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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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?"...
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.
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?
$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.
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".
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 $904 million per year) and their valuation is over a much longer period (e.g. decades). Any many other reasons...
Pro tip: whenever you read "$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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.
[+] [-] rawnlq|10 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] JohnyLy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tloewald|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyclif|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdalfakj|10 years ago|reply
My second such comment in 1 minute on this but nonetheless, SpiderOak works well with Linux.
Disc: not affiliated with them
[+] [-] veidr|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dools|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] com2kid|10 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] jmuguy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tehnix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanderjd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akoumjian|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pserwylo|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] nirmel|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nikhizzle|10 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] softdev12|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|10 years ago|reply
Also, when people speak of a market, they're speaking annually.
[+] [-] damoncali|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jaredhansen|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codesushi42|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bane|10 years ago|reply
Google (within the scope of photos) has given every person unlimited photo storage. That's how much cloud storage is worth...nothing.
[+] [-] abcdefghijkl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overgard|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jayess|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chrisfosterelli|10 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] TD-Linux|10 years ago|reply
How can you guarantee that when the client isn't open source?
[+] [-] simplexion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goalieca|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edpichler|10 years ago|reply
I really admire this company.
[+] [-] habosa|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] farslan|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] partiallypro|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hughc|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sblom|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shampine|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junto|10 years ago|reply
I'm itching to leave. I'm currently trailing Spideroak and it seems OK so far.
[+] [-] jen729w|10 years ago|reply
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.]
[+] [-] clemmer56|10 years ago|reply
Dropbox is doomed for these simple reasons.
[+] [-] mayneack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abcdefghijkl|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shedletsky|10 years ago|reply
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.