10 ms·

Why Dropbox is Failing

77 points by zackify 11y ago

bitzerlander 11y ago
This reminds me of working at Lycos as a PM a long time back, soon after they collapsed. I distinctly remember it taking 3 weeks to approve a community update email, and a 50k budget to outsource for a simple nav bar with categories...
EC1 11y ago
The only thing I use dropbox for is to publically store screenshots for easy sharing, and dropbox fails more than 50% of the time at that. (the "click to share public link" feature, sometimes takes upwards of 2 minutes, sometimes it's instant)
- js-coder 11y ago
  Yeah, Dropbox would be a good alternative for sharing screenshots, but it takes so incredibly long that it's pretty much unusable.
- seesharp 11y ago
  I can recommend using Imgur for storing screenshots. For Windows you can use Greenshot (http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenshot/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenshot/) and for OS X you can use Mac2Imgur (https://github.com/mileswd/mac2imgur https://github.com/mileswd/mac2imgur). Uploading images is instant, the image quality is higher, embedding is actually possible, you don't need to have an account and thumbnails are automatically generated.
  - cheald 11y ago
    This has been my solution, too. It's much faster than Dropbox.
benbristow 11y ago
I used to love Dropbox because of how simple it was. You could even host static HTML websites through it. All links were direct links, it was beautiful. Now you have to go through splash pages that try and make you login to the service, it's a pain. I see no reason to use it anymore though. It's expensive, there's little free space and it lacks in features compared to Google/One Drive.
- kozhevnikov 11y ago
  While I agree with your sentiment, if you were using Dropbox when it had direct links then you should be grandfathered into Public folder that still behaves like a static server.
- bengali3 11y ago
  yup, I love DB, but I cant even edit text files on dropbox.com. I'd have stuck around longer to at least have this but they haven't innovated around my needs in a while - so it rarely comes up as a solution to others issues. During school dropbox was great for groups as well as my multiple devices, but anecdotally over the last few years i've changed my behavior: Photos & Videos - now on amazon CloudDrive since i'm already a prime member - now I finally don't have space issues on my phone anymore, Amazons iOS app convinced me that they're serious (for now..) Documents on Google drive - mainly due to simple online editors for XLS and DOC - resume and daily logs Static websites now on S3 (anyone recommend an S3 sync tool?) Grocery lists shared with the wife - now using SimpleNote since we can edit on devices and cloud I haven't gone to my free Dropbox account in a while, so its becoming an archive with less traffic for my account. I'm sure they track dormancy rates as well, i'd wager i'm not alone. I did get dad to put his photos & docs up on dropbox and he loves it. Meanwhile I just upgraded to start paying for amazon cloud drive so my wife has a one click solution to backing up her photos and videos from her phone. Edit: Drew took the first bite out of the multiple device problem and rocked it better than anyone else because he put the users experience first, above all. Today plenty of big players host consumer data, but i feel none are truly focused on the everyday problems of the average joe, Drew could do it again.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
philippnagel 11y ago
Is Dropbox profitable?
- smpetrey 11y ago
  Apparently not, which is a shame.
amalag 11y ago
One thing Dropbox does which I think is pretty easy and yet noone has done is their Apps. As a developer you can create a dropbox App which means there is a specific subdirectory in the users dropbox folder which you have access to. That's it, really simple. This lets me create for instance a purchase order distribution system in which the company drops their purchase orders in a folder and they will be distributed to their vendors with email notifications. What other system facilitates this? In contrast Google Drive apps are all or nothing. You cannot ask for permission on a single folder! Are there any other services that can do this like Box.net?
- proexploit 11y ago
  Google Drive has an application data folder that is a separate permission from reading and writing all your files: https://developers.google.com/drive/web/appdata https://developers.google.com/drive/web/appdata
  - amalag 11y ago
    > The Google Drive API includes a special hidden folder that your app can use to store application data. Again, that means a user cannot drop their files into a special app folder for processing. It does not facilitate the simple use case of creating an App to distribute purchase orders to vendors.
    - proexploit 11y ago
      But your application could store them there... I don't think the use case most users are looking for is to have a magic Drive folder that automatically processes purchase orders when they're added. That's also not what the parent comment I commented on was referring to.
      - amalag 11y ago
