> Dropbox Inc.'s chief executive officer said the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization
FYI - it's very likely that Dropbox is depreciating a HUGE ($100's of millions) amount of data center cost.[0] Translated into a more common "AWS opex cost", might yield a company that isn't really profitable^. EBITDA can be very misleading (not saying it definitely is in this case) so it's always worth analyzing it with a grain of salt until you have all of the full granular details.
To illustrate, let's consider a company that buys a $100 data centre every 10 years. (To keep things simple, let's assume the data centre is worthless after 10 years.) The data centre generates $20 in revenues for each of those 10 years.
Instead of showing an $80 loss in year 1 and then a $20 profit in years 2 through 10 (with the expectation of another $80 loss in year 11), accountants smooth the numbers based on expectations. The $100 data centre cost is "depreciated" over the expected lifetime of the asset. So one might account $10 of the data centre's cost to each of its ten years, thereby producing $10 of profit each year. This better reflects economic reality.
Ebitda does not include depreciation. The aforementioned company's Ebitda would be $20 for years 2 through 10. This is a small problem in year 2. But if you're an investor in year 10, ignoring that depreciation is the flip side of capital expenditure, you're in for a nasty shock when year 11's predictable capital expenditure comes down the line.
This is correct - good explanation. It's also why good financial professionals/investors look at cash flow statement (follow the money) more so than the income statement.
The whole idea of depreciation is spreading large capital expenditures (free cash flow = cash flow from operations - cap. ex.) over many years.
Therefore, free cash flow in any single year does not say much, only when considered over many years.
The key question is, then, those large capital expenditures that are accounting for the large depreciation charges, were they truly one-off, or can we expect them to be recurring?
Having said that, I have made mucho dinero off of investing in companies that have negative earnings due to high depreciation charges from truly one-off expenses (infrastructure investment, foolish purchases by previous management, etc.). Eventually the depreciation tapers off and earnings fall in line with fcf, and I make money.
EBITDA is Earnings Before ITDA. Quick example, with super simple math:
Scenario A (AWS)
- Over 5 years, you bring in $1M per year in revenue
- Every year you pay $200k in AWS fees
- Your earnings (Net Income) are $800k per year, your EBITDA is $800k per year
Scenario B (Buy your own hardware)
- Over 5 years, you bring in $1M per year in revenue
- You pay $1M in year one for hardware and depreciate it over the next 10 years at $100k per year
- Your earnings (Net Income) are $800k per year, your EBITDA is $900k per year
There are a ton of nuances to this, but this is generally how it works. As you can see the depreciation schedule affects this a lot, as well as when you choose to make the investment. Hence why it's feasible that Dropbox took out it's largest operating expense, i.e. AWS storage, which literally overnight increased EBITDA. It just so happens to be that a year ago they switched over to their own data center, and now they are touted "EBITDA profitable".
Long story - these stories are kinda stupid unless you get to see the full income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement.
It's been a while since I researched this (accounting is not my strongest suit), but it always seemed like depreciation schedules for server/datacenter equipment were always super aggressive compared to usable life. For an expanding company, I would assume that for a high growth company with a high datacenter cost structure, this would mean that until growth slows down, net profit will always be "pessimistic" compared to the more abstract "health" of the company.
The aggressive depreciation schedules might be due to the more compute-intensive use cases. Most servers are replaced due to new technology, mainly power consumption improvements. Maybe for low power scenarios the ROI bar for replacement is a lot higher, meaning low power servers get used longer than average. I would expect that Dropbox mostly uses these (I would assume they are more IO bound than compute bound).
When I was working as an accountant, computers were depreciated with a three year life. It's important to understand that an assets useful life often exceeds it's depreciation schedule. If an asset is sold after it's fully depreciated, it's just recorded as a gain.
That's true, but it's also really hard to do for a new company or new technologies. Dropbox started on AWS, so they don't have much experience running their own datacenters. They'll probably adjust their depreciation schedule in the future when they know better how long useful life really is.
Weird tangent, but there are methods to classify AWS spend as CapEx; while your typical startup isn't going to bother with it, companies spending in the 8 figure and up range annually on AWS annually do tend to go down that path.
> The recent announcement of a German facility run on AWS to accommodate European data will not be affected but the ability to transfer data from the Dropbox data center at a terabyte per second should speed up the process of migration.
A terabyte per second, am I reading that right? It sounds... Insane?
Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable.
* It 100% "just works" on all my devices (Mac, Linux, on a server, web, on my phone -- hell, I could stick it on a Raspberry Pi!).
* It integrates seamlessly with my filesystem.
* It has never, not once, failed me or bugged out on me. I've been using this product since it first came out and have not experienced even a minor bug!
* It's not tied to any other platform or service that might have conflicting interests.
* No fancy "smart" features or unexpected behaviour. All options are explicit and behave as expected.
* No fancy UX experiments, just straightforward to setup and use.
* I never have to think about it, it just does its job.
* It's a paid service that makes money (this in itself IS a feature).
It's just better than the competition. The peace of mind and get-out-of-the-wayness is well worth the $10 bucks a month. One of the few products that would be truly painful for me to lose...
"Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable."
I hate to be cynical here, but they're EBITDA profitable, not profitable, and they've been in business for 10 years. I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.
EBITDA should really be renamed EBMS: Earnings Before Manipulative Shenanigans. A high net profit might be heavily correlated with high EBITDA, but it's relatively easy to show a GAAP profit while being in terrible financial shape, and not so easy to do that with EBITDA.
In this case, I'd consider Dropbox's emergence into slight EBITDA profits as not great, but a definitely welcome sigh of relief for a unicorn market full of bullshit.
Dropbox has exabytes of data. I'd be very surprised if SpiderOak is storing more than a few PB. Perhaps some SpiderOak folks would care to correct me on this though?
Agree 95%. On the Linux side, it can sometimes be a little tricky keeping it working. e.g. I recently lost my taskbar icon in Lubuntu after a Dropbox upgrade. I contacted support and was told they don't support Lubuntu. Perhaps understandable that they can't support all the various flavours of Linux but less than ideal for me. The various forums, Stackoverflows, etc are filled with similar issues with varying degrees of success. I'm a Dropbox for Business subscriber so did expect a little more of a thoughtful answer. Again, 95% agree...
I used to think Dropbox was such a simple company -- how could they need hundreds (or are they at thousands?) of software engineers?
There are some opportunities for real innovation, though. An easy one is de-duplication of identical files to save space (which I have tested that they do). However, I suspect it can be taken much further to gain a competitive advantage against other storage providers, such as de-duping blocks, advanced compression algorithms, etc.
And of course, there's always room for creativity in the hardware and data-centers, and UX.
While support staff definitely increases with users (paid or not), beyond a certain size the number of engineering staff should be largely independent of user count. As long as you are able to run 24/7 ops, manage outages and incidents, scale appropriately, etc. the only variable should be how rapidly you need to build and maintain your software. The rest of the complexity is all handled via automation.
The big difference between WhatsApp and Dropbox is mass storage of customer data. Scaling that data for random access is orders of magnitude harder to scale than simple message throughput without storage. The fact that WhatsApp is end-to-end with no syncing also makes it's feature-set easier to implement.
Not to take anything away from WhatsApp, I'm sure they have a few lessons Dropbox could have learned from (Erlang more robust than Python at scale?), but it's really not a fair comparison.
Yep, agreed. This means that Dropbox's minimum engineering count will be larger than WhatsApp's, but I still maintain that once you have sufficient engineers to tackle the problem, it's still largely independent of user count. Or, put another way, the number of engineers you need is O(problem complexity), not O(user count).
Yes, although I would submit that in a case like Dropbox you get the VC demand for growth which means that if your product is not a natural homerun you are forced to start adding incidental complexity to try to keep the growth engine going. Then before you know it you are O(Investment Money) like Dropbox or Twitter.
Since Dropbox is making a big push into enterprise, they are hiring a ton of high touch enterprise sales people - who can't scale in the same way an engineer can.
I agree to an extent. Dropbox is the superior product from a 'just works' point of view. I really want to support them but they're just not priced competitively in our locale.
Is a 1TB family plan for $10NZD per month (not $10USD which is like $4000 NZD /s) too much to ask?
Microsoft have a $7.99 NZD per month O365 plan that includes Email and 1TB OneDrive.
I can also buy O365 Home Premium (5 user including thick apps and Skype credit) for less than $10 per month ($99 NZD per year) -- and that's for 5 users.
Microsoft are consistently adding value to their O365 offering, its only a matter of time until they nail the "Dropbox" level of quality on OneDrive and then Dropbox won't be relevant anymore. They need to bring that price point down for the different locales. $120USD per year is just too much.
