It's hard to make money as a directory service with Google and Apple Maps around. The shadier they get, the bigger of a sign it is that they're in trouble financially, I would think.
> The shadier they get, the bigger of a sign it is that they're in trouble financially, I would think.
Has Yelp's position on the perceived shadiness scale changed in the last several years? There've been allegations of extortion, defamation, and rigging, that entire time. I don't know that allegations of faking phone numbers is any worse, only less familiar.
Steve Jobs FTW yet again. I thought he was wrong about Dropbox for the longest time. But their latest attempts at "productizing" their service (Adobe / Zoom / Slack / Atlassian / Google Docs / Office integrations, "social" features, etc. etc.) have convinced me that simple file sync, which is all I ever wanted from them, is not enough to sustain a company. Meanwhile the shareholder-induced march downwards continues.
I wouldn't necessarily frame that as an inevitability of Dropbox as a product, as much as an inevitability of the traditional VC funding model.
It's likely you could build a very healthy business selling people file syncing — I personally use a tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor that seems to be doing just fine. The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.
> The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.
This.
The local pizza joint is probably a great family operated business with a enough profit to support the owners + employees (but probably not enough profit to support the owners, employees AND investors).
If you take that same pizza joint and give them $10m from investors, the pizza joint will attempt to franchise their store to a dozen new locations, and they'll probably fail in the process.
Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.
>Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.
Well, according to some quick searches the founders seem to be doing pretty alright by themselves. It depends if your objective for founding a company is "do something useful" or "get filthy rich as soon as possible"
When I did my (one, never again if I can help it) venture funded startup, "the only goal is an exit strategy" came up a lot, and always when one of the founders talked about a growth opportunity that would pay off over years and not months.
If that's your success metric you are acting fraudulently as soon as you take investor money, because you won't get that without claiming to commit to the goal of making them rich(er) as well.
This was one of the biggest takeaways from the "Startup podcast". If you haven't heard it, it details Alex Blumberg (of this American Life fame) attempts to create a company producing high quality long form podcasts.
At one point he and his partner are getting excited that they are on the road to profitability in 6 months. One of their VCs gets upset by this saying that targeting profitability is a sure way to end up with a lifestyle business.
The VC isn't exactly wrong about this. If you want a valuation in the hundreds of millions or billions, your goal is to figure out how to grow fast and capture defensible territory in a market. Profit is less important than growth—as long as you have a path to profit based on that growth.
If you're not aiming for this kind of territory, you're not really compatible with the VC financial model, which is designed around high risk and high reward. 30–40% of startups end up in liquidation, and 95% never meet their projections. Unless some your successful companies have fantastic returns, your fund will fail.
This is something you should understand before you take VC money.
This has been the SV narrative for the last decade or so but I'm not sure that it will stand the test of time. It seems likely that the bubble will pop on these companies going public without having returned an honest penny.
But there is probably a reason I'm not drowning in money like most investor types.
A bit of a tangent, but it feels to me like using wads of funding to try to create hypergrowth is a good fit for "winner-take-all" markets, like those with network effects.
Social media fits.
Syncing documents, maybe not-so-much.
So Dropbox invests in areas where there are possible network effects, like collaborating on documents. Because that's what fits its funding model.
But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.
> But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.
On its own, probably not. But you could imagine several avenues they could naturally grow into, that would _eventually_ turn them into the equivalent of a full OS. Its not something I would personally bet on, but also not something that, if it worked out, would totally surprise me. E.g. maybe _they_ should have invented Google Docs, and then...
Analogy: I offer to cut your lawn every week, and to shovel your driveway/walk when it snows, all for an annual fee you find attractive.
I get a lot pf customers, put together a pitch deck, then raise a bunch of money to expand.
With the money, I buy a fleet of massive snowplows, trucks that can carry ride’em mowers, equipment for doing landscaping, and while I’m at it, I start up a property management company that specializes in AirBnB owners.
“Sorry,” I tell you, “But I have to raise my fees, your property is too small for me to take a advantage of my equipment, and Also it’s inefficient to have lots of small customers so I’m tacking on a per-invoice surcharge.”
Lawn-cutting can indeed grow into a bigger business, and for me, that’s great. But for you, maybe the best thing would be to hire a teenager who is happy cutting lawns for a decent price.
