I only started the article, but it's too over-the-top to continue. I wonder how you get media to write about your startup like that?
> Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).
> Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007.
> No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more problems for its users than any other.
It's indeed a huge surprise that Dropbox is alive and well in 2015 when every major titan has similar offering for free. However I didn't knew Drew Houston was still that interested in Dropbox and my impression is that there is nothing new happening at Dropbox for years from development perspective. For example, basic things like showing long file names in tablets like iPad is completely broken for years and no one is fixing it. It appears to me Drew Houston is realizing that IPO is the only option for exit and starting a huge PR effort. Be prepared for lots of articles like this in coming months.
On legit publications, native advertising simply means an ad unit that is tailored to fit the site design/flow or quite often a more editorially formatted ad unit. However it will always have some sort of ad indicator or the company would lose the trust of their readers.
Not saying press for dollars doesn't happen, but native advertising is something very specific. I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with the IAB's definition and recommended guidelines[1]. Large online brands follow these because they want to say they are IAB compliant for brand conscious advertisers with big media budgets.
Remember when Google was trying to fly under the radar because they were afraid that Microsoft would find out how much money they were making selling ads on search result pages. Anyone knows if any company is doing that today? It seems we only know about start-up companies through PR pieces (oh pardon me, I mean objective journalism of the highest quality).
Kickstarter and Cloudflare - both have been keeping all their financials in the secret until they have murdered most of the competition.
Most of the users would come from word of mouth.
I feel like that's almost impossible to do today especially with enterprise products (e.g. google selling ads to businesses). I think people now are accustomed to using products they've come across online and anything else is too foreign and strange.
> Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service--and perhaps the only startup--ever to compete simultaneously against Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tencent.
If you're wondering who Tencent is, you're not alone:
They sold games on feature phones, then smartphones, then made WeChat, which is IM, I think, and massive in China. They also have a payment service, and the short version is, they're a competitor to Alibaba.
Tencent started with OICQ (later QQ), a somewhat ICQ clone, back in 1999. One of the most important factors, if not the most important one, contributing to the wild growth of WeChat in China is almost everyone online has at least one QQ number connecting with acquaintances. I think QQ was not as dominant as now. MSN messenger was quite popular among young middle class. In fact, the two are mainly used by different classes. After the shutdown of MSN messenger and the rise of domestic organizations (my personal perspective though), QQ seems to be the only dominant force in the market.
edit: typo and added: In fact, the two are mainly used by different classes.
Tencent also is the majority interest of Riot Games. Riot Games is the creator of League of Legends which is probably the biggest selling game right now.
Candy Crush likely still owns the distinction of the biggest game when it comes to on-going revenue generation. King Digital did $2.2 billion in sales last year ($586m last quarter), almost entirely on Candy Crush. Estimates put League of Legends at the $1 billion ballpark for 2014 (up from $624m in 2013).
"Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’
I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information on Dropbox...
Of course they are. When I was buying a house, it was a nonstop game of scanning and shuffling financial data everywhere. Office scanner, office email, office computer, cloud storage provider, personal email... and because of cloud storage provider, all other linked machines in my house, .. not to mention the email accounts of the bankers...
You can try to get away from it, if you like. But then you're just wasting your time, faxing the same amount of data over immensely slow connections to your bank, who's just going to digitize it anyway and put it god knows where....
And anyone who has done this knows it's ALL time sensitive, and you have other responsibilities in life, so the most convenient/fastest method is the only real way of getting it done.
You're not the only one who thinks that way, but I actually have a hard time justifying that level of concern to myself. I mean, how much added risk is there for the average user in storing her financial records and health information on Dropbox vs. anything else she might store in the cloud?
As far as worst case scenarios go, the financial system does a decent job of making you whole in the event of fraud, and doctors don't rely (solely) upon the stuff in your Dropbox account to make important medical decisions.
