I don't see much long-term growth for Dropbox in its current state. Right now, they're a stopgap feature. They've been successful so far because they fill a niche, but the niche that they fill is temporary. Old computing is having your files on your computer and accessing them with local applications. New computing is having your files in the cloud and accessing them from applications in the cloud. In a fully cloud-hosted architecture, there is no need for dropbox. Dropbox is a halfway point in getting us into the cloud, and as more and more apps move into the cloud they will become more and more unnecessary.
Dropbox have one special ingredient - it actually works. Do you think Samsung or Acer are going to come up with something robust and resilient? Even if they did, do you think it would work on Mac or iOS or WP7? Do you think Microsoft's solution would work outside of Windows?
Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)
Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.
As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".
Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:
I agree right now, but I've learned to suppress my initial reactions on these things. I thought Facebook had basically exhausted their niche in early 2007 and there was nowhere to go for them, and that's turned out to be pretty false. Only time can tell whether a startup ends up becoming another Facebook or another Digg.
It's not really where you are now that matters, but where you end up going. And Drew's a really smart guy and maniacally focused on his company. It's quite possible he sees things about their market that we don't.
I disagree, I see dropbox files as MY FILES. I don't like when they are obscured behind some application. I don't see those as MY FILES, I like to see my files in my folders and it's nice and I have a sense of ownership. Dropbox is just an extension of my own personal home filesystem. But it's EVERYWHERE. And that my friends, is what makes all the difference. Like Drew said, he wants a filesystem for the internet. I think this is lost on lots of "the cloud" proponents, who are focused just on applications.
At the moment each OS vendor is pushing their own cloud solution (Azure, iCloud, Kindle Amazon cloud storage)
Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.
I think Dropbox can remain relevant by getting cloud apps to save their files on Dropbox accounts. This actually also helps the end users, whose files won't be locked away by whatever apps they use.
But why can't Dropbox become the main provider for this fully cloud-hosted architecture? So I keep my cloud files in Dropbox, and grant my cloud apps access to subsets of those files. Then they would truly be the "filesystem of the web" and the growth/profit prospects are rosy.
For example, http://leanpub.com/ uses Dropbox in an interesting way. As Dropbox beefs up their API and adds features, I think there are many interesting growth/monetization possibilities. I think the main danger is the competition from Google/Apple/MS.
I was also surprised at their massive funding rounds too. Perhaps there's more room for growth than it seems...
Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
I don't understand this either, it's a commodity and everyone is doing it now. They don't seem to have special patents. I use Ubuntu One for example (5GB free) and there will be Google Drive soon.
Even when you count out the cloud future, how can Dropbox stay competitive against Google's infrastructure? They have peering contracts and their own servers.
I agree with you. I'm not sure why email, with a few added features, can't just replace dropbox completely. I have more space in gmail (and unlimited space on yahoo) than I do on dropbox, for free. Email syncs better than dropbox on every machine I have because I don't need additional software. The only other limitation is sharing but I think this is where something like "wave" would have worked.
They may be a stopgap feature right now, but they can evolve. Every successful company starts by filling a niche, and then keep expanding such niche till it reaches its critical mass.
While Dropbox is a great service (I can't imagine life without it!), it's a bit delusional to think it could be the next Google or Apple. As Steve Jobs himself said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a company.
Technically, search is a feature too. Google seems to be doing alright. I think that was just Steve being steve, and saying whatever would scare the piss outta Dropbox to get them to sell. If it's such a bad Idea, why did jobs want to buy it?
"Drew Houston, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Dropbox, last fall pocketed $250 million from seven of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms."
"Dropbox engineers even hacked their way into Apple's file system to make the Dropbox icon appear on users' menu bars, a bold feat that blew away Apple's cloud team and caught the attention of none other than Jobs."
I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?
It is quite difficult, as well as painstaking. I can't find the article where Drew Houston was mentioning this, but because the API method wasn't available, they had to use a hex editor and alter the memory location to get the functionality to appear in the finder. And they needed to do this for every version of OS X as the Finder memory address to inject the assembler/C code would be in different locations depending on the version. The process would be similar to writing a crack for software to find the algorithm for the serial key check.
Besides Dropbox being a great service, what got Steve Job's attention was the fact that the internal cloud team was impressed on how Dropbox managed to do this, since they themselves couldn't get the OS X team's cooperation for a similar feature.
I wonder if this is a mistake. I thought the hack was not the menu bar but messing with the icons in the finder so they have a status icon on top of the normal file icon (so a checkbox if they're uploaded to the server). That's quite a bit less common than menu bar changes and I think when they first did it, there was not an API for it (not sure if there is now in Lion).
I do the same. I have bought one 50GB account for me, one for my partner, and one of my companies have bought a Team account.
The plural of anecdote is not data. How many people did you refer to get the free storage you needed? How long do you think it will be before you need more and pony up?
