Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud.
Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts.
Imagine these scenarios:
- A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account. Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing sites.
- A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services.
- A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services.
- A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on youtube...and video takes up a ton of storage.
Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist.
And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a crowded space competing with companies who are making it necessary to have their file sharing services because they're tying all kinds of productivity applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.
The problem with all those things are: bandwidth. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. Dropbox wants you to stick stuff with them and then never touch it. Then they would only need slow disks and slow networks.
Once Dropbox tries to become Flickr/Soundcloud/Youtube, they have the same problem those services have: massive money loss. Playing media at scale is hard and expensive. Especially when Dropbox's niche is easily mutable data. Dropbox doesn't exactly have a massive advertising empire that could subsidize and take advantage of Youtube.
So the one place they did expand into is productivity tools. No one's going to massively share a text document/slideshow/spreadsheet, nor do those things eat very much bandwidth, and it plays into their mutability advantage very well.
Dropbox customers are clearly willing to pay more than the absolute minimum possible. Dropbox is relatively expensive. So instead of not offering a service that customers want they could simply charge for bandwidth.
Also, Dropbox does support partially syncing large files, so mutability is not necessarily that big of a problem (depending on the file format I guess).
The mutability comes into play when you want to serve the content. Youtube/Flickr pretty much operate on full replacement, when you're done fiddling with your files you publish them and they never change. This makes it easier to serve the content cheaper through caching and CDNs.
That partial sync is pretty much Dropbox's technical advantage right now. Change a bit and it tries only sync a bit. Now imagine how difficult that would be to serve with multiple layers of caching.
They even had (almost) this feature and disabled it, right? Originally, your Dropbox folder came with a Public folder which had content accessible (directly) from the web. You could host your website there. Some time later they found people are hosting their websites there which costs them bandwidth, and removed this ability. (Now you can share individual files using special links.)
If dropbox can't make money offering their product (easy to use cloud storage), then they should shut down business operations tomorrow, full-stop.
While you are correct that there are technical challenges with delivering lots of media to lot of consumers, these challenges have been handily addressed many times by many companies. In addition Dropbox relies on people installing clients on their devices. For people who are "in their network", why not just use a bittorrent-style method to move the files between users directly?
Most media that people put online isn't consumed. It's a power law distribution. So most of the vacation photos or cover-band songs aren't going to really use any egress bandwidth. But putting those things up consumes space, which pushes users over tiers, which encourages them to upgrade.
When the latest dropbox-tube influencer's videos get watched by 100 million people, that's all 100% advertising to viewers that this person is a "dropboxer", some percentage of which will feel inclined to also start using the service, creating a virtuous cycle of customers who then go and make reaction videos to the first person's reaction videos, which mostly likely will get 10 views but will consume that user's storage -- which sells dropbox's primary service offering.
Finally, why wouldn't dropbox turn a network of people's shareable media into an advertising network?And generate more revenue? It seems hilariously obvious to me that they would do that. After all, isn't that how Google funds 98.999% of all of their offerings?
Dropbox makes a profit (just barely). Google is still dodges investor questions on YouTube profitability which suggests it doesn't. Flickr/Soundcloud have been fighting for survival for years now.
The power law distribution is problematic because unless you can predict which content becomes a hit, you either treat all the content like it would (extremely expensive), as if it wouldn't (extremely slow and still expensive), or some smart predictive in-between (which is a very hard problem that you can see Netflix/HBO and even Youtube suffers from). You can see Dropbox is working on smart-sync too, because it's pretty critical for keeping costs down.
Besides, you really don't want things to go viral. Viral is expensive to serve and expensive to engineer for.
I think torrent-style distribution is a brilliant idea. Not sure how people will feel about their phone data or metered connections being used, nevermind the engineering challenges of getting torrenting working on a cellular connection.
You're asking Dropbox to essentially become Google without the profitable part (search ads). Way easier said than done. There's very little profit to be made from being a commodity, it's not clear that becoming an umbrella of multiple commodities is any different.
Dropbox is certainly positioned to make a good product, so is Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple. But until people actually start paying for good products so they're profitable products, they won't be built or will keep disappearing to be replaced by subsidized/free mediocre products by Google.
I am a fairly happy paying user of Dropbox for what it is, and I do not share most of complaints in the thread. But I think your suggestions are excellent! Please apply to Head of Product there!
Dropbox had a great, gmail like onboarding process for free users. And they made graphics people happy with their sync tech.
Then they stopped and focused on segmentation to chisel more margin and missed the boat. It’s a shame.
The enterprise sales force that I dealt was a bunch of overpaid folks who didn’t seem motivated to sell. Microsoft and Google gobbled up the enterprise market. And eventually, Adobe will steal the creatives too.
Yup, image versioning was a big deal. No one else had it at the time. Graphics people were indeed happy. I wonder if they tried to strike a deal with Adobe to back lightroom or photoshop with Dropbox.
> A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services.
Considering that Amazon offered this exact functionality, and decided it wasn't even worth maintaining, I don't think it's obvious that Dropbox missed something by not doing it at all.
> A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services
I recently dumped my music collection that previously was on Google Music on Dropbox; I'd easily pay twice what I'm paying for space to get a music app from them that played my stuff on there.
I think they're halfway copying Box's strategy and focusing on B2B.
The first two scenarios might have been huge selling points a decade ago, but Spotify replaced music downloads with streaming (not that Dropbox couldn't have made a stream your own music app), and Flickr faded away. I'm not even sure how people save their photos, these days. Just leave them on their phones?
My sentiments exactly. I, however, see more value along the lines of file related workflows and third party apps. Google Drive now has third party apps. Workflows on the other hand, I have only seen in NextCloud.
Third party apps would have helped them remain focused. That ship has, almost certainly, sailed though.
Totally agreed. I pay for Dropbox myself, but I don't know that I've shared a file with it in a decade or so. I just use Paper, which they continue to fail to market, despite it being absolutely amazing.
I see your point , I just visited the Paper product subsite and I still don't know what it is despite watching several videos. Some sort of collaborative task / list management?
Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts.
Imagine these scenarios:
- A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the site and dropbox just makes it "work". Now I want to keep putting photos up and need to keep upgrading and paying for my account. Dropbox could have taken on Flickr and any number of other photo sharing sites.
- A user dumps their music collection into dropbox and automatically get a private site they can use to listen to their collection. Now I have to keep paying for their service and upgrading to add new music. Dropbox could have taken on any number of music services.
- A user dumps the music they created into dropbox and automatically get a soundcloud like experience to share their music. Now I have to pay to keep sharing my creations and upgrading to add more. Dropbox is now taking on soundcloud, and any number of other music sharing services.
- A user dumps their videos into dropbox and automatically gets a youtube like channel they can use to share their works. Now Dropbox is taking on youtube...and video takes up a ton of storage.
Give a storefront now people can sell their music, art, videos and now their livelihoods are tied to paying for Dropbox to exist.
And on and on and on. Dropbox could have been hugely disruptive to any number of other sites and instead is a languishing file sharing site that's targeting enterprise customers (meanwhile enterprises are actively trying to block dropbox from their systems as it's an easy exfil route) -- and it's in a crowded space competing with companies who are making it necessary to have their file sharing services because they're tying all kinds of productivity applications to their storage (OneDrive, Gdrive, etc.) that enterprises are willing to approve even given possible exfil risks.