Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-24/dropbox-is-struggling-and-competitors-are-catching-up

by adventured • 11 years ago

151 175 11 years ago

jayess• 11 years ago

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.

khnd• 11 years ago

have you guys checked out aerofs?

wbond• 11 years ago

Not sure if it ticks all of the boxes you need, but take a look at Nasuni.

jacoblane• 11 years ago

egnyte might also be worth a look.

delecti2• 11 years ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your needs, but have you considered sharepoint?

yurisagalov• 11 years ago

Hi jayess,

Not sure if you're still reading this thread or not, but I'd love to chat with you more and see if we may be able to help you (or you can just sign up at aerofs.com -- we keep it free for up to 30 employees, so you can try us right out).

Shoot me an email if you'd like, yuri@aerofs.com

cjjoseph• 11 years ago

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

puttergi• 11 years ago

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.

objectivefs• 11 years ago

Have you checked out ObjectiveFS? It gives you a regular POSIX shared filesystem for your servers. Would be curious to know what you think.

sblom• 11 years ago

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...

shampine• 11 years ago

Always one of my favorite days.

wooderson• 11 years ago

Dropbox has the most brilliant engineering team in the Valley.

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

joosters• 11 years ago

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...

mehrdada• 11 years ago

Dropbox has the most brilliant engineering team in the Valley.

That's definitely been my impression having observed the company for years from outside and from interviewing there just a little while ago. Given their engineering talent, I can't imagine they'd lose the game entirely, but they might indeed struggle on the business side. I was really impressed with the sample of Dropboxers I saw and turning them down was a difficult decision.

ljk• 11 years ago

They even poached Guido Van Rossum(guy who invented Python) from google

dmix• 11 years ago

This was about the time I stopped using Dropbox:

https://imgur.com/uoShTDo

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

AceJohnny2• 11 years ago

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

pekk• 11 years ago

In terms of this one concern, more obscure services probably are safer than one which is so overwhelmingly popular, and it makes a difference if the service does not have your data in plaintext.

Of course it's easy to give up other kinds of security in exchange for reduced profile to NSA, that's a whole other issue.

lfam• 11 years ago

Are Syncthing or Tarsnap US-based? No.

And Syncthing is just a tool that does multi-way sync across devices you own. If a company wanted to replace Dropbox with Syncthing, they would have to run one or more servers to provide the "always on" feature that their employees' "sometimes on" laptops sync to.

cperciva• 11 years ago

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.

jen729w2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

I'm actively looking for an alternative.

jen729w2• 11 years ago

Yeah I get a fair bit of high CPU usage, I hear the fans on my old MBA and quit/relaunch the process. Doesn't happen too often, only about once a week. :-/

xenadu02• 11 years ago

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.

chrisfosterelli2• 11 years ago

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/

simplexion2• 11 years ago

Spideroak is great and I was lucky enough to get in on their unlimited storage they offered a while back. I still only use around 200GB so far, but with the amount of photos my wife takes of the kids it is rapidly expanding.

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

but for zero-knowledge guarantee I'm OK with that.

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

click170• 11 years ago

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.

chrisfosterelli2• 11 years ago

I can't. However, unless you built literally your entire system from source code and all of the programs that run on it and analysed that source code yourself personally, you can't guarentee that about anything.

It's a matter of degree of trust. This is what Spideroak's business is built on. Sure, I'd like it if their client would be open source, however in the mean time they're still a better option than Dropbox for security conscious people and they have been working for a while to make as much as possible open source. [0]

[0] https://github.com/SpiderOak

goalieca• 11 years ago

Condoleezza rice joining the board had a lot to do with it i think. I know a lot of people who cancelled dropbox then. Conscionable people cannot do business with someone who lied to get the Iraq war started. Also, there's no doubt she has NSA connections being a former national security advisor.

simplexion2• 11 years ago

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

farslan2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.)

farslan2• 11 years ago

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...

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.

rogerbinns5• 11 years ago

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.

chralieboy• 11 years ago

This was my experience as well. I had to destroy my personal account once I left the company because they couldn't unmerge them and transfer to a new account. This was like 3 months ago and I was shocked that they still didn't have this fixed.

Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.

eru• 11 years ago

Alas, Google Drive (used to?) suck on Linux.

jpalomaki• 11 years ago

One thing I've been waiting for is the possibility of using both private and company Google Drive at the same time, but at least according to faq this is not yet supported: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2405894?hl=en

wyclif• 11 years ago

Why doesn't Amazon Cloud Drive have a Linux client?

Tloewald2• 11 years ago

DropBox's handling of multiple accounts is atrocious in general. It's clear that they were worried about people using multiple free accounts, but they should at least accommodate people using (say) a paid business account and a free personal account.

rogerbinns5• 11 years ago

All of the accounts I use are paid. It seems rather stupid to harm your paying customers the most! They could have solved the multiple free account issue by only allowing one free account logged in at a time.

suchire• 11 years ago

Dropbox does support a paid business account and a personal account. The paid business account just needs to be a Dropbox for Business account.

lobster_johnson• 11 years ago

Is that a Linux or Windows feature? Because Google Drive on OS X doesn't allow you to have more than one account configured.

fishywang• 11 years ago

He's talking about account in general, not the desktop app.

Google Drive's desktop doesn't support multiple accounts, but you can always visit web version of your other account and get files from there.

rawnlq• 11 years ago

I can't imagine people using linux is any significant portion of their 400million users.

But fun fact: I visited the dropbox office once (it was like an adult playground) and recall seeing a cultish motivation poster that said something along the lines of "the linux client was written by one person on a plane in two hours".

shanemhansen• 11 years ago

The client was just a python program that leveraged a cross platform gui toolkit (source: my Linux laptop and gdb). So imagine getting it to work on Linux wasn't that hard.

I worked on a similar project that even shipped its own FUSE filesystem for osx and Linux (windows used cbfs iirc). Our client had very little platform-specific code.

zurn• 11 years ago

It's the same reason most restaurants offer vegetarian dishes. You're not just losing the business of the few percent that are vegetarians - you're losing the business of groups that include vegetarians.

(The analogy is incomplete since you'll also get people who don't want to get locked out of Linux even though they don't currently use it)

Also Linux users are very overrepresented in the propellerheads group that you are targeting in the takeoff phase of a DB/Drive like product.

ignoramous• 11 years ago

It's funny how a company like Dropbox that obsesses over simplicity can get so much of their product wrong! I'm not sure if its lack of talent or focus. But all indications are, they are not short on talent...

rodgerd• 11 years ago

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.

copperx• 11 years ago

OneDrive and Google Drive do not support file names that start with a period (.) and other special characters that are allowed in most operating systems. That's a non-starter for me.

kagamine2• 11 years ago

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.

noelsusman• 11 years ago

I use http://www.copy.com which supports Windows, Android, and Linux. The Linux client isn't as smooth or hassle free as DropBox, but it does work.

JohnyLy• 11 years ago

I personally don't think that dropbox supporting Linux make them successful. I would love to see the percentage of Dropbox users using Linux (I guess it's very low). Dropbox is successful because they had great PR and marketing strategy. However, if they want to stay the leader they need to make huge improvements especially for company cloud storage. If you have a company of 20 or more people, the costs of Dropbox are ridiculous.

sdalfakj2• 11 years ago

none of the competitors do

My second such comment in 1 minute on this but nonetheless, SpiderOak works well with Linux.

Disc: not affiliated with them

kelukelugames• 11 years ago

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE

akoumjian• 11 years ago

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.

clemmer56• 11 years ago

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.

mayneack2• 11 years ago

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

sjonnz• 11 years ago

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.

LekisS• 11 years ago

That's also why I decided to stop using Dropbox (for personal and professional use) and I keep on telling my friends and co-workers to use a more secure and encrypted one.

When everyone begins to care about personal privacy, how could they chose to associate with Condoleezza Rice ? Is there even a worse choice ?

Edit: I'm using Hubic now, hosted by OVH (very very bad desktop app right now, but they're making progress, and it's cheap, 50€ for 10TB / year)

curyous2• 11 years ago

What struck me about bringing Condoleezza Rice on is that it's an indicator that they don't have the customer's best interests at heart. I now avoid using DropBox whenever I can, replacing it with OneDrive and Google Drive.

