Dropbox Founder Wants To Build the Next Google

ColdWetDog writes "The Dropbox file storage and synchronization service has managed to attract 50 million users and $250 million in venture capital. The founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, says he is determined to build the next Google or Apple, not to sell out to them. Even for a guy whose paper valuation is around $600 million, it seems like the best he could hope for is another Facebook-level company — file storage isn't that sexy. I wish him luck in his bid to remain independent. I'd rather see Dropbox remain fairly agnostic with regard to other Internet services."

Comments

Tough sell

[bonch]

Dropbox has figured out an elegant solution to a vexing problem. With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, people have more devices and more apps than ever before. How can they get access to the latest version of all their stuff — photos, music, videos, documents, spreadsheets — no matter what device they are using and no matter where they are?

Apple addressed this with the free iCloud, Google of course has its own cloud storage services, and even Microsoft has the free SkyDrive, so I'm confused as to why the article considers this a vexing problem waiting to be solved when it was pretty much the theme of 2011 for all the major platform vendors. Lots of venture capital doesn't mean something is going to take off--the lesson last year was the Color app, which got $41 million of first-round funding in March only to immediately flop on release months later.

Re:Tough sell

[tidepool]

They are all, somewhat, 'tied' to a company and a product line. Sure, many things are cross platform, but I'm sure to get complete smooth functionality, you should be using the respective product line.

A 3rd party that could make *everything* sync up, without any snafu's, and offer a solid consistent UI on any device, would easily be the best solution.

Storage and, more important, remote access, is at the tip of the ice-burg at the moment. I can't imagine where it will go from here, but it'll move and fast.

Re:Tough sell

[bonch]

It is true that they are tied their individual platforms, but that could also be considered their primary advantage over DropBox. Everyone who buys an iPad automatically benefits from iCloud integration, for example.

Re:Tough sell

[ColdWetDog]

It is true that they are tied their individual platforms, but that could also be considered their primary advantage over DropBox. Everyone who buys an iPad automatically benefits from iCloud integration, for example.

I don't want it tied to Apple's limited world view of what is good or bad. I don't want it tied to Microsoft's bizarre implementations. I don't want it tied to Google's manifold desire to sick advertisers on me.

I just want it to work. On OS X at home. On Windows at work. On Linux, BeOS, CP/M (well, I give that a pass) or whatever. The vendors all have an agenda which, so far, hasn't jibed well with mine.

Re:Tough sell

[Joce640k]

Yep. The barrier to entry for "dropbox" type applications is very low.

I have zero emotional investment in Dropbox. All the files in my dropbox folder are on my own hard disk. If a competitor offered me more disk space or whatever I could switch over in minutes.

Re:Tough sell

[tidepool]

Also a valid viewpoint. But, I imagine, unless you are someone who ONLY buys apple products (we know who we mean); Or only google products, etc it's still going to leave someone hanging.

Decentralized storage isn't so much about the storage, as it the universal aspect of connectivity: From any device, to any device, with zero 'hacks' to make it work. The general consumer wants it to 'just work', regardless of device. (To be truthful, so do all people, geeks and hackers alike; we're just willing to do something about it as opposed to simply walk away and view something else to purchase).

If they can truly pull that off without a hitch, they could be in one very solid position. It seems like each 'new feature' from apple involves a forced upgrade of hardware: Ie, a SMALL example is upgrading to iCloud sync on a computer with an ipad2 no longer allows you to fully sync all things from a 2nd gen iPod touch. (Not my hardware, just a stupid example). Options are buy a new iPod touch, or disable iCloud. You can't tell me this isn't on purpose, and it's the stuff that, if provided another option, consumers will only deal with so much before the eventual 'screw it'.

Re:Tough sell

[bonch]

But DropBox has an agenda too--they want to be the next Google. That means your files and information will become a product for the real customers: advertisers. You can never escape an agenda, and if the effort to avoid that agenda outweighs the convenience the agenda provides for you, then you're acting counterproductively against yourself.

Re:Tough sell

[Surt]

You can't escape an agenda, but a company could be run that sold services directly to customers, with a contract forbidding advertising / any sale of personal data. Their agenda could be to make money by selling you a service and not selling you out.

I think when someone builds the next facebook and offers an ironclad contract forbidding any sale of personal data, I'd probably be willing to pay $5 or so per month for the service.

Re:Tough sell

[Solandri]

Dropbox just resells Amazon's S3 storage service. They have a slicker interface, but the heavy lifting is all done by Amazon.

Re:Tough sell

[turbidostato]

"Dropbox just resells Amazon's S3 storage service. They have a slicker interface, but the heavy lifting is all done by Amazon."

