
Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011) - wallflower
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/
======
bane
Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud.

Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a
growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading
their accounts.

Imagine these scenarios:

\- A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a
flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add
metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep
putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account.
Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing
sites.

\- A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a
private site they can use to listen to _their_ collection. Now I have to keep
paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have
taken on any number of music services.

\- A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a
soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep
sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on
soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services.

\- A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube
like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on
youtube...and video takes up a _ton_ of storage.

Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their
livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist.

And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number
of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting
enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block
dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a
crowded space competing with companies who _are_ making it necessary to have
their file sharing services _because_ they're tying all kinds of productivity
applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are
willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.

~~~
kenhwang
The problem with all those things are: bandwidth. Storage is cheap, bandwidth
is expensive. Dropbox wants you to stick stuff with them and then never touch
it. Then they would only need slow disks and slow networks.

Once Dropbox tries to become Flickr/Soundcloud/Youtube, they have the same
problem those services have: massive money loss. Playing media at scale is
hard and expensive. Especially when Dropbox's niche is easily mutable data.
Dropbox doesn't exactly have a massive advertising empire that could subsidize
and take advantage of Youtube.

So the one place they did expand into is productivity tools. No one's going to
massively share a text document/slideshow/spreadsheet, nor do those things eat
very much bandwidth, and it plays into their mutability advantage very well.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Dropbox customers are clearly willing to pay more than the absolute minimum
possible. Dropbox is relatively expensive. So instead of not offering a
service that customers want they could simply charge for bandwidth.

Also, Dropbox does support partially syncing large files, so mutability is not
necessarily that big of a problem (depending on the file format I guess).

~~~
kenhwang
The mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content.
Youtube/Flickr pretty much operate on full replacement, when you're done
fiddling with your files you publish them and they never change. This makes it
easier to serve the content cheaper through caching and CDNs.

That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now.
Change a bit and it tries only sync a bit. Now imagine how difficult that
would be to serve with multiple layers of caching.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_> The mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content._

True, good point.

 _> That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now_

I think OneDrive can do that as well now.

------
mehrdada
Dropbox feels more bearucratic internally than Google, a company two orders of
magnitude its size. I feel like it is a perfect case of all the “VC-style”
advice of “CEO job changes every 6 months and you should adapt” going haywire;
mistaking the focus to be building an abstract hierarchical HR org, while
completely losing the ability, vision, or desire to build a product that
people love.

Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ quote on monopoly businesses, except it happened
before they got a proper monopoly.
[https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg](https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg) In fact, the
early success may have been a curse there, thinking they have the genie in the
bottle when they really had not.

~~~
throwawaypop
I think people just wanted a cloud solution to store and retrive files.

Dropbox was one of the products that grew during the PC and digital wave. Then
came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.

~~~
mullingitover
> Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that.

I wish it were true, but neither Google nor Apple have the most basic, brain-
dead feature: "Give me a link that I can give anyone, and they can download
the thing without jumping through any hoops."

They both require people receiving a file to jump through the hoop of having
accounts with them in order to do this most basic action. It's the reason I'm
still regrettably paying Dropbox. Anything calling itself a cloud drive should
have basic feature where you can send anyone a link and they can download the
file with no other requirement than an internet-connected browser.

~~~
ImTheMaddest
Google Drive has this feature, right click the file > get shareable link >
Anyone on the Internet with this link can view

~~~
mullingitover
I stand corrected! Time to cancel that dropbox subscription.

------
ativzzz
Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can already build such
a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it
locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in
software.

...

Not mine, but a HN classic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

~~~
_visgean
Somehow I am doubtful that you can trivially build what dropbox does. I am on
their pro plan, I have tried running Syncthing on my own servers but the cost
is quite prohibitive.

I have about 300GB of photos there. Some of the files change, sometimes
generating quite a lot of space - e.g. I think calculating the deleted files
it is quite possible that I have few terabytes of data at any given moment. I
looked into getting that space on Digital ocean and it would be way more
expensive.

That is not including the price of my own labor, how much time would I spend
on managing my own solution? Can I guarantee the same level of safety as
Dropbox does? They have people thinking about security, I don't even have time
upgrade my servers - beyond automatic update..

We did not even get into weird corner cases... Couple of months ago I was
running some machine learning experiments and misconfigured the logging
process and ended up with about 15m small log files in my dropbox folder. I
had contacted the support and it was dealt with. Had I been using something
like SVN I would have to manually purge the history or something like that.

IDK, I am very happy for the value I am getting out of my money. For me the
biggest value is that it works and I don't have to do anything about it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Can I guarantee the same level of safety as Dropbox does?

Isn't Dropbox infamous for deleting your files?

