opportunities Dropbox missed was being unwilling to replace
FTP.

I've built dozens of HTML/Flash/Java uploaders on dozens of different
infrastructures, and there's always a host of issues that need to be dealt
with. When a product's UX doesn't work with FTP, it requires a lot of extra
engineering.

But allowing your customers to move files around with their Dropbox account
completely eliminates this problem. The HTML5 File API has largely solved this
(though it still exists, I still have to occasionally restart YouTube uploads.
YouTube!), but Dropbox could have been the solution, and I can't imagine how
many startups weren't built on top of Dropbox because they didn't want to be
in the replacing-FTP business.

------
013a
I wonder if Dropbox has the capability of entering the PIM space like G-Suite.
I get the feeling that there's room for another custom domain email provider
beyond the monoculture of Gmail. They had Mailbox at one point. Email is
definitely a hard space to get into, but I'd certainly move my domain to it if
the price is right and it bundled in a calendar.

Paper has been a huge change in the way my team collaborates on documents,
between the very easy sharing and super fast interface. I'd love to see what
they can do for email and calendars.

~~~
inthewoods
Paper is interesting but boy have they missed the opportunity so far imho.
Paper doesn't come close to what Quip has been able to do, and they failed to
capitalize on email. My impression, right or wrong, is that they are very slow
at development compared to their competitors.

What I think the article gets right is that Dropbox focused on files - which
are being abstracted away. At my current company, we have Dropbox and Google
Drive, but it's clear that if we're going to use G-Suite then Dropbox needs to
go.

What they could do: with their new-found public status, they could buy
Smartsheet to get a solid Google Sheets competitor. I'm sure they can find a
calendar provider.

Of course, I'm not confident that they should point their ship into the eye of
Office 365 and G-Suite - I just don't see what their other options are.

~~~
dasil003
I can't speak to the business side, but I certainly like Paper much much more
than Quip as a product. In general I find integrated multi-function suites to
feel janky and half-baked compared to their single-function competitors.

~~~
inthewoods
Do you use G-Suite or O365 alongside it? I don't see significant improvement
over a Google Doc.

~~~
dasil003
Yes, I use all three. Paper's focus on content vs formatting make Paper feel
more elegant and more "meaty" for product development/engineering purposes.
Admittedly it's a tough sell over Google Docs for much the same reason that
Google Docs was a tough sell of O365 a few years ago—it just doesn't have the
functionality to fully replace it. That said, Paper has an elegance about it
as a product that reminds me of Facebook vs MySpace ca. 2006, or Slack vs
HipChat ca. 2014, where it serves a modern use case in a fundamentally better
way, less of a local maximum if you will.

~~~
danieldk
_Paper 's focus on content vs formatting make Paper feel more elegant and more
"meaty" for product development/engineering purposes._

And the support for equations makes it great for sharing research notes as
well.

~~~
inthewoods
My team has been using [https://jupyter.org/](https://jupyter.org/) for this
purpose.

------
PrimalDual
I love dropbox but one of their biggest problems is their refusal to support
more than 300,000 files in their sync clients. I have considered moving to
google but I need local copies since I often don’t have internet connection
but I still need my files. Either way, they have a useful product even if they
won’t dominate the enterprise or consumer market.

~~~
zawerf
Oh wow I didn't know about that limitation. Doing `find . -type f | wc -l` I
have ~270000 so I am about to hit it. It would be great if they can implement
a .dropboxignore so I can get it to stop syncing node_modules folders.

I really wish I could agree with the others saying "It just works" for dropbox
sync. I have ran into many other issues around filename casing, file
permissions, symlinks, etc in the past.

~~~
Kagerjay
shouldn't you be putting your code repositories in something like c:/www
folder, and using purely git to track it?

