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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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. :-/
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
There's still no official google drive client you can install on linux. WHich is bizarre, considering chromebooks run linux and obviously sync with drive.
Google has a history of acknowledging the existence of consumers on Linux, and has published Linux binaries for various closed source products in the past. I am writing this comment to you at this moment using one such piece of software.
Does Apple have a history of publishing applications built for non-Apple BSDs?
Well, Apple gave us CUPS. Plus, recently they announced Swift will be supported on Linux, too. Now I'd be really happy if they also ported iTunes to Linux (I'm currently forced to run the Windows version in VirtualBox) - or at least make their iOS devices more Linux-friendly. IMHO there is hope.
CUPS was first released in 1999 and was adopted by most Linux distros soon after. Apple first adopted CUPS in 2003. It wasn't until 2007 before they bought the rights to the source code, hired the main developer and took over the development.
It's not a linux kernel issue, it's a distribution "no bundled libraries" and packaging issue. Google doesn't want to maintain dozens of binaries (and their respective packages) in order to support dozens of distributions. It may be that containers can sorta solve this, a single container that can run on any distro that has container support. But this is still not anywhere as straight forward as say OS X where DropBox (like many other applications) are simply drag and drop into /Applications to install, or uninstall.
Probably a mix of that and the fact that Drive supports a hybrid of traditional folders and tagging that you can't ignore (it would break things) and you can't cleanly implement on Linux (there's no real reliable mechanism to support tags that works on XFS, ext4, and Btrfs, which seems like the bare minimum today you'd need to cover).
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
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.
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.
It certainly seems stupid to mishandle someone with multiple paid accounts. I, on the other hand, have a pretty large free account with Dropbox which I acquired by evangelizing them, and have had various paid accounts from companies I worked for. Do you think it makes more sense to harm me?
Presumably their concern is someone creating 10 free accounts, and pooling/using them simultaneously. If their software and website (at the same time) supported any number of paid accounts with at most one free account then neither you nor I would be harmed.
I think I have about 40GB of free storage with DB as a result of working there referral system. However, a friend bought some Android based phone, came with DB pre-installed, and he has something like 500GB or free storage. They were doing some promotion.
I think one of the main issues with DB is that it is too little space and too much cost to add more. Considering what they pay for bandwidth, any paid plan really should be unlimited.
I think I have about 40GB of free storage with DB as a result of working there referral system. However, a friend bought some Android based phone, came with DB pre-installed, and he has something like 500GB or free storage. They were doing some promotion.
I think one of the main issues with DB is that it is too little space and too much cost to add more. Considering what they pay for bandwidth, any paid plan really should be unlimited.
The issue is that it doesn't support these simultaneously. While you can do this pseudo-merge of a personal account into a business account, it is clunky, problematic to undo, and only helps with exactly one business account and one personal account. If you have more of either than tough luck.
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".
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
Wuala hasn't updated their social accounts or blog since January, and recent comments by Wuala's users seem to be mostly negative. Does Wuala have a future?
That i cannot answer. Late last year they killed the free service and gave everyone time to either move their data or become a paying customer. They had a "whatever plan you pay for we'll double the storage" offer on. I only use it mostly for moving files between the 3 main OSes and some document storage. I found that I was quite happy with the free service so why not pay and continue using it?
They must have had their reasons for stopping the free service, probably financial, so what happens now I don't know. How many free customers converted to paid?
I mentioned Wuala mainly because they claim to take seriously security of your data and because it works well on OS X, Win & Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government and British government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
Should she have known the cost (in $$$ and lives)? It was her job and that of every senior leader involved. They grossly underestimated the effort. Their colossal mistake wasn't just an oopsy-daisy to be waved away.
Incompetence at that scale should follow you around for your whole life.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
Valuations are instantaneous. It is, roughly speaking, how much a buyer would have to pay to buy the company right now. That's easy to do with public companies because it is just "trading price * number of shares". Venture-backed companies typically use their last investment round for valuation, where, if they had $100M invested in the company for a 1% stake, you multiply that by 100 to get the $10B valuation.
It is likely an inflated number, but it's hard to tell because it isn't in an open market. It could be $1M or it could be $100B.