> I can also buy O365 Home Premium (5 user including thick apps and Skype credit) for less than $10 per month ($99 NZD per year) -- and that's for 5 users.
I have an Office365 subscription that I don't use.
Their OneDrive client is shit and they don't do file version history, which means that files are very vulnerable to mistakes and ransomware.
With OneDrive you basically get exactly what you're paying for.
> Microsoft are consistently adding value to their O365 offering
One way of looking at that is the quality of their offering is so bad that the only way to go is up.
If you objectively analyse their price, Office 365 is in fact overpriced. For example I spent about $20 on Apple's Keynote and it was a one time fee that happened 3 years ago. It's still the best presentation software for me.
And personally I have important data, like a big family photos archive, a lot of documents, presentations I did, stuff I found interesting, etc. The cost of losing it would be pretty high.
I'm very frugal in general, but I don't mind paying for email and storage.
This. They just do such a good job. System is virtually perfect.
I don't know how many people remember just how painful life was BEFORE Dropbox came along and fixed everything...but they were like an oasis in the desert when the beta first appeared.
Failing on that one for me. I hover close to the storage limit, and I receive constant notifications from the software about it. No option to "leave me alone" in the settings.
Same. They used to be good about that, but lately they've been very pushy on their premium and it's probably why they are finally profitable...
Another shitty thing they do is, they often have promotions giving you a huge amount of space (10-20GB) but only for a year. They get you to fill up your Dropbox with content you depend on, and after a year, they're like "now you got a week to delete it all or pay for premium!"
Isn't the promotion transparent enough to not be shitty? To me is seems more like, 'if you are going to do it anyway and are on the fence about who you are going to go with, try us!'.
SyncThing mostly works. Dropbox just doesn't support soft links. I have tried so many of these tools and SyncThing comes close to preventing me from reaching for rsync. SyncThing between Windows and Linux was painful the last time I tried though with all sorts of, you guessed it, soft link issues.
Official line from Dropbox is not to use soft links.
Why is doing one thing a qualification for a good piece of software? I could see that some users may prefer this model of tools, but I use plenty of good software that provides a more complete solution than just doing one thing.
As a dropbox user, even with my life in the google ecosystem, I find it's the software that make the most difference. Everything works seamlessly across systems and there's no guesswork on how most of the common synchronization issues will be solved.
Microsoft and Google tainted their offerings from day one and I don't think anyone who remembers those systems wants to go back to them, even if they've improved. I think the old restrictions on file sizes and awkward interfaces have left them with baggage that Dropbox managed to avoid. These are just my opinions based on my experiences using all three products.
A million times this. I'm CTO of a digital agency and implementing dropbox has been a huge productivity win for us. It's the little things: universal links to files, but they're still just files. It makes the onboarding so much more simple. We've actually just started using Office 365 as well, as the integration is great between the two, so you can edit dropbox files on 365 and it's pretty much seamless - Sharepoint/CloudDrive/whatever is a car crash, don't touch it.
I never thought I'd write excitedly about this, and was super sceptical at first, but honestly, it's great. GSuite feels like a toy at this point.
Agree with most of your points, except for the fact that GSuite provides way more than file sharing. The true comparison would be between Google Drive and Dropbox, where Dropbox is difinitely better.
Drive in particular is terrible from a usability perspective. I prefer drive because I'm aware of the advantages of the platform integration as well as the docs collaborative editing features, but many lay users won't get past the onboarding from Gmail over to Drive to discover its advantages.
For a first time user, Dropbox is a much better product on day one by comparison.
For me, Drive was the better option because of the non-binary pricing options. I wasn't prepared to spend $10/month for 1 TB with Dropbox, mainly because I don't see myself needing that much storage. Drive on the other hand provides a 100 GB option for $2/month which is perfect.
This was my reason for abandoning Dropbox. I reached it's free limit, wanted more. I even emailed them before switching to onedrive, to see if they were going to offer prices similar to OneDrive/GDrive. Nope. Not even close. I probably would have paid twice the amount I pay for OneDrive for its better software, but I can't pay $10 per month. Hilariously the #1 reason I decided against Google Drive is how it inherits your phone's profile. Android is TOO Google sometimes. Each app should have the ability to have its own profile. One drive is perfect because I can install Onedrive on my phone AND my wifes phone and share the same profile.