Spivak• 11 years ago

Wait you're replacing Dropbox with two companies that are known to turn over data to the NSA and don't have client side encryption?

Not much of an improvement.

sjg007• 11 years ago

Despite the politics involved in government, you need people with extensive government experience to help get access to the ultimate Enterprise customer (the Government). She was Secretary of State. The government by in large is going to want to have extensive privacy and protections for their internal data from adversaries etc...

happywolf2• 11 years ago

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

SoftwareMaven2• 11 years ago

Because she was George W Bush's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. She was a proponent of the NSA's warrant-less wire-tapping.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

Wikipedia actually has a section just about her and Dropbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Criticism_of_...

I'm kind of surprised, personally.

dwbond• 11 years ago

Other commenters have mentioned warrantless wiretapping-- she served as National Security Advisor for George W. Bush and was also integrally involved in approving and overseeing torture.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/23/condoleezza-ric... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04...

happywolf2• 11 years ago

Thanks all who replied. Appreciated.

thawkins• 11 years ago

Agreed, its why i stop using it. I started using btsync instead so that my machines where synced up without needing a cloud store.

kzhahou2• 11 years ago

Her appointment to the Dropbox board was to me another reminder that when you reach the upper echelon of power, be it honorably or destructively, you get to stay at the top essentially the rest of your life. No one invited ME to the Dropbox board, despite my resume stating very clearly up top:

* 2001-2005 - Did NOT advise POTUS to spend 1.7 trillion dollars and thousands of military and civilian lives on obviously shaky WMD testimony.

winestock• 11 years ago

Reminds me of Robert McNamara, SecDef under JFK & LBJ. Early in the Kennedy administration, both he Kennedy knew that the way that they were fighting in Vietnam made the war unwinnable. They kept on fighting the war on unwinnable terms.

In the 1990s, when he wrote his memoirs admitting as much, anyone who was anyone in the Beltway attended the celebratory launch of his book.

Carly Fiorina nearly destroyed Hewlett-Packard. After she left HP, Bush the Lesser immediately began floating her name for the International Monetary Fund. When that didn't take, she ran for the Senate against Babs Boxer. She lost that, too. And now this: https://www.carlyforpresident.com/

Left wing and Right wing, our elites seem to be selected for their ability to fail at scale.

hsod• 11 years ago

This is so reductive. If you want to talk about Rice's record as Secretary of State, lets talk about reality and leave the glib political posturing for campaign speeches.

* She almost definitely did not advise anyone to spend 1.7 trillion dollars on anything. Did she know how costly the war would be? Should she have known?

* "Obviously shaky" is easy to say in hindsight. What did she know when? What should she have known?

* Did she even advise the President to go to war? We don't know what she said behind closed doors. SecState works at the pleasure of the President-- it is entirely possible she opposed the war personally and in private counsel, but played the good soldier in public.

* If she did personally oppose the war to your satisfaction, was it wrong of her to play the good soldier, regardless of the circumstances? I tend to think so. But was it so wrong that she should be blacklisted from public life?

Life is messy.

api• 11 years ago

I'm sure they went with Condi for her expertise in government, and thus in landing government contracts. That's how the revolving door contracting system works, and when you're in the competitive enterprise market you can't pass up that flow of money.

Nevertheless, I think bringing in her as opposed to some other apparatchik not so terribly tainted has harmed Dropbox more than they realize.

It's the sort of ill-will that sales and marketing heads will never see, and that doesn't show up on typical market research. No CTO of a major company is going to say "we didn't use Dropbox because they have someone on their board who was involved in perpetuating a trillion dollar fraud that cost hundreds of thousands of lives." They might not even think this -- they just know that their many underlings recommended OneDrive, Google Drive, btSync, or an in-house solution accessed via a VPN. None of these lower-rank employees will cite this as a factor either, even if many of them are thinking it.

Nope. People will just silently make a mental annotation: if there are any alternatives to Dropbox, don't use Dropbox because they have a war criminal on their board.