~~~
_visgean
I have not experienced this in the last 8 years, care to elaborate?

------
daveoc64
I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus plan, and that
does everything I want - albeit at a higher price than I'd like, but it always
seems like their marketing is so heavily geared towards business use.

Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider
upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan.

I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".

~~~
claviska
I was a loyal Dropbox customer early on. At some point, they stopped caring
about individuals and put all of their effort (especially marketing) into
businesses. As a paid user, it was annoying to see upgrade nags in the app and
on the website. I just wanted a damn folder that would sync properly.

That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need
pushed me away. After their horrible rebranding, I got sick of looking at the
ugly new icon on my iPhone. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I now pay something like $10/mo for iCloud storage which works pretty good.
Maybe Dropbox no longer needs (or wants) me as a customer, but it’s something
I would’ve happily continued to pay for potentially decades to come.

~~~
wheels
I recently uninstalled Dropbox after years of use. The upgrade nags were over
the top, and the number-of-device limitations on the free plan made it no
longer usable for me.

I like the app, and would happily have paid _something_ for it, but as a
mostly private user, the lack of a plan between 2 GB / free and 2 TB /
$10/month just didn't make sense. $3/month for 5 GB would have been an easy
choice.

Now I'm using SyncThing, which I don't love, but gets the job done, is free,
and doesn't limit me to a couple devices. I have a folder that syncs to my web
server that replaces me sharing things on Dropbox, which works, but is a
little cumbersome. (That said, sharing links might be a fun thing to hack into
SyncThing.)

~~~
august125
What really irritated me was the suddenly imposed three device sync limit.
Being forced to pay for 2 TB when I didn't need any more space than I already
had just to get my files on all my computers really rubbed me the wrong way.
Like you, I wish there was a 5 GB / $3/month plan.

On top of that, they're losing sight of the deep OS integration that made them
so appealing to Steve Jobs. When a screenshot is automatically saved to
Dropbox I'm no longer presented with the option to "Show in Finder" but
instead "Show in Dropbox" which instead of snapping open a Finder window
slowly launches their kludgy app that isn't at all visually or functionally
harmonious with macOS.

~~~
harryh
How many people do you think there are that would be willing to pay $3/month
but not $10/month?

How many people who currently pay $10/month would drop down to a $3/month plan
if given the option?

I'm fairly certain the math on this paints a clear picture: Offering a
$3/month plan would cost them more than it makes them.

~~~
krzyk
How many people need 2TB or even 1TB / 500GB of St orange on Dropbox? Mostly
companies and persons that use it for profit.

For me 100 GB or even 50 GB and no device limit (!) is enough. Give me that
for $12 a year and I won't look for alternatives.

How many people would use that? I think more than the $10/month plan.

------
recursivecaveat
Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of
mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox'
was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps
catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service
you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite
with whatever chat service comes after Meet/Hangouts/Allo, then Zoom's days
are numbered.

~~~
jeffbee
The difference with Zoom is it was created by a person with decades of
experience engineering video conferencing at scale.

~~~
rescripting
I'm curious why this matters? Is dropbox's current failings its inability to
scale?

~~~
whymauri
I think Zoom has proven that they have exceptionally good product vision. I'm
not sure Dropbox has over the past few years.

~~~
Guffton
It may do but other providers will be just as good. So Zoom may find
themselves squeezed out.

------
pmart123
They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on. Prior to their
IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending time to migrate off of AWS
versus continuing to build around their core offering. As it stands now, they
could still target consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching,
etc.) if order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive,
Microsoft, etc.

~~~
fermienrico
I love Dropbox as a product and happily pay for it. It always works. No fuss.
No conflicts, it just works.

Something to be said about tools you forget that you’re even paying for, they
silently make your life better.

Lately, they’re getting slightly annoying though. Designers at Dropbox - it’s
a fucking file syncing tool, not a life philosophy. Get over the garish design
non sense and allow Guido(retired)...ehhh engineers to do their thing.