OneDrive is great too. I started as a OneDrive free user, then decided to upgrade once I hit the limit. I didn't have a need for the Office 365 stuff as I have a license from my university, so I opted to migrate Drive.
That's interesting. So I can only have one Drive account signed in on my Android phone?
I don't think I am a typical user, but I use Dropbox because they put the same amount of polish into their client for all systems I use (Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android).
I fear that other providers will neglect the client on platforms they are not trying to push. If a new platform were to pop up and become popular, I am pretty confident Dropbox would make a client for it, whereas the others I think would drag their feet. I don't want to be weighed down by my cloud sync provider like that.
Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product, it took quite some time before Apple's cloud offering was really production ready.
The same can be said for the other software giants.
Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. This is a tremendous amount of adoption. Dropbox's real benefit lay in that it integrated directly into your OS so that it appeared just like a regular directory. This meant that usage patterns for users didn't change and so adoption ramped quicker.
Google on the other hand was always more of a work suite or productivity suite.
So ultimately what happened is that as the other large companies played catch up there simply wasn't enough of an advantage to switch to them away from Dropbox.
> Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product
Which is the best selling point of Dropbox. It doesn't try to be an office app suite, a photo editing solution, a cloud collaboration platform, etc. It just syncs files between computers and phones, and has simple UX because of it.
its limited to 2GB, but you could increase it by installing the app on your phone and enabling the auto upload of pictures. every picture increased it by (iirc) 5MB - and this extra space stayed if you removed the pictures.
I know, I have used Dropbox since 2010 ;). But the free tier does not contribute to the revenue of Dropbox. There are no ads (except for Dropbox Pro/Business :p).
Dropbox has some deals with Samsung and others for coupons for certain phones, but most of the 1B is probably brought in by paid subscriptions. Since Dropbox costs $10 per month (plus some Packrat and Advanced Team users), there are roughly 8 million paying users who bring in the revenue. Since Dropbox has ~500 million users, that would be a conversion rate of 1.6%, which seems reasonable.
I believe one very important thing was the courage to put fairly high(1) price tag for the service and compete on the quality of the user experience and not on price.
People tend to compare the Dropbox price to for example S3 storage price, but I think that is wrong. I'm for example using the Dropbox for certain project files and I'm sure that at least in my case the major cost is not the actual storage, but bandwidth and processing.
Edit: (1) Compared to other file storage services.
From reputation I had expected that Google's sync would be as perfect as Dropbox, but my experience has been that sometimes Google screws up your data while Dropbox is perfect.
Google Drive's features may be peerless, such as their built-in office suite, but the fear of damaged data or spending an afternoon getting your files right drives me back to Dropbox for basic multi-machine file storage and syncing.
Being integrated with Microsoft and Google's infrastructure is not a benefit, in my opinion. I've seen these companies make a lot of impulsive, ham-handed decisions with their "environments" in recent years and I'd rather pay for a service that isn't going to mutate negatively in order to coerce me to buy more things from Microsoft and Google that I just do not want.
Well Dropbox's client is far better than Google's for a start. Google Drive seems to have serious issues with handling conflicts, noticing file changes, renaming files and so on. Dropbox has been pretty flawless for me.
As a former OneDrive user the service was terrible, I've had issues with sync and all of the clients - web, mobile and desktop. I've read similiar opinions. From my experience the quality of OneDrive is really poor; it's not really a competitive product. Results my vary and most certainly will but that's the way I see OneDrive. Dropbox on the other hand... just works.
OneDrive sync has improved dramatically over the years. It's still not as good as dropbox, but OneDrive has this new popup window that shows you a bunch of information about your files when they sync and are updated. That part of the UX is better than dropbox.
I tried OneDrive again a couple of weeks ago, since I have an Office 365 subscription anyway. Sync was still slow for me compared to Dropbox, sometimes does not sync everything correctly, and used 700MB of memory for a nearly-empty OneDrive.
Dropbox just works and that's worth 10 Euro per month to me, it saves me heaps of time.
Their client and sync support is simple and works very well. Hits the sweet spot of simplicity and features. The other options are more complex. Google still doesn't have any Linux support, so it's off the table for me personally.
I would imagine partly because they have a lot of brand awareness form being first to market, partly because their product is pretty solid, partly because Dropbox still have the superior client (especially consistency across platforms)
totally agree, I use both office365 and g-suite and found them to be very useful and handy, for about the same price as dropbox, you not only just got the storage, but also all the mail/word/excel-alike stuff. let's see how long dropbox can fight against these big guns.