It's like what happens if you smell bad. People will avoid you, but very few people will tell you you smell bad. That's rude. Instead they'll make up other reasons to avoid bringing up something that could be divisive.

pserwylo2• 11 years ago

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?

raldi• 11 years ago

The investors believe that the market will grow at least 10x, and that Dropbox will capture a great deal of that market.

Also, when people speak of a market, they're speaking annually.

softdev12• 11 years ago

There can be several logical reasons for this. 1, investors expect the company to merge to other verticals (outside of business file-sharing). 2, their current business is already outside business sharing (with consumers). 3, the number is just for a time period (like $904 million per year) and their valuation is over a much longer period (e.g. decades). Any many other reasons...

pserwylo2• 11 years ago

3, the number is just for a time period (like $904 million per year) and their valuation is over a much longer period (e.g. decades)

Okay, so this along with your sister the comment from raldi points at what I probably missed: The duration for which the valuation is made is unspecified, at least in this article. Thanks for pointing this out.

jaredhansen• 11 years ago

Probably because: -$904M is the market size today, but we all know it is growing -$904M is the annual revenue number, not the amount of revenue to be generated for all time in that market.

Businesses are theoretically valued at NPV of future earnings, so it's entirely plausible to get to a $10B valuation on the back of a huge market share in a fast-growing ~$1B/yr market.

nikhizzle• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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".

sks• 11 years ago

People expect this market to grow rapidly which is accounted for in the higher valuation.

nirmel• 11 years ago

$904 million is the revenue in the industry per year. Valuation is the "present value" of all future revenue, i.e. what all of the profits the company is "expected" to ever make are worth today.

To give an example, if I were to give you $100 every year for all of time, you would certainly pay more than $100 today. Maybe even $500. And if I were to say I would give you $100 the first year, then 10% more every year such that you'd get 100, 110, 121, 133.10, etc... you should be willing to pay a lot more because in 30 years you'd be getting $1700 / year and growing.

That's why businesses that are expected to make money for a long time are worth a lot, and those who are expected to last a long time and make an increasing amount of money every year are worth so much more today.

damoncali• 11 years ago

Pro tip: whenever you read "$XX billion dollar market", replace it in your head with "It's big (obviously) but we basically made up a number to make it sound like we know what we're talking about".

That and company value is the present value of all future earnings, where "industry size" is typically understood to be an annual revenue number. Apples and oranges.

jmuguy• 11 years ago

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?

Tehnix• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, the paid version does not get rid of this. It's quite annoying actually, I even had one of my friends ask "Why are you sending me a Dropbox signup link?"...

sanderjd• 11 years ago

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.

mayneack2• 11 years ago

same https://www.dropbox.com/s/ze9fhjs8y4miobo/Screenshot%202015-...

greyboy• 11 years ago

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).

lubos• 11 years ago

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

FrankenPC• 11 years ago

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

joeblau• 11 years ago

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.

delecti2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

loopdoend• 11 years ago

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

doctorpangloss• 11 years ago

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.

habosa• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

pwnna• 11 years ago

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.

Aloha• 11 years ago

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

chrisper• 11 years ago

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

robg• 11 years ago

FUD

partiallypro• 11 years ago

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.

ams6110• 11 years ago

Google Drive and Office/OneDrive are outcompeting because they do both storage and cloud apps with collaborative editing that is feels natural and works well. Dropbox is just storage with some nice sync capability.

holychiz• 11 years ago

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.

veidr2• 11 years ago

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.

adamconroy• 11 years ago

I agree totally. I almost fell over laughing recently when I saw a new headline about Dropbox and business customers.

It might have changed, but the one thing that summed up how useless it is for business is that you can't effectively run it on a server.

defen• 11 years ago

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?

veidr2• 11 years ago

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.

edpichler• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

"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!

codesushi422• 11 years ago

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.

pen2l• 11 years ago

Wait, Apple made an offer to acquire them? I was not aware of that.

