Back when we actually imagined that government could stand up to powerful companies, we dealt with the Railroads with the tools of anti-trust. The situation was almost comically similar:
+ New, hyped technology;
+ Which received huge capital investment from newly printed money;
+ And which lent itself to a natural monopoly;
+ Which crushed competitors;
+ By offering to buy them for high prices;
+ Or by severely undercutting competitors
We already did this, we already solved this problem. Issue is that it happened before any of us were born. So I guess we have to go through the pain of learning this lesson all over again. It should be plainly obvious that we haven't even really started, as evidenced by the plaintive "bUt WhAt Do wE DO aBoUT tEcH!?" cry that comes out every time these companies flex their muscle.
Many other utilities tend to natural monopolies in similar ways such as telephone service, especially to rural areas, but railways are an extreme case.
Online some network effects can create natural monopolies because users get benefits from being on the same platform as all the other users. It’s a very different dynamic though and different platforms can cater to different communities and use cases with complementary value. Twitter and Facebook for eg. They don’t impose a cost on the public in the way railways do either.
That's an interesting take after the last couple years...
The messengers in question decide which messages you see and tailor their deliveries to the one which will increase your outrage because that’s what keeps you asking for more. All so they can keep slipping in a few more adverts others pay for.
These messengers aren’t neutral, thus not exempt from blame.
Dumping is tricky. I am actually sympathetic to the argument that says let them dump away. If China is subsidising cheap solar panels and manipulating their currency to make them even cheaper again, fine. Let's gorge ourselves on cheap solar panels. That's fine in theory, but the reality is more complex. What about long term investment in technology development? Control of strategic technologies? These apply to tech services too. I use Google Doc heavily, but I do worry that they are pricing out potentially innovative competition.
What if as consumer you benefit for a little while until all competition is dead - and then prices increase beyond prior levels? Will you still like “dumping” then?
A bigger worry for me is stagnation. Suppose Google Docs gets 'good enough' and prices out all the competition, but then Google loses interest because it's not exciting anymore.
This happened with Internet Explorer. We lost years of advancement in browser technology because they dominated, wiped out the competition but then lost interest. Yes competitors came along again after a few years, but there was a significant opportunity cost to all of us.
This is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
"The objective of dumping is to increase market share in a foreign market by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation where the exporter will be able to unilaterally dictate price and quality of the product".
Making cheap products from cheap materials (at a presumed profit) isn’t the same as loss-making pricing schemes even if the high level motivation to beat competitors is the same.
Is it that, or is it because we're all so dependent on the market (for retirements funds, etc), that we're afraid to rock the boat? That would tend to indicate that anti-trust action needs to start well before the point where we're all too invested in AAPL/MSFT/GOOGL to want change.
iCloud and OneDrive are integrated into the operating system now too, too.
There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.
The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an individual.
They constantly upsell, even after you bought the product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension.
Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1 generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70% premium over competitive offers.
Good riddance.
Luckily OneDrive was finally getting stable so we migrated over and I haven't touched dropbox since.
It quickly became clear they were focusing on enterprise customers and the SMB pricing we had undermined that effort.
I think this is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article.
I very recently signed up for Apple One, for Music/TV/iCloud (family photos in particular)/all the rest and the fact that I now use iCloud sync instead of Dropbox bothers me nil. Prime also comes with Photos, unlimited photo backup. Used to use that just fine. Google Photos is like $1/mo.
Honestly, if Disney bundled a cloud storage service into Disney+ I'd probably give it a shot. File syncing is a commoditized feature these days for the average Joe.
Of course it's not as easy to set up as Dropbox, I originally had grand dreams of somehow turning this into a startup back when there were a lot of people upset that Dropbox was using an invasive kernel driver (IIRC), but I never found the time.
Yeah, this. I've found myself drifting over to OneDrive for personal use; it's pretty good at least on macOS, and Dropbox is just one-more-thing running all of the time.
But also, almost every time I log into their service I get popups bugging me to upgrade, it happened just now. I pay ~ $100/yr at the moment and I guess I've been too lazy to eliminate that expense by moving everything to one provider. Today might be the day to change that.
