Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision.
I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.
A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well.
A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.
Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?
In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, where N >> 1) at some point.
That's not how investing works. People don't invest because they think a company is worth X, they invest because they think it will be worth X at some point in the future adjusted for the risk of not being worth X. Further, they don't necessarily buy stock from the company.
In other words startups have a small chance of being worth a much larger X, and Exxon has a very large chance of being worth a slightly larger X. If you need zero risk buy government bonds not stock.
Stock and Bonds are very different things. A bond is an agreement with a company to hand back X amount of money at time Y. Stock is an agreement to share in future profits.
Importantly, when you buy stock from a someone other than the company then the price you pay has little to do with the company. But, again my point is risk is an inherent part of the process. If you invest in a startup and they use all of that money to buy government bonds and then fold in five years you would be pissed because they avoided risking your capital.
I think you are talking past each other because you are not talking about the same party when asserting whether there is or isn't a problem. It's true that the investors don't have a problem if Dropbox fails to live up to its valuation. Venture capitalists expect that most of their investments will fail. But a company that has accepted venture capital is beholden to its investors and will almost certainly have a problem if it fails to live up to their expectations. Remember that investors are part owners, and get to make decisions about how the company should be run. The more dissatisfied they become, the more drastic the changes they will demand.
Hah. It becomes a problem for it's users. When they are chasing quarterlies and the focus shifts from providing a good experience to making numbers, you'll feel it. Most companies DNA is pretty baked in by the time they offer publicly.
The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.
Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money.
Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work.
So yes that's a problem for the company. Ultimately this model of "investment" can kill a business that is technically succeeding because the speculators don't see a high enough return. That's also a problem for society as it creates instability and prevents technologically successful companies from prospering long term.
At least that's one narrative that appears to fit well with my observations.
On the other hand if the speculators also reward people doing the work, they incentivize lots of them to do that work. Hence startup economy, where many companies blatantly lie that they care about users, where in fact those companies are only vehicles for the founders to get a good exit.
Be that as it may, this is pedantic quibbling outside of the point the GGP post author was actually trying to make: speculative pressure by investors (lazy or otherwise) conflicts with the aim of stable long-term equilibrium doing +/- one thing well.
If you actually care about building a sustainable business, not Unicorns and moonshots and other things investors want you to become and do, don't take investment, or at least not much.
So what? That's literally their jobs. In fact, both parties entered into that contract knowingly with the expectation that it will be mutually beneficial.
I recall this being something pointed out in "Silicon Valley" where an offer/valuation was way over the top and would leave the team in this same kind of situation. Dropbox had to accept the offer, so they did agree to the terms that put themselves where they are now.
I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox...
Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try.
Arq is a well-supported piece of commercial software. It's a one time $50 license, but works with a half dozen different cloud services. Another commenter mentioned the open source Duplicati, which sounds similar. I haven't looked into it, but probably would if I wasn't already set up with a decent solution.
Folks often end up with a tonne of excess space either on a paid Dropbox account, or Google Suite via their university or company. You can also get unlimited space on ACD for $60/a (some people on /r/datahoarder claim to have uploaded over a petabyte), and Glacier is quite affordable on a per GB basis. It's pretty easy to get reliable versioned encrypted cloud backups on different providers that run overnight without requiring a lot of attention from an end user.
The biggest gap I have left is that most of my photos are on iCloud and if you don't have space on your Mac to store local copies to back up to somewhere else, it's easy to end up with only one copy of vital data.
>S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox...
Might be worth looking into Duplicati [1]. You choose the backend, and it does the other things you mention ("Backup files and folders with strong AES-256 encryption. Save space with incremental backups and data deduplication. Run backups on any machine through the web-based interface or via command line interface. Duplicati has a built-in scheduler and auto-updater.")
Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.
Does anything stop you from uploading 10s or 100s of TB? I recently crossed 1TB of storage use on S3 (which costs around $20/month) and am in the process of exploring alternatives.