Which is a very clever side of the Amazon's bussiness case.

Amazon surely bills a little bazillion to the likes of Dropbox or Netflix, so as long as the "new thing" happens to deal with them, the more successful they are, the more money ends up in Amazon's accounts.

But then, for each Netflix there are a thousand of wannabies that all will do is losing their shirts -but even them will move part of their money to Amazon's accounts.

So the end result is that Amazon wins always without taking the risks.

Very clever indeed.

Re:Tough sell

[PCM2]

Dropbox has been around for years thats why...noob

So has WinZip.

Re:Tough sell

[Riceballsan]

why vendors obsession is in it is obvious. for every person like you who would rather give money than information, there are roughly 1,000 people who would gladly let everything about themselves leak out to the public rather then spend $5 a year. Every privacy fiasco done on facebook/google or any other site has had little to no impact on the number of people subscribing, and usually loses less than 1% of the current subscribers even for the big issues. Now look at how many people went into an extreme panic when the fake rumors of facebook charging money sent all of it's users into a mass panic. I would bet that if facebook charged say 15 a year, within 3 months they would become myspace and G+ would become facebook.

Re:Tough sell

[Darkness404]

Because most of the internet wants free stuff. Sure, there is a small subset of the population who /really/ wants something enough they'd pay for it, but for the majority of people on the internet, free works.

Most people simply will not pay, they will go to a free site. The average internet user doesn't care about the advertisements, after all, that's what adblocking and hosts files are for.

Re:Tough sell

[Columcille]

iCloud != Dropbox. Apple was a lot closer with iDisk, though that was not as efficient and elegant as Dropbox. iCloud does not offer a solution anything like Dropbox.

Re:Tough sell

[icebike]

You can't escape an agenda, but a company could be run that sold services directly to customers, with a contract forbidding advertising / any sale of personal data. Their agenda could be to make money by selling you a service and not selling you out.

Actually if the idea is to make money directly from its users, that's fine and dandy. Beyond that, any plans to sell my data or even the fact that that I have data is out of the box a non-starter for me.

The fact that Drop Box can break the encryption any time they want/need is pretty much a non-starter as far as I am concerned. The fact that they lied about it initially is another black mark. At least Google tells you right up front exactly what they can and will do with the content of your email.

SpiderOak promotes zero knowledge storage. They have no way to break the encryption and couldn't do so in response to a subpoena if they wanted to. Windows, Mac, Android, Linux. And their fees are half of what Drop Box wants. In addition it can keep iterations of your data if you wish, so you can roll back those changes in your spread sheet one by one.

I just don't see what Drop Box has to offer in regard the topic of this post, Without breaking its basic promise to keep your data private, they have nothing to sell other than space. You won't get to be of Apple's size or Google's omnipresence just supplying disk space that can be had by government agencies without even going for a warrant.

If they want to convince me, change their system to a zero knowledge system in which they can't hand over the keys to anyone because they don't have them. They need to pick up the tab from the mobile carriers for data syncing mobile devices. Trying to build a cloud storage empire that gets shared with police is not likely to be all that successful in the age of data caps.

Re:Tough sell

[vakuona]

I don't think that's what the founder meant when he said he wants to be the next Google. It looks like he means to establish a successful company that stands alone, rather than selling out to the highest bidder.

However, I think they do have a tough sell. As Steve Jobs put it, they don't have a product, they have a feature. Once could storage is built into every device you can buy, and that storage is not drop box, they cease to be relevant.

Re:Tough sell

[TooMuchToDo]

This is nothing new. You know who got rich during the Western US gold rush? Those who sold the tools, not those prospecting.

Re:Tough sell

[Kalriath]

Are you referring to WinZip in general, or your own specific evaluation copy?

Re:Tough sell

[ILongForDarkness]

Yep and they have nice things like the ability to set limits on the sync, drop and forget syncing (I think iCloud has that too though I don't think google has (skyDrive?)).

Future: media sharing perhaps? I seem to recall a article somewhere talking about how their software is very efficient in the backend, built their own storage jbods, lots of deduplication etc. Say they can get an agreement to become a digital library for ebooks and music. Might be tough with Apple and Amazon in the mix but if they could get something together with the right holders they could offer a DRM layer on top of their existing sharing system. A platform agnostic iCloud that obeys media rights (both a good and a bad thing, but good business I think).

Re:Tough sell

[TheRaven64]

In the '90s, every Windows user installed WinZIP (a few even paid for it!). Everyone distributed zip files and WinZIP was the tool for opening and creating them. It wasn't a sexy market, but it was a solution to a problem that a lot of people had, and it was the tool that everyone used (except warez d00dz, who preferred rar). The, Windows came with the ability to explore zip files as if they were normal folders. The need for WinZIP dropped from almost everyone to practically no one overnight. The same thing happened on the Mac with StuffIt - OS X can natively open a variety of archive formats, so there is no need for a third-party tool.