Google Drive is unusable. I upgraded to a paid plan so I'd have no storage limits. But the moment I tried to back some large folders, I noticed the upload speeds were capped, and the native client kept crashing. I'd leave it on overnight, just to see it not running in the morning. 100 GB of files is a trivial amount these days, and it's impossible to manage on Drive. And selective sync would attempt to upload the folder before it deletes it locally, so was useless. I couldn't just select which folders to upload first, even though I was there trying it due to Drive's own inability to upload large amounts of files.
Then there are all the sync issues. I had setup 5 or 6 computers to sync files, which is the main use case Drive is sold on. Yet, I'd notice (1) and (2) and (3) duplicate versions of the same file, and at one point I had a folder with (79).
So I'd have to dig through partially synced folders and duplicates just to figure out what to sync first, then sort through computers to see if Drive was actually running. Then remove large folders to outside of Drive, and drop them in in batches just so Drive wouldn't choke itself.
I also had an issue with file name length. I had copied a folder of saved web pages from Dropbox. I'd noticed all the directories were empty in Drive. Turns out, the folder names were too long. I understand the existence of technical constraints, but if I can't move files from Dropbox just by copying them, Drive needs to modify it's feature set.
Insync is the only reason I still have Drive. It doesn't crash, and it doesn't have sync duplication issues. But again, there is some API rate limit that causes it to halt. Drive is simply incapable of handling large amounts of files. I wish they'd just say that.
So I am back on Dropbox because I have no other options. And it just works. I had no idea syncing was such a hard problem.
And now with smart sync, I can see the files locally without having them take up space. Most of the files are for storage purposes anyway, so this is genius. The new online interface is better than google also.
It still locks up Photoshop, and I bet it's still piss slow in Japan, but for now all my large folders are back on Dropbox. Drive is reserved for Sheets and Docs that don't take up any space anyway, because the files are just links.
> So I am back on Dropbox because I have no other options. And it just works. I had no idea syncing was such a hard problem.
This is such a great comment. I'm bookmarking it so I can post a link to it every time someone on a different thread asks why Dropbox is still a thing :).
Hey there - I went down a similar road as you about a year back when I looked for a file backup solution.
I started with Dropbox, and attempted a sync of my local files. Within minutes the Windows app crashed.
I switched to Google Drive, same thing. Synced a large number of files and the Windows software crashed.
Even Tried Insync, still had crashing issues.
Researched the issue and found that both clients are limited in the amount of RAM (32bit vs 64bit) and this limit is easily reached when syncing tens-of-thousands of files causing the software to crash.
Neither provider offers a 64 bit version, or a version of their client software that handles syncing jobs this large.
I finally settled on Backblaze which was affordable ($5/month), and "just worked". The files aren't as accessible as Dropbox or Drive, but I still use those for the files I need/touch often, and use Backblaze for my "entire PC" cloud backup solution.
> If you happen to have a Mac available to do these uploads, this limitation should not exist in the Mac version of the client.
Those are the words of a Google employee. Offering a product that is fundamentally flawed is unacceptable -- Google or otherwise.
> We've released a new version
Didn't work for me. Then I started getting other errors, so I gave up.
Pasting below for reference:
-------------
Ken Watford said:
Error D41D on Windows is a memory error. The Windows version of the product currently has difficulty syncing large numbers of files at once due to the memory constraints on 32-bit applications, even if your machine has a lot of memory. The number of files it can handle at once varies a bit, but it can't reliably do a million at once. The actual size of the files isn't much of a factor.
I would recommend moving those files back out of your local Drive folder and starting the app. Once it has settled, move them in a little at a time, preferably fewer than 100k at once, waiting for the sync to complete before the next batch. The limitation is not on the number of files synced, but the number of files actively syncing.
If you later need to sync all these files down to another Windows machine, you will probably need to use the Selective Sync option to only sync down a few folders at a time, adding more later.
If you happen to have a Mac available to do these uploads, this limitation should not exist in the Mac version of the client.