Office 365 is crazy good value in comparison - although I will say my users still complain about onedrive and say Dropbox sync was more rock solid.
I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops.
No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but needs your own infra to run.
Dropbox allows me to do a lot of things and they're currently irreplaceable for me. That's not because I can't replace them (would take half a day at most) but, their service worth the money they want.
In the early days of computing people would sell task managers, file managers, memory optimisers, software to burn data to a CD etc. As time went on, these ‘products’ just became features of the operating system. While it used to make sense for people to own a copy of Nero Disk Burner, over time this became expected functionality of the operating system. Consumers demands for base software change over time - Task managers used to be a product you bought for your OS, now they are just a feature of your OS.
So what do Dropbox offer, I would say it is “seamless file syncing”, which meets a broader consumer goal of “my changes are synchronised across my team and devices”. I think the issue is that as time goes on, this is becoming a standard consumer expectation of applications.
Applications like Google Docs and Figma have actually decided that it’s better if they handle the sync rather than Dropbox. Just like windows was better at task management, they are better at synchronising their own files. It means they can even offer things like collaborative editing!
Secondly, as time moves on, the base expectation for an OS might move to ‘all my files are synchronised’ - and if that’s the case, what is the role for Dropbox in a world where customers just expect that as standard? We used to have file managers as their own purchased products and then they became standard OS features. Why should a cloud file manager or sync service be fundamentally different in a cloud-first world? Online sync might be the new windows file explorer. Take iCloud for example - that’s just a feature fully baked into OSX.
So what does this mean for Dropbox? Well what it offers over time might just become what people expect other software or their operating system to do for them - And I think this is what Jobs was predicting. Why do I have to get something else to sync the files on my computer, surely this is an operating system responsibility?
So then the Dropbox space becomes - “cross operating system syncing of files that don’t have a native cloud sync process”. People still buy Nero Disk Burner... it’s just their market isn’t what it used to be.
They chase after an enterprise consumer but this would put them into direct competition with Microsoft, a fight that they cannot win.
Both iPhone and Android have support for cloud sync baked into their operating system as a core feature for their own service.
The issue with things like Carousel or Google Photos is that the sync is actually a fairly small part of the engineering effort - the hard part is making an amazing photo viewing and editing app which with mobile devices includes the end to end user flow from your mobile phone camera! Google photos and iPhoto make a little more sense as products when you consider that these are really about viewing the photos you took on your Apple/google device and providing native sync from their camera app. I’m not sure what Dropbox’s long term competitive advantage could be in the space from a corporate strategy perspective.
Still has. It's called "Camera Upload" now.
> Once people star buying storage from google/apple there would be no point to buy any of Dropbox offering.
I think secure erase, transfers, file requests, "Apps" and OS independence is worthy of the price they ask for. Also on-demand sync on other OSes and other small features increase their value in my eyes a lot.
A google docs file isn’t a file in the traditional sense, it just exists on the cloud and we can collaborate at the same time.
Similarly with Figma, that’s not really a file. It just exists and we can all edit it at the same time.
My todo list app used to sync with Dropbox, now it syncs for free without Dropbox.
Even Microsoft office documents on 365 sit in a weird space between ‘kind of a file and kind of not’ - the file is there, but when you are doing live collaborative editing that’s presumably not also updating the file on the disk in real time - there is some other sort of magic going on.
The important thing with the above examples is they can offer better sync because they don’t rely on Dropbox, rather than despite not using Dropbox.
If sync is an application feature, sync tends to be better than if sync isn’t an application feature and it’s left to Dropbox to do the sync.
Where this does ring true is Dropbox versus not OneDrive on it's own, but OneDrive as it comes bundled with O365. Many F500 type companies pretty much MUST have O365.
Then, if you have O365, you have OneDrive. And the question then isn't whether Dropbox is better. It's whether OneDrive is "good enough" to suffice, despite it being not as good as Dropbox. And the decision maker doesn't care if it's not good enough for some smallish subset of employees that need a Linux client, etc. They care whether it's good enough for most.
This is the problem. Putting Linux support aside, focusing too much on enterprise, while necesseary up to a point, kills both the product and personal productivity tools market.