Fast forward a decade, and DropBox is in the same position in the cloud storage market that WinZIP occupied in its own market. Everyone who needs to share a couple of files with a friend or colleague uses it. But now operating systems and other services are coming with some cloud storage, so there's less need for a third-party service.

Re:Tough sell

[Ooki]

The nice thing (tm) with dropbox is that it is OS agnostic. I can have my files synchronized on all of my platforms - easy. With me being on *nix/win/android/mac platforms (at work/uni/home) it really pays of that dropbox is not requiring me to stay on one OS at all. To make the case with WinZip, if the included zip extractor found in the operating systems where so that you could only open "windows zips" on windows, and so on. Then WinZip would still be in great shape!

Re:Tough sell

[Ginger Unicorn]

if the server is doing the decryption, then all you have is their word that they won't access your decrypted files, or allow authorites to sniff their network for encryption keys. I thought the idea is that the client does the encryption/decryption, and all the server sees is encrpyted blocks.

file storage isnt... data mining is

[decora]

having spiders crawling over the private data of tens of millions of people could be incredibly lucrative. not only to sell to businesses, but to sell to the various governments of the world who are interested in spying on people. every year the governments of earth spend billions collecting and gathering data on people to analyze 'security threats'.

now, that data is being collected for them. facebook is a good start, but it's mostly just trivial personal stuff. here, at a file storage site, we have the big fish. spreadsheets from companies, investigation reports from corporate analysts, stock trading information, debt trading information, etc etc etc.

Not even the best options in their own space

[finkployd]

SpiderOak is a heck of a lot better (and unlike dropbox is actually secure). Of course with additional features it is a little more complex but that can be easily solved in time.

Re:Not even the best options in their own space

[ColdWetDog]

Why is at a 'heck of a lot better'? (Curious as to your thinking). From a brief perusal of the site, it seems to be similar to Dropbox albeit with end to end encryption. That's nice - I get around that by storing the data that I think needs to be encrypted in password protected sparsebundles (on OS X). Seems to work just fine. Much of the stuff I have on Dropbox could be shared openly on the Internet with the only downsides of confusing a whole bunch of people.

Re:Not even the best options in their own space

[finkployd]

Much more flexibility regarding what is synced (I don't need a dropbox directory, I can pick and choose directories or even individual files on each machine to be synced).
Your solution to security is fine, except I want to be able to access my data on windows, linux, osx, android, and ios. It is also just easier to know everything is encrypted rather than needing to mentally track what should be as well as have to worry about opening sparsebundles (or opening truecrypt volumes, etc).

Re:Not even the best options in their own space

[finkployd]

They don't use client side encryption, and can decrypt your data on their side if they so choose. Almost a year or so ago, they had a couple of hours where (due to a botched code deployment on their side) anyone could log into any dropbox account using any password. The fact that they CAN decrypt your data (in addition to apparently having very bad testing procedures internally) means that someday they may decide to follow Google and Facebook's model and troll it for information for targeted advertising, selling to whomever, etc.

They claim their employees need to be able to have access to your unencrypted data to comply with government regulations but this does not pass the smell test at all. SpiderOak and Wuala both use client side encryption and do not have access to your data.

Re:Not even the best options in their own space

[leehwtsohg]

Because one of your secrets is how many secrets you have.

Who said "I don't like any of your secrets, but I will fight to the death for your right to have them" ?

Re:Not even the best options in their own space

[TooMuchToDo]

THIS. Backblaze? Their own datacenter (well, a datacenter in SF where they built their own gear). SpiderOak (and Nimbus.Io, a subsidiary about to do S3-style storage with higher latency but to be used for archival purposes)? Their own datacenter. Apple? Google? Of course, their own datacenters.

S3 is GREAT to prototype your concept. But once you start to actually *use* it and scale out wildly? Not so much (from a cost perspective; from the tech side, it works very well).

Re:My My My Music makes me so hard

[Shikaku]

You're free to use Dropbox with Truecrypt you know. The initial upload will be huge if you make it use up all your space but syncing will be fast afterwards.

"file storage isn't that sexy."

[John Hasler]

Almost as boring as Web searching, in fact.

Re:"file storage isn't that sexy."

[bonch]

I don't really get that comparison. Search is far more sexy because it parses the content of the web and the information people are genuinely interested in.

Re:"file storage isn't that sexy."