I was sold on Backblaze. Until it would continually time out when backing up my 5TB pseudo-server/HTPC. And then it would restart. Just as it reached 5TB. I think I have finally found my solution with rclone (I moved to a Linux system after Backblaze was a no-go) and Amazon Cloud Drive. All my data is encrypted and it is trivially easy to add fresh backup copies. All of this is mostly for my media. All non-media is in my dropbox account and I back up to a physical drive. I used to be high on BackBlaze (I had issues with CrashPlan taking forever too, BackBlaze was faster) but when it would continually just have my backups magically disappear, I left.
I've been able to backup close to 1 million files (7.7TB) to CrashPlan, granted I had to manually edit the .ini file multiple times to increase the Java Heap memory allocation to allow that many files. At least the fix is documented on their support page (although I still can't figure out why after however many years this bug exists, they don't just add an option in the software directly). The only problem I have with them is that they have an upload limit, which changes from day to day, but over here in Europe I get between 100-1000 KB/s, which according to support is throttled depending on how many users are currently active. They offered to let me send them a hard-drive... to their US address, haha! It took about 2 years of leaving my PC on 24/7 to finally back everything up, let's hope they don't go the same way as StreamLoad (MediaMax), where I lost ~2TB of time-lapse footage due to being unable to download everything before the service went offline. It's even documented on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linkup).
I can't imagine having the patience to wait 2 years(!!) to upload everything. It took about 24 hours to backup my internal 750 GB drive to Backblaze... At that point I'd just build my own system that uploaded to Glacier or something.
Yeah it was painful. Thankfully ~50% of that time was at the office, where I don't pay the electricity bill. A lot of the latter half was using a very unreliable DSL connection, which, due to rotting copper cables (and multiple chew-throughs from rats), I only get about half of the promised throughput, so upstream is limited to ~120 KB/s at best. I finally caved in and bought an LTE modem last year which gets me ~1 MB/s (on good days).
I had no idea that Dropbox had topped $1B in annualized revenue. Their new profitability gives me some measure of confidence that not all of the Unicorns are facing inevitable doom.
"Their new profitability gives me some measure of confidence"
"Profitability" can mean whatever you want it to mean at a given moment. In this particular case it's closer than a lot of measures, but it's still a non-GAAP profit. In general these sort of startup announcements are marketing materials.
Every company I've been at has declared themselves "profitable" -- the devil is in the details of what you choose to ignore.
I agree and that's why I used the words "some measure of confidence". However, it IS better than many other unicorn examples, such as Uber losing $800M in Q3 2016 for example.
> the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (positive EBITDA)
EBITDA and cash flow are useful metrics to look at when evaluating whether or not a company can service debt, but I'm wondering why they needed to open a $600M credit line last month if they are gearing up for an IPO?
I guess they need a bit of extra cash on hand to pay off taxes as well as interest on their last 2 loans (funding rounds) from JPMorgan?
It's worth noting that they replaced an expiring $500million line of credit that had not been touched. So you may be reading a little much into what may just be prudent financial planning
Drew's statement that Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company to $1B in annual revenue is either wrong or basically tied. Salesforce.com did it in just over 9 years, and it has been almost 10 years since Dropbox was founded.
Can't help but remember the quintessential (links anyone?) dropbox critique when Drew first talked about it on HN. In particular something like 'why do we need this when you can just use rsync'.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system
yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting
it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the
mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account
could be accessed through built-in software.
It clearly says that in the article: "The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2007, has been meeting with bankers to discuss plans to sell shares in an initial public offering"
I'm really starting to appreciate how cynical we've all become about how these corporations operate. They've always "been evil", but now it's just assumed.
The company is overtly preparing for a big public sale of its shares. As part of that it is conducting press outreach with the goal of talking up how well it is performing.
Seems roughly comparable to a company that's about to launch, say, a new electric car running a campaign to get people talking about how fun it is to drive electric cars. Other than the clear effort to get coverage from journalists, is there really something nefarious going on here?
Maybe evil was the wrong word to use given the context. My observation is merely that rather than saying "oh, they've been in the news a lot recently" it's now "oh, their marketing department has been working overtime on an astroturfing campaign ahead of a possible IPO"
"Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by a grassroots participant(s)"
So pushing articles on HN and other outlets doesn't qualify I guess?
I wonder how one feels when they receive this feedback, "I never think about you until you fail, and you have failed me the least of your competitors. You have succeeded in making me forget you. Good job. Here are 10 dollars."