        I think it is a very common use case to have a folder for an app that will do something and not have an app need permission to your entire folder. But google doesn't think so. You had responded to my comment which talked about such a use case. I think it is obvious that purchase orders are an example. Have temporary hidden storage via an application data folder may be useful, but I am talking about folder level permissions for an app.
ommunist 11y ago
Problem of Dropbox as a product I will possibly use, that functions I need from it, can be relatively easy achieved with git on your home server or NAS, and Working Copy.app on your tablet or phone. At a fraction of cost.
boomzilla 11y ago
Are things that bad at Dropbox? I know its user growth has been slowing down, but I thought it's more because they've been focusing on monetization. It does seem to me that Dropbox is a feature, not a complete product. If it goes away tomorrow, all I need to do is to move all my files from Dropbox folder to either OneDrive/GoogleDrive/AmazonDrive, and all is good. I've seen some data sharing problem that's critical for business and I don't think Dropbox can help there. For example, we need to share (and work on) some very confidential and sizable datasets (think hundreds of GBs). After looking around a bit, we decided to go with an AWS VPC (two factor login required), and set up big Windows machine in the VPC, and everyone who need to work on the datasets have to remote desktop in. It's not ideal, but at least we can be reasonably sure that no one needs to make a copy of the data (one can not accidentally do that, and it's not trivial to do deliberately).
kienankb 11y ago
I've used Dropbox for a long time, and it's been really useful in school (as others have noted) and for sharing files, but recently I've actually moved to ownCloud (https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/). I hooked a 500GB HDD into my RasPi at home, spent some time on configuration and setup, and now I've got functionally the same product, but limited in space only by how much storage I want to buy (one-time cost, obviously) and plug in instead of the 13.25GB I have on DB that I had to scrounge around for offers and promotions to get. It's nice because I have a backup of whatever files I'd like at home instead of somewhere else, and if I were super paranoid I could make that into redundant storage, back that up daily, etc. It's a little more work but a lot more control. If the linked post is accurate, it sounds like an absolutely horrible work environment.
- throw7 11y ago
  My limiting factor is internet up speed of a piddly 120KB/s max. It's not useful or what I would consider broadband... at all. oh well.
- benbristow 11y ago
  Owncloud's nice but last I used it, it's really darn slow.
onedurr 11y ago
I have 23gb of free storage with DB (took advantage of early referral deals), and of the many sync storage services I've tried (many of which no longer exist), DB is the only one that's consistently worked near-perfectly for me. Aside from wondering at the products seemingly coming out of left field, had no idea of any internal company issues...
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I'd pay except its impractical. My club uses Dropbox to hold our artwork (game design club). Its several GB of art. But the pricing plan goes from free (and we've hit our limit on that) to over a thousand dollars annual. Yes, that's right. We are 10 people, times the monthly fee each, times 12 months per year. For a hobby club. The worst part of that is, we'd be paying for what? To hold our own data on our own machines, sharing it with our own bandwidth. Dropbox adds a sync feature to that. Which seems like it would cost a fixed fee to access, now and forever. Not scaling with the size of our data (our data, on our machines). Anyway, we don't pay.
- allenz 11y ago
  To be fair, Dropbox has to store your files on their server as well, plus someone has to pay for the engineering that makes the sync seamless. Out of curiosity, have you tried Google Drive, which would be $2/month? (I'm not affiliated with Google.)
- Epskampie 11y ago
  Try bittorrent sync: https://www.getsync.com/ https://www.getsync.com/ Direct syncing from computer to computer (peer 2 peer), no storage limits.
  - benbristow 11y ago
    Or the open-source alternative, Syncthing. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
sjg007 11y ago
I have a 8GB iPhone 5c but I take a lot of pictures/videos. I'd like to have them stored in the cloud and maybe only have thumbnails on the device. Has anyone solved this? Music can now be cloud streamed.
- boduh 11y ago
  Yes, you can install Carousel from Dropbox. It will store your photos in Dropbox and free up the space on your phone but you will still be able to see the photos in the Carousel app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carousel-by-dropbox/id825931374?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carousel-by-dropbox/id825931... Look for "Free Up iPhone Space" in "Settings"
Adut 11y ago
It's been my experience that anytime you work for a company larger than about 50 people, it starts devolving into the sort of situation the OP describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle. The best you can hope to do in this situation is to put on the big boy/girl pants and be a champion for change.

