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One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquir

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition in their interface, I might have missed it). After I started uploading pics on Google photos, I have little to store on Dropbox. Synced storage might be big enough problem for it to continue to grow bigger, but I wonder if it's a meaningful moat. What if the storage + software gets commoditized to an extent that it becomes essentially free for most people?

free2rhyme214 10y ago
That's why they're focused on the Enterprise now. I agree their acquisition strategy has been lackluster.
blowski 10y ago
Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well. A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.
  - nicoburns 10y ago
    Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?
    - objclxt 10y ago
      The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.
      - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the company. Ultimately this model of "investment" can kill a business that is technically succeeding because the speculators don't see a high enough return. That's also a problem for society as it creates instability and prevents technologically successful companies from prospering long term. At least that's one narrative that appears to fit well with my observations.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        On the other hand if the speculators also reward people doing the work, they incentivize lots of them to do that work. Hence startup economy, where many companies blatantly lie that they care about users, where in fact those companies are only vehicles for the founders to get a good exit.
        vecter 10y ago
        If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.
        zasz 10y ago
        Plenty of investors are risking other people's money, though. Venture capitalists themselves are prime examples of this.
  - IAmGraydon 10y ago
    They can survive, but from an investment standpoint they need to be able to expand and grow for it to make sense.
- reverend_gonzo 10y ago
  The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.
  - Afton 10y ago
    > it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?" This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.
    - dleslie 10y ago
      Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user. rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.
      - alphapapa 10y ago
        I've been looking at rclone but am always leery of trusting any new software project with my data. Have you had any issues with it? Thanks.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox... Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 [2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html [3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home
  - robbiemitchell 10y ago
    It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.
    - yeukhon 10y ago
      Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.
      - srtjstjsj 10y ago
        Dropbox is remote backup and cloud storage. It solves a rather different (larger) problem from a local backup.
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  I agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.
  - matt_wulfeck 10y ago
    I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".
- EGreg 10y ago
  Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud? And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE. So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?
  - newsat13 10y ago
    I think it's most about awareness/marketing. Just go out in the streets and ask people if they know about nextCloud. If they do, ask them if they run it. Most don't because it takes time and effort to run things. nextCloud is squarely in the enterprise space. nextCloud-as-a-service is a supremely hard market to enter because you need investment from day 1 (storage has to be very high and pricing has to be very low since it's the first thing people will compare against).
  - nsm 10y ago
    IMO open source projects need a critical mass of developers to achieve "polish". All the edge cases and so on that isnt' a matter of writing clever code, but sitting there for days writing tests or manually investigating corner cases, or putting in resources for good crash reporting, seamless updates and things like that. I have yet to see an open source project that deals well with this (Firefox doesn't count because they have a lot of $$ and can employ devs to work on all these things.) When you reach a scale of millions of users, all these tiny details start to affect a sizeable amount of users.
  - mnutt 10y ago
    I think part of the challenge is manufacturing and handing out a distributed system to nontechnical users and then trying to debug their issues without having central control. (Or any control, really) As someone who built an OSS synced storage server, scratching my own itch was pretty easy but responding to bug reports that are far outside of my use cases can get tedious. And somehow it feels like there are just so many, compared to other areas. Edit: git-annex supports encryption and webdav remotes (and thus, ownCloud/Nextcloud/others) and it works pretty well.
- stevehawk 10y ago
  Normalley I'd say - "There's nothing wrong with that and they can do what they want." but... .they're filing for an IPO.. so their shareholders are going to start hitting them with the "If you don't always make more money than last time we'll fire you and find someone who will." If you don't want to expand your business far beyond what it's already doing then you don't IPO and take on shareholders.
brightball 10y ago
To this point, Dropbox does an excellent job of what they set out to do. I haven't seen anybody do it better and I'm a happy paid user. Being able to pay $10 / month for 1TB of fast, instantly synced and versioned online storage integrated directly into the filesystem is hard to beat.
- rogerbinns 10y ago
  The place where Dropbox is spectacularly bad is multiple account support. Google does a good job of multiple account support - you log in to the relevant multiple accounts and things work. Dropbox expects you to pseudo-merge exactly one personal account with exactly one business account. You end up with a mess. It gets even worse when trying to unmerge them. And is not useful should you have more accounts than exactly one of each. That mess will keep coming back to bite you almost every month as Dropbox doesn't do what you'd expect. Dropbox is lucky that that they do two things their competitors don't: they support Linux and syncing generally works.
