Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

&gt; Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease.<p>Honest question: WTF are they doing?

Unless I&#x27;m reading this wrong, the takeaway from this article is that Dropbox is a reasonably successful company, with enviable brand-recognition and reach, that&#x27;s `suffering&#x27; from being overvalued early on and is simply no longer hot and new. That seems like a reasonably good problem to have, and is certainly better than being a loss-maker.

My dropbox scenario is I have a 2TB HD and 2TB dropbox storage with the 1year packrat service. I record and edit music on the HD and dropbox is always syncing my changes. The next day, when I&#x27;m at work, I can pull up the website and listen to the stuff I worked on the previous night. If I go into a studio I connect to dropbox and sync whatever folder(s) that contains the song(s) I&#x27;m working on. When I get home the files are there.<p>Once I forgot to disconnect my dropbox and someone at the studio trashed the folders and they were deleted on my home machine. I remotely disconnected their connection from the web interface and restored my folders to the previous checkpoint.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine a simpler, more efficient mechanism for keeping things organized and backed up. I also have a separate backup service on the same drive of course, just in case.<p>The only annoyance with dropbox I have is there are certain scenarios where you can&#x27;t play audio from the website and are forced to download it, which is annoying when sharing links.<p>That and I wish I could give them more money for more space.

I really don&#x27;t understand all the negative Dropbox sentiment these days. Who cares if the investors aren&#x27;t getting a 10x return? How does that materially affect you as a customer? Why are you even cheering for that anyways?<p>I am a very happy paying Dropbox customer. It&#x27;s a solid product that does the job very well and isn&#x27;t stuffed with a bunch of other useless features I don&#x27;t need. It&#x27;s pretty much perfect.

I&#x27;d be shocked if Dropbox is still in business in 5 years. It&#x27;s kind of sad because it was the first mover and I loved the service when it was the only one, but now there are a million options that are probably just as good. Not to mention they&#x27;ve never made a dime on me personally or anyone I know (and as I understand it that&#x27;s true for 95% of their user-base). Our company actually banned Dropbox.com because we decided we&#x27;d rather do everything on Google drive for free instead of pay Dropbox for corporate use. The whole industry also has bearish macro outlook as storage continues to get cheaper and yet people&#x27;s need for it doesn&#x27;t grow proportionately.

People stick with Dropbox for a simple reason: they do the syncing thing faster and more painlessly than anyone else out there.<p>If Apple ever gets their act together and makes iCloud actually fast and reliable a syncing service, Dropbox might be in trouble.

Dropbox really proved out how valuable &quot;it just works&quot; in the cloud can be. Their first few years of execution were phenomenal and the product provided a real value. I remember discovering that I could mock up iPhone apps in photoshop on my desktop, save jpgs to dropbox and open in the app to see what the screens would look like immediately on my phone. Delightful. And then... none of their acquisitions or product initiatives stuck and they added a questionable board member. Anyone have insight in the last couple years of stumble? I&#x27;m at a loss.

Reasons it&#x27;s still in the game:<p>1. It works, with fewer problems than any other sync &#x2F; cloud storage that I&#x27;ve used.<p>2. It has enough people using it outside of work that it&#x27;s getting paying business customers (the Linux effect?)<p>If either of these falters (if 1 falters, 2 does too) then they&#x27;ll be gone. There are plenty of competitors and some even do sync well enough that people will use them.<p>I&#x27;m rather upset that they&#x27;ve dropped Carousel, as it&#x27;s probably the app my girlfriend and I use most on our phones, but I&#x27;d only leave Dropbox if they didn&#x27;t fold enough of the Carousel features back into the Dropbox client - or there wasn&#x27;t a third party app that could provide similar functionality using our Dropbox storage.

I very happily pay for Dropbox. I haven&#x27;t found any of the alternatives as easy as Dropbox. The syncing is seamless.

Only reason I still use Dropbox is because 1password integrates so nicely with it.

I stopped using Dropbox after the Snowden revelations broke loose. Dropbox does not use end-to-end encryption. You have to encrypt by yourself.<p>That is not particularly hard, but it still means that you are storing your files in a honeypot from which the NSA regularly draws a juicy feed.<p>Especially users outside the USA should never use a cloud service that lacks automatic end-to-end encryption.<p>As a non-American, you would also reveal your identity (along with your data) to a host of American surveillance agencies by paying by credit card. So, that is another non-starter. Along with unencrypted data, that is just an accident waiting to happen. They would store your dropbox data alongside Angela Merkel&#x27;s digitized private phone calls to her husband. &quot;I love you honey!&quot;. Seriously, I pay for cloud services only with bitcoin.