Anyway, I'm also surprised by the series of very bad moves of all sorts by the Dropbox crew. They're focusing on various areas these days which to my understanding just spells dead end, like being a place for photo storage (competing with Flickr), etc. They lost any good will they had built by having Rice on board, and then sticking with that decision even after seeing the bad reception. It's surprising because I thought Drew Houston et al. were very strategically smart folks who couldn't make these types of mistakes.

codesushi422• 11 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-said-no-to-nine-dig...

bane3• 11 years ago

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.

j_s• 11 years ago

Also worth mentioning Amazon Prime Photos here, even though it requires a Prime membership.

olefoo• 11 years ago

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.

abcdefghijkl• 11 years ago

I saw that they're opening new offices and was interested in applying there, would you say it's a good idea to work at Dropbox or would it be too unstable?

bane3• 11 years ago

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

hughc• 11 years ago

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.

overgard2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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).

overgard2• 11 years ago

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.

anotherevan• 11 years ago

SpiderOak will let you handle assigning different folders.

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

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

dools2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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_2• 11 years ago

Just pray you will never need any kind of support.

com2kid2• 11 years ago

I may be biased, I work at MS, but I've always loved OneDrive. It just works everywhere. On my laptops, tablets, and across both Windows Phone and Android.

Google keeps doing UX things with photos and Google Drive that confuses my #1 usage scenario (finding photos). It also has some strange integration with Google Docs. It all sorta works but, again, the UX changes pretty damn frequently. OneDrive has reliably stuck with "here are a bunch of files."

dools2• 11 years ago

Which OneDrive do you mean: OneDrive or OneDrive for business which is actually sharepoint online even though it's not called that, but there is another product called sharepoint online?

I didn't really use OneDrive but had a bit of a bash at OneDrive for business... It has all the same basic features as Drive implemented in a slightly clunkier interface. Workarounds possible but really, why bother when Drive is better? Example: I wanted to show a list of thumbnails and allow someone to "flick through" them. Impossible. There was some app/plugin thing called ImageViewer that I had to get from some store that sort of worked a bit, install process was arcane, and it wasn't a folder it was in some weird menu.

I can't talk about OneDrive really cos I never used it (I signed up before realising that OneDrive and OneDrive for business are different things.... Zapier has recipes for OneDrive but not OneDrive for business....) oh and not to mention the OneDrive app that ships with windows 8.1 is not OneDrive for business so if you are an office365 customer and you buy windows and try to use OneDrive, it won't log you in.

It is an utter atrocity. An abomination. Also in office365 you can't add custom spf records, and when I finally got OneDrive installed on windows 2008 server it just wouldn't synch some files. I ended up installed Drive instead.

Every foray I have into the world of Microsoft is fraught with nonsensical, arbitrary restrictions and inexplicable bugs.

colinbartlett• 11 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

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.

roymurdock• 11 years ago

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.

dagw2• 11 years ago

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.

junto• 11 years ago

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.

_pmf_2• 11 years ago

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.

scurvy2• 11 years ago

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?

sdalfakj2• 11 years ago

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.

scurvy2• 11 years ago

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.

letstryagain• 11 years ago

Only one computer needs to be online for the sync to work. This is a good thing because your files never go to a third party. You don't have to trust Dropbox or anyone else with your data. Plop it on a couple of servers and you're good to go.

NoGravitas• 11 years ago

Or Syncthing, which does very much the same thing as BTSync -- multi-way sync of one or more directories between several computers you own/control. Syncthing is free software, and offers better security guarantees than BTSync, but as a result it's slightly harder to set up a folder on each client.

Or there's also OwnCloud, which gives you a very simple user experience; you just need to have a centralized storage server set up.

silverlake• 11 years ago

Dropbox supports LAN sync, which is like BT Sync. I'm surprised this isn't a killer feature for companies. If I upload 100MB to a shared folder, other sync tools will download a copy for every user. That could be a huge amount of traffic. BTSync and Dropbox solve that problem.

RogerL• 11 years ago

I just made that switch, being frustrated by Dropbox and Google drive for reasons of no interest to anyone but me.

What I fear losing is previous versions. That saved my bacon once. Well, bacon bits at least.

Also, my repositories are far larger than devices like my phone can use. With Drive I can just pull up the one PDF that I want to read on my phone. Not sure how this works, or if it works, with Bittorrent Sync.

charleswitt• 11 years ago

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.

thanatropism• 11 years ago

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.

shedletsky• 11 years ago

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.

Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up

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