Dropbox made itself a household name by giving away cloud storage. The eight-year-old company, valued at $10 billion, had 300 million registered users a year ago; now it’s got 400 million. Its two-year-old effort to make money from business users has been less impressive. While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No. 2 Box and No. 3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.
Dropbox is hugely popular, but it seems clear they need to figure out this sales strategy quickly.
For one, stop asking me if you can take over managing my photos.
One no should suffice.
For me the problem is if I spent $100 for a terabyte of space, I’d feel as if I was wasting $80. For what I do, I that amount of space is unnecessary. It would be better if they offered 100 gig for around $40. At least it would seem better value for money. As it is I’ll keep using my 10 or so free gigs of space.
I have 20 GB of free space with Dropbox. It works everywhere because it’s integrated with damn near every app on the Mac and iOS that I have.
But instead of using it, I use COPY. I have 2 TB of free space (yes, Terabytes) now. It works exactly the same as Dropbox, though it’s not as integrated with other apps as Dropbox.
I use Copy at home and at work. Between the much higher amount of free space you can earn, the shared folders on Copy split the storage space used between the people sharing the folder, etc. The selective syncing is better. The website app is much better (IMO). And Copy is owned by Barracuda Networks, which I trust with security a lot more than Dropbox.
I have 11.8GB of free Dropbox space, mostly thanks to that photo-upload promotion of a few years ago… which I believe The Loop alerted me to. I mostly use it to post completed client work. The Finder (and iOS) integration are convenient. We had a paid account for a few months which accommodated a specific client, but closed it when we moved on.
I also have 20GB of free Box space, which I occasionally use if I haven’t culled Dropbox in awhile. It’s browser UI is odd, but the Finder integration is also good.
At the moment, this is more space than I need. Barring a policy change at either company, it’s unlikely either will be making any money from me, unless one of my referrals has upgraded.
Condaleeza Rice is on Dropbox’s board. She hooked Dropbox directly into NSA. And since NSA can’t keep a secret, your Dropbox files are insecure.