That's not to say there's no danger. There's obviously no shortage of Bad Things that could be done with your financial and medical information, but for most people, it's not much worse than the Bad Things that could be done with the photos they share on Facebook, the e-mails they archive in Gmail, or the phone numbers and addresses scattered across countless unsecured databases around the web. In fact, I'd argue that most Dropbox users would be more concerned about Dropbox leaking their private photos and letters than credit card statements and medical bills.
"I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information on Dropbox..."
In 2015, the only sensible approach to security is to consider every machine you touch to be compromised, all the time. And yet I still store financial information on Dropbox - pay slips, bank records, mortgage documents, wills. Why would I care? I don't put download links to them on every email I send out of course, but if they would 'leak', it wouldn't make a material difference to my life. While the ease with which I can access and keep track of them does.
Same with medical information - what do I care that anyone knows how strong my prescription glasses are? Or if I'd got some serious disease tomorrow, what sort of treatment I get? I'd have to disclose if I wanted to get life insurance anyway.
I no longer see a rational reason for trying for absolute secrecy on things like this. The cat's out of the bag.
Its inevitable. When todays 22yr olds hit their 30s, their documents will be handled in the cloud and accessed everywhere, including financial, medical, certificates, insurance policies etc. We might even find a way to us cloud documentation as verification, forgot your ID at home while entering a bar, just open your dropbox, box on mobile & show verified ID.
Glad I am not the only one thinking that its almost a paid advertisement for Dropbox. It looks particularly suspicious given the Amazon unlimited storage announcement.
> From the start, Dropbox was almost magically simple: Install Dropbox’s folder on your desktop, and by simply dragging files into it you could suddenly access them from anywhere.
That was simple in 2007, but this kind of synching model (also used by Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) doesn't feel simple anymore to me. Most applications still save files in other locations by default. Having to save them in your Dropbox, or having to move them to your Dropbox afterward, turns out to be a massive friction.
If the goal is that "Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around", you need to remove that friction. I know at least one person who lost access to some important files when she needed them because she forgot to drop them off in the right box.
One possibility would be to do what Microsoft does with Office 2014 and OneDrive, and try to force you to save all your files inside the synched folder. But that quickly gets annoying, especially since most people already have mountains of files stored and organized elsewhere.
That, and the lack of client-side encryption, is why I'm a loyal customer of a Dropbox competitor that allows me to sync any folder on any device with any other folder on any other device. I set it up to sync my entire $HOME partition, so I don't need to care where my apps store their files. That, Mr. Houston, is how you get me to hand over my "whole computing environment" to you.
> Having to save them in your Dropbox, or having to move them to your Dropbox afterward, turns out to be a massive friction.
This also bothered me so I looked for a solution. As much as I love Dropbox, I still have data stuck on external drives and NAS boxes. I looked at some Dropbox competitors but you always get that half-baked feeling with them. I sticked with Dropbox in the end (especially after they introduced the 1TB plans) but I still wanted to get the files from my external drive in there.
I tried symlinks which felt neat at first, only to later discover their nasty shortcomings: imagine the horror of files getting deleted when my external drive was disconnected. Symlinks also don't get the updates so in order to sync changes I always had to close and restart Dropbox. Back to square one.
In the end, all I wanted was a simple way to have files synced from my external drive and NAS, without having to worry about it or doing voodoo to get it working. That's why I created Boxifier (http://www.boxifier.com). I wanted a super easy, set-and-forget, "it just works" solution.
I think Dropbox doesn't get enough credit for solving the sync problem for the masses in a way that feels so simple. That simple that it's easy to forget that it is a hard problem in the first place.
You mean in the same way that IBM dominated personal computing (besting that little start-up Microsoft), and Microsoft dominated search (besting that little start-up, Google), and Google dominated social (besting that little start-up, Facebook)?
Turns out, no matter how big or successful you are, you can't dominate everything. That is something Dropbox has going for it in battling Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
Proud user of Dropbox, lot of people around me using it as well, even received 50gb of storage with my S3. I guess I know what it does, but thinking about Business version - anyone here with any cons? Especially in terms of sharing stuff in/out of the company?