I've never really understood how companies can offer "unlimited" storage at low prices.
"Unlimited" space in any online service almost always means "there is a soft cap where we start threatening to shut down your service, but we won't tell you what it is ahead of time".
Actually quite an interesting point. Consider S3. They provide unlimited storage, but their software has to be able to keep up with the insane growth of data, albeit the hardware storage demand as well.
S3's cost to the consumer scales with the amount stored. That's different from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google, who offer enterprise-facing non-developer storage options at a flat rate for "unlimited".
They can do this because these enterprise-facing products offer fewer performance guarantees relative to their developer-facing products. But, ultimately, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, in literally all of these products.
I would think enterprise offering would have a stricter SLA than developer-facing product. The only thing between Dropbox and Amazon is that there is no independent enterprise offering for S3, except Amazon pays a penalty for violating said SLA.
Is this a hidden plan? The cheapest unlimited plan I see right now on their website is 54€/month, which is the advanced business plan for 3 users. Even if I take the annual plan and divide the price by 12 it's 45€/month. Also these prices don't include VAT, while the personal plans do. Perhaps you were unaware that the business plans can't be bought for a single user?
I stand corrected, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.
Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page make this clear. You have to click into the business section to actually see that. Super annoying.
That's a bummer. I have a sizeable chunk of raw image files I'd love to back up somewhere without having to have it on my machine, Dropbox would be a good fit if it wasn't for the 1TB limit on individuals. Ended up uploading directly to S3 and archiving to Glacier.
Amazon Prime Photos allows unlimited photo storage (RAW included) with any $100/yr subscription to Amazon Prime. If you're already paying this for the other benefits, then it is free.
At the risk of "ruining" it for some users, Amazon doesn't appear to validate nor re-compress uploaded images. I uploaded some bits from /dev/random as a .png, and it counted towards photo storage, and I got the same bits back re-downloading the test file. So you don't even have to resort to stuffing metadata or steganography.
For the record, I don't exploit this loophole and only tested to satisfy my curiosity. At $60/yr. it's already very cheap for unlimited -- it's my tertiary backup so I'll accept the risk that "unlimited" is qualified -- generic file storage.
You could go with something like https://www.cloudfuze.com/
But then you would end up paying 5$ a month. It gives you the freedom to choose the storage provider or multiple of them transparently.
Okay, but that's the sort of tradeoff you have to make when you you won't pay freight on things. Backup is basically a solved problem, you just have to pay for it.
The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.
As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost.
Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free
I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?"
This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.
I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.
I wasn't involved in these design discussions early on, and Skydrive certainly didn't use rsync, this was just meant as an example of "this is essentially a solved problem, we just need some UI". It isn't, and presenting it as such just gets you into a bad situation.
But Dropbox doesn't handle any merging of changes; any conflicts are left for the user to resolve. In this way it's basically an automatic version of Unison, which is exactly "some UI" around a "solved problem." Right?
It doesn't handle merging of changes within files, however, if you take a step back, consider that you're essentially merging lists of metadata (with hashes of blobs), not just uploading these blobs; and because the systems that need to be synced are distributed, not always connected, and users want to read/write all of them you get the limitations of the classic CAP theorem.
E.g. the quite feasible scenario with two computers, both partially synced, and both getting files changed/added/removed/moved while the sync is happening. Consider applications creating temporary files while a document is being edited, and expecting to be able to create those files... and then it results in some app being unable to open the same document because it's "already open" on another machine. There are all kinds of interesting conflicts and race conditions possible, and you need to resolve them all in some way that doesn't weird out the users.
Stock git explodes when dealing with binary files that are above a certain size or are changing frequently.
So forget about photo collections, shared Photoshop files, or any other non-text document formats.
The workarounds had a lot of pain points for a while (that maybe are fixed now in 2017, haven't explored that recently).
I was more thinking the concept of source code control than the specific, but used a specific since a specific file transfer program was mentioned. Some source code control programs handle binaries just fine.
Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation.
Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS.
Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client.
Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux client.
Google Drive: Stories of unreliable syncing behavior, app instability, and so forth. No Linux client. Google history of killing non-core products.
--
Not only did Dropbox get there first, they did it mostly right, to the point where their competitors can be described as also-rans.
The other thing is that Dropbox has "good file sync service" as their entire mission, while every other provider of note has it as some value-add into their other services, meaning it's subject to the whims of what those companies are doing on a particular day.
Also, Dropbox is the only one that offers delta-sync which is a godsend when editing multi-gigabyte PSDs/Media Files. Other providers would simply not work for this use-case with my 100KB/s upload speed. Seems very wasteful as well, uploading every file from scratch for every edit.. kinda curious how users on these providers deal with it?
For iCloud, you actually can use iCloud Drive via a web interface from other OSes - I think the biggest limitation is actually that you can't share arbitrary files, only certain types of files (Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Notes, Photos).
I could easily go all in on iCloud Drive if I could make arbitrary files available to other users.
Apple also has a Windows client for iCloud Drive, and you can use standard Word/Excel/PowerPoint files and still edit them through Pages/Numbers/Keynote on a different Mac.
And that's fine for you and me, but limits its adoption (hence appeal, hence longevity) to people that download unofficial, unsupported third party clients and manually set up cron jobs.
The reason Dropbox is kicking ass is that nobody wants to deal with the manual work. Download a program, put stuff in folder, stuff appears elsewhere. No thought required. Simple.
I've been using Dropbox on Linux for many years, and it's definitely had some occasional issues with memory leaks, and its general CPU and memory usage has definitely increased. Used to be it never went over 100 MB RSS, but now it's always well over that, at about 250 right now.
Anyway, I run it at nice 5 and "ionice -c3", and even though I'd like to switch to something else, I still haven't found anything better for Linux use. Everything I've looked at has some issue that makes it a non-starter.
> The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.
Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Google[3], and Amazon[4] already do have comparable products, with comparable prices[5].
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free
This kind of thinking is exactly why Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon will never deliver something better.
Yes - they can deliver something better for free but they think "it shouldn't take a lot of effort" so whatever they deliver is not adequate.
They also do not have no business reason to do it since valuable engineers and time can be better spent on other business sectors. For example, Amazon Cloud Drive is just a checkbox (look you can save you photos and videos also on our storage) from point of view Amazon management. Google Drive is the same. Microsoft has the same thinking: look here is OneDrive - but we really want you to buy Sharepoint.
So do not expect anything of Dropbox quality from these companies.
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.
OneDrive is perhaps not quite as polished and its Linux support is lacking/unofficial/nonexistent depending on your viewpoint, but Microsoft's push to Office365 means that if you subscribe to it you're getting at least as much storage as Dropbox offers at a monthly cost that's ~70% of Dropbox for a single user, or 5x that (5 * 1TB/user) at the same annual price as Dropbox. On top of that, you get the assorted Office apps.
One notable weakness of the non-Business version of OneDrive is the lack of version history, so if that's important or you have no other forms of backup then that could be a deciding factor.
I'll leave out of it the question of whose servers data resides on and passes through.
Even the big service providers, like Dropbox and Microsoft have run into issues of scale that result in price increases or reduced storage quotas, later in the product cycle, forced onto existing customers. Typically a result of poor early planning or lack of insight into actual resources required per user.
Or bait and switch to grow fast quickly.
Dropbox, recently (quietly) raised prices on their Business plan, forcing existing Business customers to choose between a fixed storage space quota or a price increase. The decision will be forced on users on renewal in 2018, which is why we haven't heard much about this yet.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/30/dropbox-smart-sync-and-paper/
At the same time you've got a race to the bottom from big companies targeting the consumer market. These providers most likely have no hope of generating revenue directly from the cloud storage itself, and instead use cloud storage as a loss leader for other channels and products.