Is wanting to decouple work and personal files completely while retaining independence on personal systems a cardinal sin?
IMHO, touting about benefits of a work/life balance is moot if I can't completely shut-off work stuff from my life while using my computer. Dropbox, Evernote and Trello allows me to do that. None of my work stuff is present in these mediums. Similarly none of my work stuff syncs to my personal computers directly. I use company laptop for that stuff.
Trello also went the same route. Trello Gold was a personal productivity powerhouse. Now it's unmaintained, intentionally crippled semi-premium version of Trello Business class.
Do I need to set-up a VPS, install {Next,Own}cloud to it and install all my tools as add-ons there to have a personal productivity space? In 2021? That shouldn't be necessary, that wasn't the promise.
Yet we are here. Every product is targeting the enterprise, where the freelancer or the personal productivity enthusiast is either confined to its corporate licenses or expensive (in terms of time) self-hosted solutions.
- Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure there will be many other tools which can talk with Dropbox but not with my server.
- Collaboration: I bet that not so many people would install another client and remember a username, password, URL triplet to just work with me (e.g. academic research, side project, etc.). They'll either force me to use other tool or things will just break down (just experienced a similar thing at work).
- Maintenance: OS, service, add-on updates, licenses, security, monitoring, etc. will be additional time consuming obligations.
- Pricing: If I use a VPS, excessive network traffic or resource usage will result in a price hike.
- Price/Performance: You cannot beat the competition at the price/performance ratio. I will pay more, spend more time and get less. Why bother?
- Environmental: In my case, self-hosting at home is impossible. I neither have the bandwidth, nor the space required to store another system and keep it quiet at the same time. Additional power bill and heat is not welcome, either.
These are just the issues coming from top of my head, and can be expanded further.
It is most likely Dropbox faces higher churn in their primary customer demography (Creatives and Professionals). Their offering lack many admin controls it is not yet ideal for enterprises where the churn is low. Further, OneDrive and G-Suite offers much better value by bundling the productivity suite.
Their Dropbox Transfer offering is a nice alternate revenue stream for them. I wonder what else they can come up with.
However, there are concentration points of this 2% which is beneficiary to both parties.
Dropbox can target this 2% better and users of this 2% can use Dropbox to collaborate and sync their other systems which have more popular OSes.
Nice thing about Syncthing is you can entirely configure what you are syncing and how. I literally press one button on my phone, it creates a backup, and that backup is sent to my server.
I would go as far to say that Android's killer app is Syncthing. Yes, I'm putting this on the same level as iMessage for iOS. It's that good. If I ever switch back to iPhone I will really miss it.
FYI, you might be satisfied by Insync.
When you are against FAANG every product is just a feature.
Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own, you need to have some other data from somewhere else to use with it.
That just describes a tool. A hammer is useless without a nail, but a hammer isn't a feature. The claw of the hammer is a feature.
>And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly what we would consider a feature for most big software companies
Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A feature is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not, and they are the only place to get it.
It's not really related to compensation even if those companies pay well. The short history is that FANG was coined by Jim Cramer (he has a TV show where he talks about stocks) around 7 or 8 years ago to mean Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google. He just thought those were good stocks to invest in at the time but the term caught on and started being used in different contexts, Apple was added as the second A to make FAANG and now it's roughly just a synonym for a big tech company depending on the context.
This also explains why Netflix is represented in the acronym but much bigger companies like Microsoft aren't.
Apple, Google and Microsoft have shown they want to compete directly in streamed video market (and similarly the online music market.)
They might not have successfully competed against Netflix yet, but I have no reason to believe that one of them couldn’t come up with a better product with better platform integration, and Netflix becomes another Hulu in the middle runners.
If Dropbox creates software that performs a task, it can be copied (to a sufficient degree) by Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and people can get it there.
I completely disagree. Netflix creates original content, but so do all (most?) of the other competing streaming platforms. And they all compete for licenses to third-party content. Heck, notable third-party content often makes headlines for moving from one streaming service to another when the contracts expire.
I was referring to the concept of "bundling and unbundling" [1] which is beneficial to the big rich companies. The big players have the money and the control over the eco-system (files, documents, events) which gives them the advantage to go against smaller products and make them features.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/9/21/atomisatio...