Why would you be a proud user? User perhaps, but proud of using such a service?
I am an ashamed user of Dropbox still (see drop-dropbox someone posted below), because of inertia.
I know that that there is a high probability any three letter agency can access my unencrypted (and probably encrypted) data at Dropbox, but I suppose it is no worse than at Google Drive
I only wish competitors (Drive in my case) would copy their sleek OS integration and the public folder functionality. Sadly since Condoleezza Dropbox is not an option for me.
"Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company. It’s a philosophy that appeals to many Dropbox employees. On a chilly night in San Francisco’s Financial District, Ilya Fushman, head of business and mobile products, and Agarwal join Houston and me for dinner at the Battery, an exclusive restaurant and private club. Despite the posh surroundings, Fushman and Agarwal wax poetic about the egalitarian culture Houston and Ferdowsi have created. "It’s really hard to pull off creating an environment of peers," says Agarwal, a former engineering director at Facebook who oversaw the development of its News Feed. "We hold ourselves accountable to expectations, and at a bunch of companies, that ends up being centralized. Drew’s my boss, but I prefer to think of him as a peer and friend.""
I really don't know if the author was being facetious or the surroundings really did distort his perception of reality. But either way, as someone who grew up in a communist country, I really can't believe how people in SV are spewing these kind of second rate propaganda while keeping a straight face.
This is purely a PR piece. I'd guess there's not much editing going on, so claims like that will go through to the reader as long as they make it through Dropbox's PR (which is originating the piece to begin with.)
So, yeah, those are some extraordinary claims there, and nobody's going to check on them. Journalism is mostly dead in this country (except for some rare exceptions.)
A HNer made this same point in a different thread today. The child comment pointed out that (i'm paraphrasing) "people don't pay for journalism or content, so the only way to monetize it is as a vehicle to drive traffic and push ads.
Absolutely. My thinking is the problem in today's world, specially on the web, is that you can't tie people down to consume the advertisement, so you have to fool them into consuming it.
In the good ole' days of pre-cable/pre-TiVo TV, people who wanted to watch a program would have to sit through the ads because they didn't know when the next segment of the show would start. Websites can't constrain you the same way because you are free to take an action against the ad: close the tab, change tabs, install an ad-blocker.
So what's the solution? You mask ads as content. You get a press release from a company, do some basic editing on it so it doesn't look exactly the same as in the other 50 or so blogs affiliated with the PR company, and you are good to go. You get paid, the client company gets good publicity and the PR company gets their slice. The consumer is none-the-wiser and thinks s/he got something for their time. Win/win/win/kinda-lose.
> Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company
But that surely doesn't extend to equity, where the founder holds an order of magnitude or two more than his VP of Engineering, who holds an order of magnitude more than his rank-and-file employee "peers" who built and continue to build the company towards success.
That's how most companies work. The risk diminishes as the company becomes more established and recruiting becomes easier. Houston wrote the prototype himself and became accepted to Y-Combinator on that platform. Before attending he met Ferdowsi and they went through Y-Combinator and iterated on the design and built a great product, they made the viral Digg video and released to a waitlist of +75,000. Before another employee was hired YC was in the cap table and 7 participants had funded in the seed stage (included sequoia).
I am not sure if the group dynamic functions as peers, in that decisions and features and such are developed by discussion and there is mutual respect. However, I think Houston and Ferdowsi are more responsible for DB success than others and thus have a bigger slice of the Cap table.
It's typical for the founder to hold 2-5 times as much equity as all employees combined. We can argue risk all day long. I claim this is a severe imbalance, and one day silicon valley workers will wake up to it and demand more for their services.
Makes you think of a scene straight out of The Hunger Games. These guys, surrounded by opulence, building the perfect society, all while ignoring the reality of the middle class rats that surround them.
> Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).
> Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007.
> No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more problems for its users than any other.