The “Break it Down” Blog

I first signed up for Box.net about 6 months ago I think after seeing it mentioned on DL.TV as a free 1GB of file hosting space. Back then 1GB was a good amount but maybe not as much as some other sites offering up to 5GB free. What sold me on the site was the very slick AJAX interface, desktop-integrated synchronization service and the company blog that was being updated multiple times a week with information about the company, upcoming updates and so on. What was important about the blog is that it indicated a level of activity and hunger from the little start-up company; both very important for a customer to feel safe or confident in their purchase. Well I felt both safe and confident, at first.

I went ahead and purchased 1year/15gb deal, the most expensive hosting plan they had for $99/year. I then set forth uploading every picture/file/backup I had to my account. This came out to around a measly 7 or 8GB of data. I went ahead using Box.net for a few months, noticing bugs here and there with the uploading, downloading, managing files or viewing photo albums. I filed all the issues totalling somewhere around 18 email communications with the Box.net team consisting of Jeffrey, Aaron and Dylan.

A few months passed and I noticed that I was still encountering the same bugs/problems/issues over and over again. I still couldn’t upload from Linux using the Java applet, the Flash upload only accepts 1 file at a time to add it to the upload list (which has a 20-file limit itself and now has no upload progress indicator), uploads don’t refresh the dir on any other platform besides Windows, “Download Folder” command has some magical limitation that is not aparent and you just have to keep trying the command over endlessly until it works (otherwise you get a 0byte Perl script as your download file when it fails), viewing a photo album screws up if you use the bottom nav links you get duplicate pages, scrolling large directory listings would be nice to have paging buttons on the bottom and most importantly, the blog stopped getting updated… what was going on?

The first time I filed almost all of these issues received immediate feedback of “Thanks for the report, we will look into it right away” and other similar replies. I noticed that the blog was not getting updated weekly anymore, but bi-weekly. Fast forward a few more months and now the company blog gets updated once a month, the desktop-integrated synchronization software was never released as far as I know, none of the bugs or simple enhancements I have ever reported were implemented, the public Box.net “API” that was suppose to allow 3rd party integration was taken off line and locked up with a password and I get a reply to my problem with the Java uploading applet for the Nth time saying that it doesn’t work on Linux because: “We’ve actually never tested it on Linux before - since we just license the applet, there is very little we can do about this “.

I’m really starting to feel left out in the cold at this moment. I understand how business works and tasks that teams need to prioritize, but from my perspective as a paying user, I’m really not seeing anything happening. Then to top it off, I hit a real snag, and the reply is pretty hands-off.

Maybe I overreacted, but what broke the camel’s back was the last monthly company blog update here. Given the current state of the site and state of support for the users, to see the (abandoned?) company blog get updated with something so uselessly trivial as if it were cute seemed insulting to me as a paying customer. This is the update I get after so long? No thank you. I have personally come up with what I think happened to Box.net:

• Box.net announced their service at a time when there were only 1 or 2 other major players in the hosting service arena like Streamload (Now MediaMax… or something).
• Google and Yahoo announce plans to get into this market with *free* hosting.
• All the competitors starts offering *free* hosting, most with more default space than Box.net
• Some competitors start offering unlimited space, just limiting bandwidth… interesting
• Box.net realizes their business model will fail and they can’t scale their service size-wise to compete with the other offers out there
• The demand for Box.net’s service is much smaller than they anticipated, likely not going to be profitable even long term (especially if Google does GDrive and steps into the market)
• They are sitting on VC-money
• They aren’t fixing bugs
• Progress stops on all Box.net projects, like the desktop-synchronization software that never saw daylight

My conclusion? They are sitting on the VC funding and just burning down the pile until it’s gone, then closing their doors. I had no idea how long it would be until they closed their doors and am certain they would give no notice of it, so I am almost expecting to see the site 404 some day and know that all my data is gone and I can’t get it back. So instead I spent the last 4 days pulling down all my images to my local drive. These are going up to Picasaweb ASAP, for the rest of the files, I will find another hosting service or just wait for Google to step into this market.

I really thought I was supporting a hungry startup 6 months ago, I wish that had been the case. I can’t blame the Box.net team if the problem is infact financial, but I can be mad at them for lack of communication and how they have handled their paying customers (me). (Digg this)