Not to mention the top reason I dropped Dropbox: with Condolezza Rice on the board I feel they are a bit too chummy with the government and the NSA.

As an otherwise-happy Dropbox customer, it does concern me somewhat that there has been very little innovation in the core product for several years. They seem focused on building a halo of lock-in services instead.

&gt;&gt;&gt; Dropbox signed up 13 large companies with more than 1,000 users each<p>So let&#x27;s say the average employee count is 2k and they negotiated to pay $100&#x2F;user&#x2F;year. 13 * 2000 * 100 = $2.6M. Even if we double the average employee count and assume they pay standard $150&#x2F;yr, it&#x27;s $7.8M.<p>Assuming that business offering is their strongest bet to get as strong as some investors might like (i.e. justify the valuation), how many of these do you need to justify $10B valuation? And how big is the market?<p>I am not sure that it all adds up.

It&#x27;s very hard to be optimistic about their future when their main competitors are Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive), Apple (iCloud), Amazon (CloudDrive), Box etc. Virtually every single one of big players nowadays offers cloud storage. I cannot see Dropbox succeeding in the long run, especially with the amount of innovation they&#x27;ve put in their product in the past two years (close to none).

I think they missed their opportunity - namely what they&#x27;re doing with Paper now. I like Dropbox a lot, but most people I know work with Google Drive&#x2F;Docs. The whole idea of &quot;files&quot;, to me, is becoming more and more abstract and remote. I&#x27;d probably find more use for Dropbox if I was using Office 365, but then there is OneDrive for that.<p>Bottomline, I have less need for Dropbox outside of backing up photos. And there are any number of services for backing up photos that are frankly better from a usage PoV (though not from a syncing PoV where they are clearly better). I have an iPhone - I used iCloud to download the pictures to my MBP and then have Google Sync running to push them to Google Photos. iCloud&#x27;s photo service is still pretty terrible - but using this method I get all the goodness of Google Photos (e.g. let me find all the pictures of my dog or my kid).

Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it&#x27;s a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals &#x2F; Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you&#x27;ve signed that deal for the huge late-stage VC cash infusion at a fantasy-land valuation, there&#x27;s no going back.

$5M valuation isn&#x27;t exactly suffering. The problem is that the failure of Box as a thriving company has put a ceiling on how much Dropbox can make in the public markets.<p>If Dropbox does need more money, if it can&#x27;t get profitable with the funding it already has, then it will be in for tough times. If it is forced to go public before it&#x27;s ready, like Square, then its employees will suffer much like Square&#x27;s employees have with its stock price.

I have used Egnyte, almost since their beginning. Surprised no mention here. Pretty good enterprise offering, including hybrid cloud or self-hosted options. The only complaint I&#x27;ve had is they unilaterally tried to double my subscription price to match their competition. I negotiated a compromise and now I have some weird custom tier.

Actually really love using Paper for simple product specs, cleaner simpler than google docs and uses markdown.

Completely commoditized service with a few core parterships scattered here and there. Not able to take on the better capitalized players i.e Microsoft, Google, Apple, heck even facebook. Long term odds are not great, unless they merge with a complete ecosystem player like the above

I use rdiff as an open source, simpler alternative to Dropbox for syncing files across a network. Dropbox uses the same library of functions as rdiff: librsync.

online consumer storage businesses are dead-ends; consumers will own data appliances in their homes that are as easy to use as a fridge, with massive symmetric piping, port control, redundancy, etc.

In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox&#x27;s board (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drop-dropbox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drop-dropbox.com&#x2F;</a>). I don&#x27;t know what their future holds. But personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service.<p>I&#x27;d hope their customers are also looking at the security of their data in light of this and seeking out alternatives.

I wish they had more choice regarding purchasing more space. I&#x27;m not interested in 1TB and find 10$ per month too much if I wont even use 10% of it. Although if there is a cloud provider I&#x27;d trust that sync would never fuck up, I&#x27;d be Dropbox.<p>Google Drive still thinks it&#x27;s normal to re-download the cloud folder instead of letting me install Drive in the same location after a system reinstall, where all the files already exist. And to trust them 1TB with that behaviour ? Hahaha.

The problem is that Dropbox isn&#x27;t that complicated. They were able to win in the beginning because they were a novel idea. Now that they have proven the business model, it will invite competitors (which has already happened).<p>A bigger company with more resources will eventually be able to put them out of business.<p>It would have been better to cash out. Unless they truly have something proprietary with a higher barrier to entry, it will be a difficult road ahead.