Summary: If a company is in business A, but it isn’t happy doing A and really wants to do B, C, and D to satisfy its investors’ ambitions, that may be an excellent play for the company, but a terrible play for its existing customers.
TL;DR -> Please give Syncthing a try, it does just what it says on the tin and with no fuss once setup.
In the beginning, there was the 3.5" floppy disk, trudged along in my backpack in its little box with the 4 blank ones (which only ever got used by the slackers who forgot their own), used for little notes on the single README.txt featuring a .LOG at the top so each time I opened it, Notepad would insert the time/date.
Then along came the 1GB Kingston DataTraveller flash drive, what an amazing device! It held not only that increasingly read-only README.txt file, but also a portable knock-off of Onenote 2003 which name I forget (Agilix? Wikidpad? I no longer remember)
Then in 2012, Dropbox rolled into my life and I was in hog heaven, getting up to 5G from various referrals before moving in 2013 to Skydrive (now Onedrive) because a recent HTC purchase included 25GB of free storage space in addition to the already commodious 7GB(!) of free sync space. Clearly I want to be offline first, so I'll keep syncing the briefcase on the flashdrive (now a 4GB SanDisk) and carry that last floppy disk...after all if I still have an IBM USB floppy drive, might as well carry the disk right?
Fast forward several years. The 1GB and 4GB flash drive are keeping each other company in the retirement home of the electronics drawer, ready at a moment's notice to hand me a zipped up copy of Sim City 3000 or Timone and Pumba's Jungle Arcade or other such digital hoarder file from old CDs I dare not read any more but still want their contents.
In my pocket is a whopping 32GB Samsung stainless steel drive, and in my bag where the floppy disk used to live in honor is now a SIXTY-FREAKING-FOUR GB SanDisk extreme pro flash drive featuring Hiran's boot CD, DBAN, Ghost, Kali Linux, Peppermint OS, and more at the touch of a fingertip.
But the files? The briefcase has been synced oh, 4 months ago now? These days I don't plug it in as much, the old habit of plugging it in to work, home devices as soon as I log in long gone. Why do that when I can use Syncthing, an amazing tool that syncs the files with any and all devices however you want to slice n dice em. All you gotta do is introduce them with a handshake and boom, files are synced all over the wire, automatically and without being uploaded to Google's, Microsoft's, or Apple's cloud servers for heuristic analysis and advertising targeting.
I have arrived at file portability nirvana, and it is with Syncthing.
Same here. I used to run a local Nextcloud server, but Syncthing is simply so much easier for what I need. And adding a "server" that's constantly switched on is as simple as installing it on one more machine.
No idea what he's talking about but try out Unison! I use it to keep files on my computers synced to a central server. It works absolutely great and handles conflicts in the most sane way (imo).
The only caveat I've found so far is that you may have to increase the number of filesystem watches if your default value is too low, otherwise unison won't be able to monitor all of the files you are trying to sync.
It just fucking works. Took a few minutes to set up and it's been working great. Several TB of storage for the price of hardware I already had lying around doing nothing.
I heard you can do it quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each? I’ve never tried it, but unlike Dropbox, with OneDrive you can share folders without the shared folders taking away from your storage.
With Dropbox for instance with the free account, if you have 2GB of storage and use a shared folder with 2GB of storage you still have a total of 2GB.
If you are immersed in the Apple ecosystem, iCloud Drive will be a better solution once they add shared folders in the fall.
> Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each?
Well, what is Dropbox doing wrong that they have to charge so much more? (Given that offering more products for the same price basically equivalent to charging less per product)
Who's to say they're doing anything wrong? Microsoft is a huge company that can subsidize products using their profits from other products. They book Office 365 revenue as cloud revenue, and they're eager to grow that portion of their business to make Azure look good. So they're basically giving away services and throwing money at it to pad growth for Azure.
If anything, it's likely Dropbox's prices are closer to the true cost of providing the service.
Commercial cloud revenue was $9.6 billion in the third quarter, up 41 percent from a year ago. Revenue in Microsoft's productivity and business processes unit was $10.2 billion as commercial Office revenue grew 12 percent.
> Why would anyone pay $9.99 a month for Dropbox when you can pay $9.99 for Office 365, get the full office suite for six users with 1TB of storage each?