[Anrego]

As I recall, google actually had a hard time getting investors early on because no one thought there was any more money in search. It was seen as a mundane, solved problem.

Re:"file storage isn't that sexy."

[am 2k]

As I recall, google actually had a hard time getting investors early on because no one thought there was any more money in search.

That was probably correct. After all, they're not selling search, they're selling advertisement spots.

Re:On their way..

[Joce640k]

We live in a digital age. Sending files to other people seems like the single most obvious use of the Internet, but it's a strangely unsolved problem...

Obligatory XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/949/

Re:My My My Music makes me so hard

[unity100]

do i need to redirect you to the 'fuck song' ?

Re:My My My Music makes me so hard

[Anonymous Coward]

A little paranoid? He's not wrong.

Check out Kinects terms of service, and what they can do - by default, you agree to let them use pictures taken by the device of you using it in advertising. This is a CAMERA IN YOUR TV WATCHING YOU USE IT.

Smartphones... Were you around for the CarrierIQ debacle? Independent auditing of the code in these portable, always on, always connected devices just isn't going to happen, and even if there are people with morals inside the companies making these devices its not going to be hard for the bad guys to sneak a back door into millions of lines of code. And on a whole other level they're trying to sneak back doors into cryptographic standards(I forget the details, use google, this stuff is all out there)

Now we're being asked to rely on companies giving us access to great big machines in the sky - to trust that these companies aren't watching and recording every single action, that those actions aren't being analysed and aggregated, and most importantly of all - they won't ditch you like a hot potato and leave you high and dry when you find something so wrong you can't walk away from it. Look how all those companies ditched wikileaks.

Secret FISA requests? Indefinite detention? This guy isn't paranoid - thats the fucking scary thing.

File Storage isn't sexy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the guy I just got done trying to help that lost 10 years worth of writing because he had never though to back it up ;)

Re:File Storage isn't sexy?

[Chelloveck]

Given that the grandparent wrote about a guy who lost 10 years of work because he didn't know to make backups, I'd say Apple pretty much nailed that one.

Business model?

[Lazy Jones]

I'm a Wuala user myself, so perhaps I've overlooked something - but how does Dropbox hope to earn money? By selling additional disk space or turning the free accounts into paid ones once people begin to rely on them?

Re:Business model?

[amaiman]

They removed that feature quite a while ago (the 5-10 second "upload" because the file hash matched another user)...People found a way to game the system to get files they didn't already have (by just distributing the hashes for popular files), so Dropbox disabled the feature (they promised it would return, but it never did and they no longer answer support questions about it). They still do de-duplication internally, though, so that's how they can afford the storage; there's just no benefit for the end-users anymore as far as upload times (the extra uploads to them don't cost anything since Amazon EC2 and S3 don't charge for incoming bandwidth, so they can hash the file on their end before storing a redundant copy.)

Re:On their way..

[Joce640k]

Painful? Why?

Nobody's forcing you to sit there and count the bytes as they get sent. This sort of thing is why background tasks were invented.

what about the password/security issues w Dropbox

[jsepeta]

Any journalist worth his salt would have immediately responded to Mr. Houston, "If you want to be big like Google, you can't leave all your users' files unprotected for a day because one of your staff turned off the passwords."

If you want to play with the big boys, you need to wear big boy pants.

a thumbs up: for SparkleShare/GIT free open-source

[SpzToid]

Try the free open-source SparkleShare software and roll your your own cloud 100%. That would trump any cloud provider option if this is your concern, since all the disks and PCs are under your ownership and control. (Although you are correct in your technical arguments, for sure. I also like SpiderOak.)

SparkleShare is essentially a DropBox clone in terms of a GUI, which extends to recovering older versions with a right-click. It looks like DropBox, and it works like DropBox too. But it is just a scripted GIT environment. In fact if you already have a GIT Repo hosted on a server (or service) somewhere, SparkleShare is easily configured to wrk with it. Here's how you start from scratch, assuming you already have PGP keys shared with the server:

At the server, create a new, empty GIT repository:
git init --bare NEWREPOSITORY.git
At the workstation:

Normally, you might use something like the following commands to work with GIT. (these are not necessary if you use SparkleShare)

git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
cd NEWREPOSITORY.git
git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
The SparkleShare config:

Add Hosted Project...

Address:

ssh://user@example.com:port

Remote Path:

/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git

This document explains how to add a layer of encryption, (which also works to secure services like DropBox btw: https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Encrypting-your-files-before-transfer

In real-life, those directions aren't so hard are they? But let me tell you now in real-life, I formatted this nicely in html and slashdot has been torturing me for 20 minutes as I tried to submit it well. Plain text option worked best, eventually.