For example, Google integrating free "unlimited" photo storage into their products, Apple iCloud integration and significant price cuts. If these loss leading experiments fail there will be another round of forced price increases or reduced storage quotas. Only time will tell.
So far it's a good bet against "Unlimited" free services:
Then you've got Amazon cloud drive, offering unlimited Storage, but only for non-commercial personal use, with all sorts of restrictions. Sole practitioners and small businesses not welcome.
Using Your Files with the Services. You may use the Services only to store, retrieve, manage, organize, and access Your Files for personal, non-commercial purposes using the features and functionality we make available. You may not use the Services to store, transfer, or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service ...
And this open-ended goodie:
The Services are offered in the United States. We may restrict access from other locations. There may be limits on the types of content you can store and share using the Services, such as file types we do not support, and on the number or type of devices you can use to access the Services. We may impose other restrictions on use of the Services.
And finally most consumer grade cloud providers offer little protection in terms of encryption. Google, Amazon and Microsoft might get big brother on your data. You might even have real people looking at your files for whatever reason.
Our Use of Your Files. We may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Services to you, enforce the terms of the Agreement, and improve our services, and you give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, use information about Your Files to organize them on your behalf, and access Your Files to provide technical supporthttps://www.amazon.com/cd/tou??ref_=cd_unlimited_tou
Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
Big brother with good intentions:
Microsoft Anti-Porn Workers Sue Over PTSD - ex-employees of the company’s online safety team say they had to watch horrific online videos of child abuse, bestiality, and murders—and that Microsoft ignored their PTSD.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/11/microsoft-a...
Finally, as a few others in this thread have stated, the underlying technology behind syncing and sharing is quite complicated. Cross-platform compatibility and maintaining backwards compatibility with older operating systems is mind boggling difficult.
In this regard in might be better to choose a cloud provider that offers end-to-end encryption, and has been in business for more than a few years (to ensure they've got the business model worked out).
Interesting. I had to sign something saying that I would be exposed to terrible stuff during the course of my job at MSN, and I wouldn't sue the company for damages. This was back in 2003. Maybe they stopped asking employees to sign this document?
* you must not even try to ... sell the Services unless specifically authorized to do so; publish or share materials that are unlawfully pornographic or indecent, or that contain extreme acts of violence;
advocate bigotry or hatred against any person or group of people based on their ... *
Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud?
And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE.
So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?
IMO open source projects need a critical mass of developers to achieve "polish". All the edge cases and so on that isnt' a matter of writing clever code, but sitting there for days writing tests or manually investigating corner cases, or putting in resources for good crash reporting, seamless updates and things like that. I have yet to see an open source project that deals well with this (Firefox doesn't count because they have a lot of $$ and can employ devs to work on all these things.)
When you reach a scale of millions of users, all these tiny details start to affect a sizeable amount of users.
I think part of the challenge is manufacturing and handing out a distributed system to nontechnical users and then trying to debug their issues without having central control. (Or any control, really)
As someone who built an OSS synced storage server, scratching my own itch was pretty easy but responding to bug reports that are far outside of my use cases can get tedious. And somehow it feels like there are just so many, compared to other areas.
Edit: git-annex supports encryption and webdav remotes (and thus, ownCloud/Nextcloud/others) and it works pretty well.
I think it's most about awareness/marketing. Just go out in the streets and ask people if they know about nextCloud. If they do, ask them if they run it. Most don't because it takes time and effort to run things. nextCloud is squarely in the enterprise space. nextCloud-as-a-service is a supremely hard market to enter because you need investment from day 1 (storage has to be very high and pricing has to be very low since it's the first thing people will compare against).
I agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.
I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".
Normalley I'd say - "There's nothing wrong with that and they can do what they want."
but... .they're filing for an IPO.. so their shareholders are going to start hitting them with the "If you don't always make more money than last time we'll fire you and find someone who will."
If you don't want to expand your business far beyond what it's already doing then you don't IPO and take on shareholders.
I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.