The problem is the shareholders. Dropbox doesn’t need to grow. It can stay the
same and continue to be helpful (and make money, provide a living to many
employees). But the goddamn shareholders will ruin a perfectly good product.
Public companies get hollowed out and the marrow sucked by the shareholders. I
want a Drew Houston & Sons Co.; not Dropbox Incorporated.

~~~
nvarsj
> No fuss. No conflicts, it just works.

I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux filesystems bizarrely
- forcing me to reimage multiple machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour
on non-ext4. I also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason I
haven’t swapped to something else is my life is locked into it from the early
days. I’d love to drop it at this point. I don’t even need that much space -
just something cross platform.

~~~
fermienrico
Works just fine for windows and mac. I know of that shit storm when they
neutered the linux app.

I think you're referring to this fiasco?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209)

~~~
_visgean
It also works on Linux. Specifically on ext4.

------
aprdm
I just recently was shopping for a solution for myself and considered google
drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud .

What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on Dropbox which
I have been (a free ) user for 8 years.

I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the worse, I also
got super confused about their site which didn’t try to sell to people but
instead to enterprise only.

As a person that needs around 300gb and want it integrated with my
MacBook/iPhone I ended up paying for iCloud .

~~~
KozmoNau7
Did you look at pCloud? Their pricing is decent, they have great link sharing
functionality and rudimentary but workable media streaming. Their Linux client
is miles ahead of Dropbox and any of the third-party GDrive sync applications.

------
innocenat
I am a happy user of paid Dropbox, and I think many person are the same as me.

For me, OneDrive and Google Drive are not enough simply because of their
terrible sync system. Back then when OneDrive was just launched the speed for
me was absolutely horrible (like <100KB/s). Sure, I'd like if I could just buy
space as I grow, as I remembered it was a hard decision to buy 1TB (back then)
when I only needed 50GB.

I currently have >600,000 files in my Dropbox. I don't know if other system
can reliably deal with this many files, Dropbox has proved it to me that it
can deal with my files on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

~~~
bichonnages
Synology Drive @ home + Backblaze B2

much cheaper

works great

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> [pg] That does count for a lot with us. It's surprising how many of the
groups who apply have a cofounder who's not willing to quit his or her job.
It's a worrying sign when someone who knows the company a lot better than we
do isn't willing to bet on it. But again, there are always exceptions.

The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job to wok on
dropbox part-time.

The problem I see with pg's logic is that the founder and YC are not betting
the same value on the company. The way I see it, YC is asked to bet some
money, but the founder is asked to bet everything they got. If YC was asked to
bet everything they had on that one company, they'd say no. In that case,
having a plan B is not a sign of lack of resolve, it's a sign of sanity.

But I'm probably missing something. I really don't have the whatsitcalled,
entrepreneurial spirit. It all looks like gambling to me and I hate gambling,
especially when the odds are stacked against me; which they always are,
otherwise it's not gambling. So I guess I don't get it.

~~~
JohnHammersley
I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not
all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding
team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign
that you might struggle to be successful.

I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing
ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much
effort, it's likely that if you're not able to quit to work on it, you'll lose
out to a team that can.

PS: I'm saying this as a founder who quit his job (as did my co-founder) when
it looked liked we had something, and I doubt Overleaf would be where it is
today if we'd not. So I may be biased in that direction!

~~~
hansvm
Just wanted to drop by and say that Overleaf is an amazing product, and my
only complaint is that I didn't learn about it sooner.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks hansvm, always good to see replies like this :) Glad you're finding it
useful!

------
aabhay
I’m a huge fan of dropbox, partially because I’m an enterprise user of all
their features (including paper and transfer!). In addition to Discord, I feel
that it is one of the few companies that has kept their product simple and
streamlined. Even modern tools like Airtable, Notion, Miro and of course Slack
feel bloated and complicated. It’s a genuine challenge for large organizations
to maintain simplicity so I respect what they were able to do.