In the world of music, an effects pedal or guitar stomp box is more "feature" than "product". You can't write a song just using a chorus pedal. But there are many many thriving companies that do nothing but produce and sell pedals.
Much of this likely rests on the fact that the "protocols" that music gear use to talk to each other are simple, well-established, and legally unemcumbered. Also, for reasons that aren't clear to me, even dominant companies in the market do not seem to have pushed very hard to extuinguish that interoperability in anti-competitive ways. Or, at least, not yet.
a) it's too easy to build data syncing into other products
b) the ease of having syncing built into the product I'm using is really powerful
When Dropbox first came out a lot of software was a lot more "local", and Dropbox was a lot more useful. But now we have Google Docs and Office 365 for most documents, git/GitHub, etc. for source code, things like Figma are starting to crop up for designers.
For each of these, unless the syncing was especially bad, it's hard to imagine an out-of-band syncing solution differentiating itself in any meaningful way to make up for the more complex UX/setup.
Unless someone for some reason comes up with a product that's just amazing compared to its competition but has no syncing capabilities, or syncing becomes incredibly difficult to implement well, I don't see why people would use Dropbox.
I'm not a musician, but my guess is that musicians care enough about pedals or the differences between them to justify a separate market for them. Certain pedals are smoother, or offer more resistance, and that matters a lot to certain people? But I don't see an analog to that for data syncing.
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If there were a market for data syncing itself, I feel like it would be product companies paying for it as a service, and not something that end-users want to pay for directly.
Another way to look at this is that maybe filesystems are too low-level of an abstraction for most end-users. I found that people would often be confused by the idea of a filesystem that existed separately from any application when I was trying to explain computers to them, and UX seems to be moving away from needing users to think about a filesystem.
For me Dropbox has the following advantages:
* it works with _all_ my files and applications (not only those with sync built-in) * it's a separate product, that does one thing only, where I explicitly pay for that thing. It's not an after-thought or something whose business model is unclear or is against my privacy * for the same reason I am less worried that the company behind it will pull the plug because it's not the main focus
I much happier to pay more for a service/product with a clear focus made by a company that doesn't a gazillion other things. (Btw for similar reasons I think that Evernote is damaging itself with their strategy of chasing new features at all costs).
In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.
But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras.
After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.
So we have a situation where it doesn't make sense for Google to focus on the feature, but the fact that they have the feature at all trips up specialist companies.
It's the best collaborative writing tool, and with the work from home situation, it's the best tool to replace never ending zoom meetings with asynchronous collaboration.
That's an interesting idea, but if you think about it, a lot of companies are in the same boat. How long did Uber go before making a profit? Amazon?
Heck, Microsoft spent eight billion dollars until Xbox started turning a profit for them. Xbox probably would have never existed if not for Microsoft taking a massive loss to make it happen.
$MSFT hadn't really taken off like the others until later that year.
This statement seems so funny considering 20 years ago Microsoft were all the FAANGs
Dumping is an unsustainable business practice that cripples competitors before raising prices to sustainable levels.
Bundling isn't bad if its price is higher than cost and it's cheaper for customers than unbundling.
I would disagree strongly with that. FAANG is not interested and actually has trouble competing in sub $100m markets.
On the other hand, Dropbox could've shifted more towards the enterprise customers and gained traction before the likes of Microsoft and Google ramped up their competing products. That'd have built them a better moat than being subject to the fickleness of mass consumers.
It seems like Dropbox could be generating 10s to low 100s of million in profit every year. They're spending a lot on R&D that they don't necessarily need to in order to chase growth. Even if GDrive/OneDrive et.al. eventually drive them out of business it would only be after Dropbox made 100s of million to billions.
End the infinite growth model once and for all. The only solution to all these issues. The shift has to be cultural before legislative.
I don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this. Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from entering into competition without any potential for profit? At the end of the day, maybe the world as a whole doesn't care that they are missing out on small cool tech companies that will never get huge? But, of course, in an environment where small cool tech is unsustainable we'll never know if they would eventually get huge.