Dropbox needs to pull an "Amazon" and pivot like they did with AWS, and Apple did with the iPod. Storage is not going to take them there. Growth is limited and someone can easily come along and replace them. They need a secondary source of income.
The way the Dropbox execs have been talking themselves up in the press over the last few months just makes me think that they're angling to raise the price on an acquisition.
Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are:
* compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way.
* compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.
I'm late to the thread, but I'd like to share how I use dropbox and share some of my issues.
I have been a long time user, and recently I joined a company which is 100% virtual. We are all consultants who work from our homes - but travel regularly to client sites.
While we are working from our homes - we collaborate and work on the docs needed for our client visits.
Everyone has their own account, and quickly a couple gigs would fill up, due to what i feel is poor logic on dropbox's part, and it is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue.
The issue is that we have ~10 people all sharing project folders. But with the free account, this means we get a lot of duplicated consumption.
If 3 people have 2GB space, and they each share .5GB with eachother, then that .5GB is taking up .5GB from everyones account.
This sucks.
Personally, I have a paid 50GB account, and I created a shared public folder. Everyone on my team joined the public folder - which is always 50GB to ME - but to them it consumes THEIR space - and soon their syncing stops because the folder I made is larger than their box.
This is retarded, I think that if they visit MY folder, this should not count against THEIR storage - especially when I am paying for it.
I do undestand the complexities of this - but then the problem is that the cost to fix this issue is that everyone needs to upgrade their account.
I have looked at the team offering, but then that is too expensive.
I think what is best - is to have one corporate DB account, and have everyone login with that userID - and pay for the upgraded space for that one account.
With this said, based on the current design of dropbox and the fact that it is simply a feature - there is no way this company will be the next Apple, let alone google. Unless Drew is referring to emulating their culture, or maybe brand recognition. certainly he cant be talking about product diversity....
Anyway - I love dropbox, and am happy to pay for it, but as it currently stands, is a half-feature.
I dont even know what kind of use-case model for teams such as mine they are looking at. Perhaps I should send them an email.
> The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent...
I couldn't agree more -- I also pay for a 50 gig plan. About a week ago, I had to rebuild one of my machines and somehow my new Dropbox folder (which of course was empty) synced out to the cloud and to the rest of my machines. Suddenly my backup consolidation was completely wiped out. I submitted a support ticket and even now, nearly a week later, it is still unassigned. So, I spent a day undeleting 3500+ files through their web interface. Although quite limited, I will say I was thankful that functionality was there.
After being so impressed with Dropbox, their lack of customer support has been a huge disappointment.
I know it would be relatively small but can anyone wager a guess as to how much each of the 2gb freemium packages costs Dropbox? At 50 million users it has to add up--I've always wondered about Dropbox's conversion rate (free to pay) but it must be relatively high to support the current monetary system.
Keep in mind that they use S3, so they pay for what they use, not what they have committed to their free users. But if they were, then for 50 million free users:
2gb * 50,000,000 = 100PB. That would qualify them for S3's over 5PB pricing of $0.055 per GB-month. So that's $66 million per year just for storage.
But again... they're probably actually using far, far less than 100PB on their free customers.
>He'd strap on headphones to block out everything but the endorphin rush as he cranked code late into the night on a new service that instantly syncs all of your files on all of your devices.
sigh Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?
I remember reading an article a few years ago by (I think) a novelist who envisioned that in the future we'd store our entire computing system online and just switch between devices, always having access to our environment and files. Whether you're on a smart phone, your home computer, or at a terminal in the library, etc.
I don't believe dropbox is going to do that, but it is an interesting idea.
I can see that too. But I can also see somebody like VMWare getting there first--a gigantic, centralized cloud VM repository is not difficult to imagine, and they already have a bunch of technology needed to move a VM from a server to a computer (I think).
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerbinns|14 years ago|reply
Heck even Ubuntu One (which only had to work on one operating system whose source they had) never worked reliably for me. (I ended up with machines in the admin centre multiple times, and about once a month one of my machines would silently decide to stop syncing files.)
Doing 80% of a file solution that works some of the time in some of the places is easy. Doing the rest is something that only Dropbox has managed.
As for long term growth, consider that for each of us the amount of digital data we have keeps growing, that we often want to share differing parts of it with different groups and that there keep being new kinds of data beyond just "binary files".
Put another way, ask any Dropbox user if there is more they wish it did. You'll get a long list back. Where there is demand, there is opportunity and growth. They have a list of over 6,500 different requests at their website:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox
Admittedly around 6,000 things aren't that interesting:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox#votebox:popular:600
[+] [-] nostrademons|14 years ago|reply
It's not really where you are now that matters, but where you end up going. And Drew's a really smart guy and maniacally focused on his company. It's quite possible he sees things about their market that we don't.
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrich|14 years ago|reply
Dropbox could become the universal cloud storage, which can be accessed using identical APIs on every platform, thus becoming the single store for users working with multiple operating systems. Furthermore, application programmers will only have to target this one API.