77 points by zackify 11y ago

This reminds me of working at Lycos as a PM a long time back, soon after they collapsed. I distinctly remember it taking 3 weeks to approve a community update email, and a 50k budget to outsource for a simple nav bar with categories...

EC1 11y ago

The only thing I use dropbox for is to publically store screenshots for easy sharing, and dropbox fails more than 50% of the time at that. (the "click to share public link" feature, sometimes takes upwards of 2 minutes, sometimes it's instant)

js-coder 11y ago
Yeah, Dropbox would be a good alternative for sharing screenshots, but it takes so incredibly long that it's pretty much unusable.
seesharp 11y ago
I can recommend using Imgur for storing screenshots. For Windows you can use Greenshot (http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenshot/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenshot/) and for OS X you can use Mac2Imgur (https://github.com/mileswd/mac2imgur https://github.com/mileswd/mac2imgur). Uploading images is instant, the image quality is higher, embedding is actually possible, you don't need to have an account and thumbnails are automatically generated.
- cheald 11y ago
  This has been my solution, too. It's much faster than Dropbox.

benbristow 11y ago

I used to love Dropbox because of how simple it was. You could even host static HTML websites through it. All links were direct links, it was beautiful. Now you have to go through splash pages that try and make you login to the service, it's a pain. I see no reason to use it anymore though. It's expensive, there's little free space and it lacks in features compared to Google/One Drive.

kozhevnikov 11y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, if you were using Dropbox when it had direct links then you should be grandfathered into Public folder that still behaves like a static server.
bengali3 11y ago
yup, I love DB, but I cant even edit text files on dropbox.com. I'd have stuck around longer to at least have this but they haven't innovated around my needs in a while - so it rarely comes up as a solution to others issues. During school dropbox was great for groups as well as my multiple devices, but anecdotally over the last few years i've changed my behavior: Photos & Videos - now on amazon CloudDrive since i'm already a prime member - now I finally don't have space issues on my phone anymore, Amazons iOS app convinced me that they're serious (for now..) Documents on Google drive - mainly due to simple online editors for XLS and DOC - resume and daily logs Static websites now on S3 (anyone recommend an S3 sync tool?) Grocery lists shared with the wife - now using SimpleNote since we can edit on devices and cloud I haven't gone to my free Dropbox account in a while, so its becoming an archive with less traffic for my account. I'm sure they track dormancy rates as well, i'd wager i'm not alone. I did get dad to put his photos & docs up on dropbox and he loves it. Meanwhile I just upgraded to start paying for amazon cloud drive so my wife has a one click solution to backing up her photos and videos from her phone. Edit: Drew took the first bite out of the multiple device problem and rocked it better than anyone else because he put the users experience first, above all. Today plenty of big players host consumer data, but i feel none are truly focused on the everyday problems of the average joe, Drew could do it again.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago

philippnagel 11y ago

Is Dropbox profitable?

smpetrey 11y ago
Apparently not, which is a shame.

amalag 11y ago

One thing Dropbox does which I think is pretty easy and yet noone has done is their Apps. As a developer you can create a dropbox App which means there is a specific subdirectory in the users dropbox folder which you have access to. That's it, really simple. This lets me create for instance a purchase order distribution system in which the company drops their purchase orders in a folder and they will be distributed to their vendors with email notifications. What other system facilitates this? In contrast Google Drive apps are all or nothing. You cannot ask for permission on a single folder! Are there any other services that can do this like Box.net?

proexploit 11y ago
Google Drive has an application data folder that is a separate permission from reading and writing all your files: https://developers.google.com/drive/web/appdata https://developers.google.com/drive/web/appdata
- amalag 11y ago
  > The Google Drive API includes a special hidden folder that your app can use to store application data. Again, that means a user cannot drop their files into a special app folder for processing. It does not facilitate the simple use case of creating an App to distribute purchase orders to vendors.
  - proexploit 11y ago
    But your application could store them there... I don't think the use case most users are looking for is to have a magic Drive folder that automatically processes purchase orders when they're added. That's also not what the parent comment I commented on was referring to.
    - amalag 11y ago
      I think it is a very common use case to have a folder for an app that will do something and not have an app need permission to your entire folder. But google doesn't think so. You had responded to my comment which talked about such a use case. I think it is obvious that purchase orders are an example. Have temporary hidden storage via an application data folder may be useful, but I am talking about folder level permissions for an app.