There's lots of 3rd party solutions for .dropboxignore personally I've used
many of them and am not a fan of it (perl scripts, 3rd party apps, etc). I
wish dropbox would natively implement .dropboxignore, but its probably never
going to happen since only a small % of users voice their concerns for it.
Average dropbox user probably doesn't care or doesn't know what a
.dropboxignore is.

~~~
zawerf
I do use git too. But it's nice to be able to jump between multiple computers
without needing to push an incomplete commit to remote (when I get tired from
sitting in front of desktop I switch to laptop to code in bed).

Also dropbox's 30 day version history did save me a couple times when I
accidentally deleted something before committing. And not having to worry
about losing the day's work even if your computer fails is good for peace of
mind.

That said this hits a lot of edge cases with dropbox syncing since it's not
built for this kind of workflow. Every time you do npm install it will cause
thousands of files to sync. I have had the .git folder get corrupted when I
start using it before it has fully synced. Or git would handle syncing
internal symlinks/permissions/casing differently and I would need to rely on
git to restore.

~~~
Kagerjay
The only problem with using dropbox in this case, is if you accidentally dump
node_modules inside of there, it really makes your file history revisions in
dropbox messy.

That and if you have to sync with another PC at home makes your computer
sluggish for like half an hour while its syncing

My solution to you is to have your code repos in another storage solution (not
dropbox). Unfortunately you would have to pay for that too

Or, you could use a built in IDE that has a autosave local revision history. I
know most of the brainstorm products have this feature, such as PHPstorm. This
would prevent accidentally deleting something before committing

For incomplete commits / switching computers, I can't really think of any
workarounds for this unfortunately. Dropbox is very convenient here. The only
solution is to use something like teamViewer and remote into your desktop PC
from your laptop

------
rrggrr
Think back to about 2009... there was a company called drop.io that was
purchased by Facebook and their product summarily executed. It was a simply
and elegantly executed Dropbox, Slack, Box, Discord-ish all-in-one solution.
It was about 5-10 years ahead of its time.

There is room for Dropbox to expand and grow revenue beyond file
storage/syncing. One hopes the billions they will raise after IPO will be
applied to a more drop.io-ish offering.

------
mankash666
Dropbox keeps getting compared to atlassian, which confuses me. I portend it's
VCs lying to themselves about Dropbox's price-to-earnings ratio to justify
their $10B fantasy as pricing Dropbox with box's P/E would value it around
$7B, a whole 30% lesser than they'd like

------
gfosco
Consistently amazed at how many words he can write without saying much of
anything.

~~~
tptacek
That's interesting. I got a lot out of it:

\- He seems to believe Dropbox is superior technically.

\- Box is Dropbox's closest competitor.

\- Fundamentally there are two ways of making money from storage, enterprise
direct-sales and consumer self-service.

\- Box has self-service as a loss-leader for direct-sold enterprise accounts,
and accounts for the operating costs of its self-service accounts as a
marketing expense.

\- Dropbox doesn't; we don't really know Dropbox's cost of customer
acquisition, which is a big deal for a consumer product.

\- A much greater percentage of Box's accounts are paying customers

\- Box can put together customized offerings for enterprise customers in ways
Dropbox can't and so Box has negative churn.

\- On the other hand, running the business this way means that the early
investors in Dropbox (including Drew Houston) kept a far larger part of the
company for themselves.

\- Box is outperforming Dropbox in the market.

\- Atlassian is outperforming both of them.

\- File storage is probably not the strategic high ground for enterprise
computing, something Thompson used to think.

Dropbox is about to go public. An analysis that suggests they're a niche
company is a big deal. Dropbox's investors will be betting that they're not.

------
foxh0und
I'd move back to them if they could implement something similar to Spider Oak,
where I can choose where to sync individual folders on the machine. (IE,
preserve my /home/username/<documents/pictures/downloads>)

------
williamstein
This article is about the low-touch versus high-touch tension of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16421438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16421438),
illustrated by Dropbox versus Box.

------
yueq
it is a dying business in all means. The brand name might worth something
though.

------
zitterbewegung
I had dropbox for awhile and I answered a good question which they gave me
~300GB. It was convienent for a few years but I slowly started to not use the
service. Collaboration with friends moved to other services. Now, I plan on
moving my files off of it to Amazon. I only paid for the pro version for
version history. I think its nice as a free service but now since I have so
many Apple products and Airdrop I don't really have a need for the product at
all. Also, if I want to share larger files or work documents I would always
use google docs (now moving to aws work docs). I hope to be off of both Google
services and dropbox soon as I really only use Dropbox for archiving stuff I
don't want to lose.

I think my answer is biased due to the 300GB unlimited account I have though.