Incidentally, "trading price * number of shares" almost always understates the selling price when a public company is bought, and it almost always overstates the selling price when a company is liquidated (technically, shares are worth zero when a company is liquidated, but I mean how the share-price usually free-falls in a very short period right before a firesale). The reason for this is that trading price, by definition, is set by the most marginal buyers and sellers, those who most want to get rid of their shares or most want to acquire new shares. The actual shareholder body consists of a large range of individuals with a large range of selling prices. To acquire a full company, a buyer needs to start convincing less marginal shareholders to sell, and usually needs to pay a premium (sometimes up to 50% over market cap). To get rid of a company that has suddenly started heading for bankruptcy, shareholders need to sell into a market of much less willing buyers, and so they need to offer a significant discount.
You don't "specify a duration" for the valuation: an infinite duration is baked in the valuation itself through the time value of money.
If the annual interest rate is 10%, 100$ in 1 year is worth 90$ today, 100$ in 10 years is worth about 35$ today and so on.
Of course, in the case of company valuations, you have to also account for the uncertainty (both on the upside and downside) of the future cash flows.
It's like being 1000 miles down the road and going 60MPH. There's nothing inherently contradictory about the first number being bigger than the second.
(Of course, the calculation for a business valuation is a lot more complex than a simple distance = rate * time.)
But that's missing the broader point that it's not useful to try to define a category like "business file sharing" and then pigeon-hole a company like DropBox into it. It's like people wondering how Uber could be valued so much larger than the total taxi industry. Well, the opportunity is much, much larger even without moving into adjacencies.
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.
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".
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".
$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.
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.
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?"...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
184 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadWe 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 know, I'm hellbanned.)
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
If anyone on this thread has further questions about Egnyte I'd be more than happy to answer them here.
But they've hired fairly weakly on the business side.
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.
https://imgur.com/uoShTDo
Syncthing has been an excellent replacement in team environments. As well as Tarsnap for more technical set ups.
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.
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.
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.]
I'm actively looking for an alternative.
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/
How can you guarantee that when the client isn't open source?
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.
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
http://boingboing.net/2011/04/21/dropboxs-new-securit.html
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
Now we use Google Drive and it just works, figures out accounts, has great permissions stuff for teams, etc.
When companies build on open source, they generally don't make it easy for you to use the base product without their extensions.
So for all intents and purposes in terms of a platform, OSX != BSD and ChromeOS != Linux.
Does Apple have a history of publishing applications built for non-Apple BSDs?
CUPS was first released in 1999 and was adopted by most Linux distros soon after. Apple first adopted CUPS in 2003. It wasn't until 2007 before they bought the rights to the source code, hired the main developer and took over the development.
Edit: never mind. They have published specs. Are they not good/stable or have no devs stepped up yet? https://developers.google.com/drive/web/about-sdk
They can and have done packaged Linux software.
I think one of the main issues with DB is that it is too little space and too much cost to add more. Considering what they pay for bandwidth, any paid plan really should be unlimited.
I think one of the main issues with DB is that it is too little space and too much cost to add more. Considering what they pay for bandwidth, any paid plan really should be unlimited.
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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
They must have had their reasons for stopping the free service, probably financial, so what happens now I don't know. How many free customers converted to paid?
I mentioned Wuala mainly because they claim to take seriously security of your data and because it works well on OS X, Win & Linux.
My second such comment in 1 minute on this but nonetheless, SpiderOak works well with Linux.
Disc: not affiliated with them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE
Dropbox is doomed for these simple reasons.
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)
Not much of an improvement.
I'm kind of surprised, personally.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/23/condoleezza-ric... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04...
* 2001-2005 - Did NOT advise POTUS to spend 1.7 trillion dollars and thousands of military and civilian lives on obviously shaky WMD testimony.
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.
* 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.
> Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government and British government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
Should she have known the cost (in $$$ and lives)? It was her job and that of every senior leader involved. They grossly underestimated the effort. Their colossal mistake wasn't just an oopsy-daisy to be waved away.
Incompetence at that scale should follow you around for your whole life.
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.
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?
Also, when people speak of a market, they're speaking annually.
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.
It is likely an inflated number, but it's hard to tell because it isn't in an open market. It could be $1M or it could be $100B.
(Of course, the calculation for a business valuation is a lot more complex than a simple distance = rate * time.)
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.
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".
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.
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.
As well as anyone that shares files with me, I see the same pop-up (icognito window or not).
> 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.
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.
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.
[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.