  - brightball 10y ago
    I could see that. I'm _only_ using it for personal so I haven't really run into the issues that you're talking about. I think for Dropbox to operate in a pure filesystem-native-first experience they're probably approaching it from the 1 computer = 1 person standpoint (or one logged in user on the computer at least).
    - rogerbinns 10y ago
      I've got one colleague who mistakenly let Dropbox psuedo-merge his personal and business accounts several years ago. He still hasn't completely fixed it! I was around when they introduced the "multi account" support, and it was very easy to see how/why they did it. Instead of updating their clients to support multiple accounts (which they should have done), the client just keeps supporting only one account. Then on their back end they return "merged" content to the client. You can easily see how this can create chaos, because other people can also be updating your personal and business content, and untangling it all is a mess.
james_pm 10y ago
Paper is a great little part of Dropbox that is showing some real potential. They recently added task dates and assignments, and some nice formatting options (like code blocks with syntax highlighting).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
draw_down 10y ago
Maybe just having one good product is okay.
- mcgannon2007 10y ago
  Not at the crazy level they've let their valuation rise to. VCs won't accept that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tomc1985 10y ago
Why must these things always be looked at through the eyes of business? Why can't Dropbox just do file sync really effing well? Companies need to stop trying to take over the world, and focus on product/service mastery
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Because when you raise VC, you have made a pact with the devil to take over the world. Your customers aren't just your customers, but also your financial backers at that point.
  - hinkley 10y ago
    One of the hardest at things my teams have struggled with is the fact that for large parts of the software world, the user is not the person with the checkbook. Getting both of them what they want is a constant challenge, full of compromises.
Pigo 10y ago
I was a big fan of dropbox until I bought a Chromebook and got T's worth of space in Google Drive for free. I don't think I've used my dropbox in a long time. I don't think I know too many people who use them either.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I was a big fan of dropbox until I bought a Chromebook and got T's worth of space in Google Drive for free. Just FYI in case you don't know: unless you have a paid GSuite account¹ or an educational GSuite account, Google's privacy policy allows them to mine data in your Google Drive for advertising purposes. Even if you pay for extra storage. This may or may not be acceptable to you, but for a lot of people it isn't. 1. Former Google Apps for Work.
szermer 10y ago
I just presented a deck on this topic today. The 30 year evolution of the document goes something like: Paper > Word Processing > Email Attachment > Collaborative (Google Docs) > Cloud Storage > Meta Information The last part, Meta Information, is the ‘conversation about the document’ and represents the evolution from a physical piece of paper that I hold in my hand to having a conversation around a document that I might only view as a file name in a folder and never open it up (or just click on the preview). Box notes is a good first phase of this evolution, however Conversational UIs will lead that next evolutionary phase. Dropbox needs to support the communication pathways that are formed around the documents that people are storing.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  I don't mean to offend or be crass but I couldn't help but laugh. I think you are overanalyzing documents. What you said could be word for word out of the Silicon Valley show script.
  - szermer 10y ago
    As I prefaced in my comment, I presented a deck (the need to move enterprise IIOT towards conversational UI) and the evolution of documents was a part of that. I don't sit around thinking of documents in such a lofty manner ;-) If you disagree about the evolution, I'd love to discuss and learn more from your POV. Much like documents, I'm looking to evolve into meta conversations.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. On the flip side, it works really, really well cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, iOS - you name it, they have it. And it's 100% hassle-free.
smpetrey 10y ago
That's exactly why I cancelled my account. There were rumors they were going to launch an email service, then a basecamp competitor, then it was a race against iCloud and Google drive... Honestly after cancelling my account I've never looked back. I get more storage per dollar with google and iCloud and the Dropbox macOS integration is a joke. With all the acquisitions Dropbox has made in the past decade, they couldn't have created a more useful macOS app? Read a blog post by any former dropbox employee and you'll hear the same thing over and over: Dropbox is littered with management problems and their leadership has no idea what the future of the company and will look like because cloud storage is a race to zero.
- hinkley 10y ago
  > a race to zero That's a much nicer phrase than the one I used to use: "complicit in your own destruction". One is too bland, the other too strong. Certainly there's got to be one in the middle.
andyjsong 10y ago
If that was a real concern, doesn't Google and Facebook also face this same issue? Isn't like 80% or more of their revenues come from ads? The other business units and moonshot projects are just rounding errors on their balance sheets.
aphextron 10y ago
Steve Jobs said it best: "[Dropbox] is not a product, it's a feature."
- thirdsun 10y ago
  While this may seem like an obvious observation, I have yet to see a cloud storage service that does it as well as Dropbox. And that includes attempts by huge companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
- draw_down 10y ago
  He did say that. He was also the CEO of a company that still sucks at solving these kinds of problems. Guess it's harder than he gave them credit for.