[+] [-] kasrak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gustavo_duarte|14 years ago|reply
For example, http://leanpub.com/ uses Dropbox in an interesting way. As Dropbox beefs up their API and adds features, I think there are many interesting growth/monetization possibilities. I think the main danger is the competition from Google/Apple/MS.
[+] [-] 6ren|14 years ago|reply
Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
[+] [-] sek|14 years ago|reply
Even when you count out the cloud future, how can Dropbox stay competitive against Google's infrastructure? They have peering contracts and their own servers.
[+] [-] leak|14 years ago|reply
Just my thoughts.
[+] [-] lelele|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] generators|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mvkel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerggerg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richcollins|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvkel|14 years ago|reply
You can agree with what I said _and_ make an ancillary point, you know :)
[+] [-] AdamFernandez|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buu700|14 years ago|reply
Well, that's quite the accusation.
[+] [-] dwynings|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krigath|14 years ago|reply
I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?
[+] [-] gigantor|14 years ago|reply
Besides Dropbox being a great service, what got Steve Job's attention was the fact that the internal cloud team was impressed on how Dropbox managed to do this, since they themselves couldn't get the OS X team's cooperation for a similar feature.
Edit: found the article - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox/all/...
[+] [-] tednaleid|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallflower|14 years ago|reply
Mach Code Injection!
(talked about at 15:30) http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how...
https://github.com/rianhunter/mach_star
[+] [-] eurleif|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
[+] [-] azakai|14 years ago|reply
> I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
Have you ever paid Google a dollar?
[+] [-] swombat|14 years ago|reply
The plural of anecdote is not data. How many people did you refer to get the free storage you needed? How long do you think it will be before you need more and pony up?
[+] [-] jinushaun|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeybaker|14 years ago|reply
Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are:
* compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way. * compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.
[+] [-] samstave|14 years ago|reply
I have been a long time user, and recently I joined a company which is 100% virtual. We are all consultants who work from our homes - but travel regularly to client sites.
While we are working from our homes - we collaborate and work on the docs needed for our client visits.
Everyone has their own account, and quickly a couple gigs would fill up, due to what i feel is poor logic on dropbox's part, and it is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue.
The issue is that we have ~10 people all sharing project folders. But with the free account, this means we get a lot of duplicated consumption.
If 3 people have 2GB space, and they each share .5GB with eachother, then that .5GB is taking up .5GB from everyones account.
This sucks.
Personally, I have a paid 50GB account, and I created a shared public folder. Everyone on my team joined the public folder - which is always 50GB to ME - but to them it consumes THEIR space - and soon their syncing stops because the folder I made is larger than their box.
This is retarded, I think that if they visit MY folder, this should not count against THEIR storage - especially when I am paying for it.
I do undestand the complexities of this - but then the problem is that the cost to fix this issue is that everyone needs to upgrade their account.
I have looked at the team offering, but then that is too expensive.
I think what is best - is to have one corporate DB account, and have everyone login with that userID - and pay for the upgraded space for that one account.
With this said, based on the current design of dropbox and the fact that it is simply a feature - there is no way this company will be the next Apple, let alone google. Unless Drew is referring to emulating their culture, or maybe brand recognition. certainly he cant be talking about product diversity....
Anyway - I love dropbox, and am happy to pay for it, but as it currently stands, is a half-feature.
I dont even know what kind of use-case model for teams such as mine they are looking at. Perhaps I should send them an email.
[+] [-] nhangen|14 years ago|reply
The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent, and the product is overpriced and relatively shallow at an enterprise level.
Still pay for a personal 50gb account, but canceled the team account...well we will as soon as they actually return my call.
[+] [-] d-roo|14 years ago|reply
I couldn't agree more -- I also pay for a 50 gig plan. About a week ago, I had to rebuild one of my machines and somehow my new Dropbox folder (which of course was empty) synced out to the cloud and to the rest of my machines. Suddenly my backup consolidation was completely wiped out. I submitted a support ticket and even now, nearly a week later, it is still unassigned. So, I spent a day undeleting 3500+ files through their web interface. Although quite limited, I will say I was thankful that functionality was there.
After being so impressed with Dropbox, their lack of customer support has been a huge disappointment.
[+] [-] int3rnaut|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adgar|14 years ago|reply
2gb * 50,000,000 = 100PB. That would qualify them for S3's over 5PB pricing of $0.055 per GB-month. So that's $66 million per year just for storage.
But again... they're probably actually using far, far less than 100PB on their free customers.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
[+] [-] marcamillion|14 years ago|reply
sigh Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?
[+] [-] andrewhillman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naner|14 years ago|reply
I don't believe dropbox is going to do that, but it is an interesting idea.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjlang|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fourstar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JesseAldridge|14 years ago|reply
Really? Drew runs Windows?
[+] [-] astrodust|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandvm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teflonhook|14 years ago|reply
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