ommunist 11y ago

Problem of Dropbox as a product I will possibly use, that functions I need from it, can be relatively easy achieved with git on your home server or NAS, and Working Copy.app on your tablet or phone. At a fraction of cost.

boomzilla 11y ago

Are things that bad at Dropbox? I know its user growth has been slowing down, but I thought it's more because they've been focusing on monetization. It does seem to me that Dropbox is a feature, not a complete product. If it goes away tomorrow, all I need to do is to move all my files from Dropbox folder to either OneDrive/GoogleDrive/AmazonDrive, and all is good. I've seen some data sharing problem that's critical for business and I don't think Dropbox can help there. For example, we need to share (and work on) some very confidential and sizable datasets (think hundreds of GBs). After looking around a bit, we decided to go with an AWS VPC (two factor login required), and set up big Windows machine in the VPC, and everyone who need to work on the datasets have to remote desktop in. It's not ideal, but at least we can be reasonably sure that no one needs to make a copy of the data (one can not accidentally do that, and it's not trivial to do deliberately).

kienankb 11y ago

I've used Dropbox for a long time, and it's been really useful in school (as others have noted) and for sharing files, but recently I've actually moved to ownCloud (https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/). I hooked a 500GB HDD into my RasPi at home, spent some time on configuration and setup, and now I've got functionally the same product, but limited in space only by how much storage I want to buy (one-time cost, obviously) and plug in instead of the 13.25GB I have on DB that I had to scrounge around for offers and promotions to get. It's nice because I have a backup of whatever files I'd like at home instead of somewhere else, and if I were super paranoid I could make that into redundant storage, back that up daily, etc. It's a little more work but a lot more control. If the linked post is accurate, it sounds like an absolutely horrible work environment.

throw7 11y ago
My limiting factor is internet up speed of a piddly 120KB/s max. It's not useful or what I would consider broadband... at all. oh well.
benbristow 11y ago
Owncloud's nice but last I used it, it's really darn slow.

onedurr 11y ago

I have 23gb of free storage with DB (took advantage of early referral deals), and of the many sync storage services I've tried (many of which no longer exist), DB is the only one that's consistently worked near-perfectly for me. Aside from wondering at the products seemingly coming out of left field, had no idea of any internal company issues...

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

I'd pay except its impractical. My club uses Dropbox to hold our artwork (game design club). Its several GB of art. But the pricing plan goes from free (and we've hit our limit on that) to over a thousand dollars annual. Yes, that's right. We are 10 people, times the monthly fee each, times 12 months per year. For a hobby club. The worst part of that is, we'd be paying for what? To hold our own data on our own machines, sharing it with our own bandwidth. Dropbox adds a sync feature to that. Which seems like it would cost a fixed fee to access, now and forever. Not scaling with the size of our data (our data, on our machines). Anyway, we don't pay.

allenz 11y ago
To be fair, Dropbox has to store your files on their server as well, plus someone has to pay for the engineering that makes the sync seamless. Out of curiosity, have you tried Google Drive, which would be $2/month? (I'm not affiliated with Google.)
Epskampie 11y ago
Try bittorrent sync: https://www.getsync.com/ https://www.getsync.com/ Direct syncing from computer to computer (peer 2 peer), no storage limits.
- benbristow 11y ago
  Or the open-source alternative, Syncthing. https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/

sjg007 11y ago

I have a 8GB iPhone 5c but I take a lot of pictures/videos. I'd like to have them stored in the cloud and maybe only have thumbnails on the device. Has anyone solved this? Music can now be cloud streamed.

boduh 11y ago
Yes, you can install Carousel from Dropbox. It will store your photos in Dropbox and free up the space on your phone but you will still be able to see the photos in the Carousel app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carousel-by-dropbox/id825931374?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carousel-by-dropbox/id825931... Look for "Free Up iPhone Space" in "Settings"

Adut 11y ago

It's been my experience that anytime you work for a company larger than about 50 people, it starts devolving into the sort of situation the OP describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle. The best you can hope to do in this situation is to put on the big boy/girl pants and be a champion for change.