~~~
ramraj07
How the hell is slack more complicated than dropbox?? I didn't see Slack
Paper, or Slack photos which they then comoletely and annoyingly dropped
support for!

~~~
aabhay
Compared to Google Drive and OneDrive, Dropbox is like a zen masterpiece. I
just install the Dropbox helper and I rarely if ever need to use the website
or use any funky app integrations.

Slack used to be simple, now it’s a mess of different teams, with a thousand
channels, each with threads and document tools and integrations and slash
commands to remember.

------
KozmoNau7
I used Dropbox for a while, but their Linux client was a mess that randomly
spiraled into 100% CPU usage for long periods of time.

Google Drive with Insync was better, but had absolutely no bandwidth limiting,
so it ate all of my meager upload speed a lot of the time.

There are also the obvious issues of hosting your files with American
companies, if you're not fond of various three letter agencies looking through
your stuff. I do t have anything even remotely incriminating, but I am opposed
to widespread secret surveillance on principle.

So I use pCloud, which is hosted in Switzerland. Their Linux client is great,
their pricing is decent, they have reasonable media streaming built in
(supports FLAC, too) and their sharing links are easy to use and don't require
people to register accounts. They also have good undelete features (30 days
standard, up to a year for an additional fee).

------
hartator
My main thing is almost always 100% cpu on my huge 1tb folder when working
there.

------
maxdata
My company was largely run on dropbox as a crucial piece of infrastructure for
many years before my arrival. As of a couple months ago, it has been cut out
of our production pipeline entirely, but for many years, if you saw a digital
out-of-home ad in certain places, it only got there because someone had added
a media file and schedule to a dropbox folder. Looking back on it, it's pretty
wild how much of their business relied on dropbox working reliably.
Thankfully, that's all gone now.

~~~
jumhyn
I worked in a research lab several years ago that used Dropbox as their
version control system for all the data analysis scripts they wrote. It took a
while but by the time I left I had convinced everyone to switch over to git.

------
ValisTuring
I heard some positive feedback of AI Dungeon using Cortex to reduce their cost
of using GPT2. Reference: 1.[How we scaled AI Dungeon 2 to support over
1,000,000 users ][https://medium.com/@aidungeon/how-we-scaled-ai-
dungeon-2-to-...](https://medium.com/@aidungeon/how-we-scaled-ai-dungeon-2-to-
support-over-1-000-000-users-d207d5623de9)

------
krzyk
I resigned from Dropbox recently because they don't have a subscription that
is right for me (I'm not a data hoarder who needs 1TB of synced space, I just
need 50 or 100 GB max) and because (most importantly) added an artificial
limit of max 3 devices sync for free tier.

I switched to syncthing and so far I love it. Now my data lives on 2 always
online servers plus few laptops, vms.

------
miked85
I switched to Resilio (formerly BitTorrent) Sync [1] years ago and never
looked back. It does have the restriction that at least one of your machines
must be online to sync with others, but aside from that, it has been a solid
replacement.

[1]
[https://www.resilio.com/individuals/](https://www.resilio.com/individuals/)

~~~
teknas
If one of your devices is guaranteed to be always online, you should take a
look at syncthing. I found it to be faster than resilio.

[https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

------
hunvreus
I would gladly pay for Dropbox if their service was more compelling than
Google Drive.

And it could: Dropbox Paper is still the best editing experience I've ever
had. If it allowed for better organization and search, it would blow Notion
out of the water.

------
sqldba
I dropped Dropbox when they enforced the 3 device limit on the free consumer
plan a few years ago.

It sucks for them because I was very outspoken about them beforehand because I
used it. Then it changed from endorse to absolutely tell people to stay away
because it’s unusable.

Penny wise pound foolish.

------
Havoc
Recently saw an appealing -40% discount on amex for dropbox. That could be
cool - esp if stacked with a promo. Headed over to their subreddit in search
of a special...literally an entire subreddit of complaints.

Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.

~~~
seanieb
Find me a technical saas product of tyat scale that doesn’t have support
forums that are on fire? Checkout gdrive or iclouds.

~~~
Havoc
Not sure I'd call their subreddit a support forum

------
sonicggg
This article did not age well for Dropbox.

------
danbmil99
I was beta user number 50. I saw no value in something I could do easily with
SFTP or SCP etcetera. I'm not an investor I guess

------
ausjke
what happened to the stock, it's lustlacking comparing to other high tech
stocks.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> it's lustlacking comparing to other high tech stocks

Something described as "lackluster" is lacking luster, not lust.