Surprised to see no talk of Paper on this thread. Sure, Dropbox has visibly tried and failed to build other offerings - Carousel and Mailbox - but Paper seems like the most well-reasoned attempt so far, and something a lot of their customers probably need. It reminds me a lot of Quip which Salesforce thought was worth $750M.
I'm not a dropbox user. A friend send send me a link to dropbox folder with fotos. The web-UI killed me. I could download the fotos one by one. It was not smooth or fast or pleasant, but it was possible. But since it were hunderets of fotos I looked for a big DOWNLOAD_ALL button. After some time I found such button, but it told me that the folder is too big (2 or 3 GB) for download. WHAT?
I tried to create an account to download it to 'my' dropbox, but the free space was less than 2 GB, as far as I rememebr. So dropbox asked me to pay 10$ to get fotos from my friend. After cursing for an hour I asked my friend to bring the fotos on a usb stick.
As you've encountered, they count shared folders towards the quota of every single user with access. This multiple charging for the same data was one of the reasons I stopped using Dropbox.
I have nearly pulled out of Dropbox by now. The fact that people send me Dropbox links is it's only reason to stay. I find it very convenient to use as a download manager.
My reason to drop it is that I want my data out of the US for privacy. Our local (german) companies can provide the cloud basics by now.
> My reason to drop it is that I want my data out of the US for privacy
Given most cloud providers use AWS as a back end, that's probably not possible. Plus, if you send email, it likely will hit a gmail,hotmail,etc. server. It's basically impossible to avoid.
I use web.de for email, which is the largest german mail provider in Germany. Their data center is on the other side of my city. Unfortunately, they are somewhat spammy even if you pay. I think about switching to mailbox.org or posteo.de.
Sure, lots of my contacts use gmail, but since email encryption is not really used, email is practically unsuitable for secure communication anyways. Fortunately, we have a few good instant messengers (Signal, Wire, Threema, ...) now. The primary use for email today is authentication, so I should probably get my own domain to maintain control.
My replacement for Dropbox is SyncThing. There is no cloud storage. It does not provide sharing via public link of course.
Mailbox.org does E-Mail for over 20 years [0]. ProtonMail only exists for 3 years [1]. Thus, I give Mailbox.org a higher chance to be still around in 10 years.
ProtonMail does PGP via Javascript in the browser, which is ridiculed by security people. Mailbox.org tried that in 2015 and it did not survive their internal pentesting [2]. Maybe ProtonMail has better coders. Maybe not.
Mailbox.org smallest offer is 1€/month. ProtonMail lets you choose between nothing and 5€/month. I like the mailbox.org price point.
If you believe in secure communication via email, you should support ProtonMail. They try to make it hip and easy. In my opinion this is a lost cause. Even if we could educate the masses about PGP, this is still behind the Double Ratchet Algorithm [3].
Yeah, I don't know why HN doesn't change this story to it's proper, correct title.
Current title makes it look like Wall Street it saying it. The real title makes it clear that the CEO is saying it, which, as a result, makes it useless PR drivel.
HN doesn't change the title unless either the submitter or the mods are aware that the title should be changed. You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. In my experience they're very responsive.
Gah! Maybe it's just me and my lack of understanding of large corporate financing, but my past job history means that just seeing "EBITDA" or having it spelled out makes me twitch.
Probably because both companies where "positive EBITDA" was a relevant phrase no longer exist.
I really wish some Cloud Storage Provider would have online file management solution. Currently I have many 2.5" HDD and USB stick, all with may be slightly different / duplicated Data. I wish I could upload all of them to the Cloud first and then start sorting it. Currently the only solution is to Buy a super large HDD, copy every files on to it and start sorting it.
Does the n stand for noun? Because that's not a noun is it. You can't point to an EBITDA profitable. You can't put one in your pocket. Is an EBITDA profitable dangerous? How about two? I have a million EBITDA profitables.
For me, Dropbox is the iTunes of file synchronization; I have to use it, but it's such a pain. It takes minutes to finish indexing on startup, and it occasionally decides to take up all my CPU, which has forced me to disable it on startup on Windows 10.
FYI - it's very likely that Dropbox is depreciating a HUGE ($100's of millions) amount of data center cost.[0] Translated into a more common "AWS opex cost", might yield a company that isn't really profitable^. EBITDA can be very misleading (not saying it definitely is in this case) so it's always worth analyzing it with a grain of salt until you have all of the full granular details.
[0] - http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/...
^EDIT - I should have said, "might not be profitable yet".