Dropbox's entire business relies on reliable file sync. Microsoft on the other hand, has OneDrive as one of many services. If I'm setting up cloud services for businesses that need years of guaranteed service with little change and good customer support, I know Dropbox will be there. Microsoft on the other hand... not so sure.
Remember when OneDrive offered "unlimited" file storage then took it away 1 year later?
The OneDrive client sync (until maybe the past year) was extremely slow and unreliable once you hit 100k+ files. Dropbox was the only one that would get the job done.
Long-term viability is a funny thing financially. If a company is worth their discounted future earnings, then a long lasting low number and a quickly dying high number might be the same. As far as investors are concerned, being a long-term viable business (in the usual sense) might not matter, even with the big-picture view.
Simple file sync is a plenty big enough market to sustain "a" company. Just not one with Dropbox's valuation. The lesson is about investor overreach, not whether or not there was an economic need being filled.
I will never forgive Dropbox for limiting free users to 3 linked devices, which promptly resulted in half the people I preached the gospel of Dropbox to ringing my phone and being pissed at ME.
Maybe they could give you more devices if you get people to sign up, like they used to give away additional storeage if you got people to sign up for dropbox
Updated, but seriously, the Steve Jobs quote is tired. Dropbox is a legit company with a good product. They are as much of a company as Apple was with just a niche computer product.
Steve Jobs made the comment because he probably realized that storage was a big business and he also realized that Dropbox is a direct competitor with iCloud.
Apple out performed Dropbox, but Dropbox is certainly a real company.
They aren’t profitable and don’t have a clear road to profitability. They may have a “good product” but if they can’t make a profit, by definition, they aren’t a good company.
I've tried using Google to find places to eat, but Yelp's search is just so much easier. If I'm in a new place, I just pull up Yelp, click "Restaurants" and go with the first thing that has food I like. It's never failed me yet. It might not be the best or cheapest around, but usually the thing with 4+ stars is still pretty good. We've found a couple of places that way where we keep going back every time we're in town just because we liked it so much.
When I pull up Google and search for [restaurants near me] or [restaurants] in the Maps app, it's a mess. I can't tell what is good or not. Also they usually only have a few ratings. With Yelp I can find places with 100+ ratings out in the middle of nowhere.
The problem for Yelp is that there is no money in providing a great service like that, so they have to do shady things to make up for it.
Are you perhaps in the Bay Area? Yelp has a very strong presence in the Bay Area. However, when I travel to the EU and outside of California, I notice that the quality/quantity of reviews from Yelp vs Google is reversed. People advised me to find restaurants using Google Maps instead. Restaurants owners also put up sign asking to be rated on Google.
I am in the Bay Area, but my biggest use case is when I travel outside the area.
I agree with you though, Yelp totally breaks down outside of the USA. Seems to work pretty well within the US though. We found some great places in Wyoming near Yellowstone for example.
I tend to use TripAdvisor more overseas, it feels less shady, though a year ago an app update made it suck battery like nobody's business, and I had to delete it.
Thankfully, last trip (June) it seemed to work fine.
I would be happy if people started using more locally sourced info on restaurants and places to sleep. Tripadvisor/yelp etc. can destroy any local restaurant scene. IMO there is nothing more soulless than picking a tripadvisor top 10 restaurant just because it‘s listed there. I usually ask people i know or random locals for tips where to eat. Or look at local blogs. Or you just pick a random place. I feel like some people just don’t do that anymore.
For that precise reason I don’t use Yelp (or similar) at all. I love serendipitous discovery and my favourite places wouldn’t win any such popularity contest (and I’m thankful they don’t).
I believe that this quantification of all aspects our world leeches much of the enjoyment and discovery from it, so I prefer not to participate.
Some of my favorite restaurants no longer exist because they weren't discovered. So I'd just caution that that feeling of having one's personal list of hidden gems may not align with the interests of the people that run those places.
Google maps also likes to hide results unless you are zooming in/out/researching the area constantly. Just show me everything in town, the full picture. I don't care if I have to wait seconds longer.
Would have happened by now if they were going to. Yelp was integrated into Apple Maps from day one and Siri before that. If anything, Yelp has gotten slimier since then.
Antitrust regulations would certainly not be achieving the goal of reducing customer harm if they were to _prevent_ Apple from delivering a better, less-slimy solution to replace Yelp.
Which is really stupid because you have to download the app to actually read any of the reviews. Google, at least, displays the reviews right in the listing.