free2rhyme214 10y ago

That's why they're focused on the Enterprise now. I agree their acquisition strategy has been lackluster.

blowski 10y ago

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well. A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.
- nicoburns 10y ago
  Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?
  - objclxt 10y ago
    The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the company. Ultimately this model of "investment" can kill a business that is technically succeeding because the speculators don't see a high enough return. That's also a problem for society as it creates instability and prevents technologically successful companies from prospering long term. At least that's one narrative that appears to fit well with my observations.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        On the other hand if the speculators also reward people doing the work, they incentivize lots of them to do that work. Hence startup economy, where many companies blatantly lie that they care about users, where in fact those companies are only vehicles for the founders to get a good exit.
      - vecter 10y ago
        If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.
        zasz 10y ago
        Plenty of investors are risking other people's money, though. Venture capitalists themselves are prime examples of this.
- IAmGraydon 10y ago
  They can survive, but from an investment standpoint they need to be able to expand and grow for it to make sense.
reverend_gonzo 10y ago
The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.
- Afton 10y ago
  > it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?" This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.
  - dleslie 10y ago
    Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user. rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      I've been looking at rclone but am always leery of trusting any new software project with my data. Have you had any issues with it? Thanks.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.
yeukhon 10y ago
I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox... Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 [2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html [3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home
- robbiemitchell 10y ago
  It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.
    - srtjstjsj 10y ago
      Dropbox is remote backup and cloud storage. It solves a rather different (larger) problem from a local backup.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".
EGreg 10y ago
Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud? And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE. So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?
- newsat13 10y ago
  I think it's most about awareness/marketing. Just go out in the streets and ask people if they know about nextCloud. If they do, ask them if they run it. Most don't because it takes time and effort to run things. nextCloud is squarely in the enterprise space. nextCloud-as-a-service is a supremely hard market to enter because you need investment from day 1 (storage has to be very high and pricing has to be very low since it's the first thing people will compare against).
- nsm 10y ago
  IMO open source projects need a critical mass of developers to achieve "polish". All the edge cases and so on that isnt' a matter of writing clever code, but sitting there for days writing tests or manually investigating corner cases, or putting in resources for good crash reporting, seamless updates and things like that. I have yet to see an open source project that deals well with this (Firefox doesn't count because they have a lot of $$ and can employ devs to work on all these things.) When you reach a scale of millions of users, all these tiny details start to affect a sizeable amount of users.
- mnutt 10y ago
  I think part of the challenge is manufacturing and handing out a distributed system to nontechnical users and then trying to debug their issues without having central control. (Or any control, really) As someone who built an OSS synced storage server, scratching my own itch was pretty easy but responding to bug reports that are far outside of my use cases can get tedious. And somehow it feels like there are just so many, compared to other areas. Edit: git-annex supports encryption and webdav remotes (and thus, ownCloud/Nextcloud/others) and it works pretty well.
stevehawk 10y ago
Normalley I'd say - "There's nothing wrong with that and they can do what they want." but... .they're filing for an IPO.. so their shareholders are going to start hitting them with the "If you don't always make more money than last time we'll fire you and find someone who will." If you don't want to expand your business far beyond what it's already doing then you don't IPO and take on shareholders.

brightball 10y ago

To this point, Dropbox does an excellent job of what they set out to do. I haven't seen anybody do it better and I'm a happy paid user. Being able to pay $10 / month for 1TB of fast, instantly synced and versioned online storage integrated directly into the filesystem is hard to beat.

rogerbinns 10y ago
The place where Dropbox is spectacularly bad is multiple account support. Google does a good job of multiple account support - you log in to the relevant multiple accounts and things work. Dropbox expects you to pseudo-merge exactly one personal account with exactly one business account. You end up with a mess. It gets even worse when trying to unmerge them. And is not useful should you have more accounts than exactly one of each. That mess will keep coming back to bite you almost every month as Dropbox doesn't do what you'd expect. Dropbox is lucky that that they do two things their competitors don't: they support Linux and syncing generally works.
- brightball 10y ago
  I could see that. I'm _only_ using it for personal so I haven't really run into the issues that you're talking about. I think for Dropbox to operate in a pure filesystem-native-first experience they're probably approaching it from the 1 computer = 1 person standpoint (or one logged in user on the computer at least).
  - rogerbinns 10y ago
    I've got one colleague who mistakenly let Dropbox psuedo-merge his personal and business accounts several years ago. He still hasn't completely fixed it! I was around when they introduced the "multi account" support, and it was very easy to see how/why they did it. Instead of updating their clients to support multiple accounts (which they should have done), the client just keeps supporting only one account. Then on their back end they return "merged" content to the client. You can easily see how this can create chaos, because other people can also be updating your personal and business content, and untangling it all is a mess.

james_pm 10y ago

Paper is a great little part of Dropbox that is showing some real potential. They recently added task dates and assignments, and some nice formatting options (like code blocks with syntax highlighting).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

draw_down 10y ago

Maybe just having one good product is okay.

mcgannon2007 10y ago
Not at the crazy level they've let their valuation rise to. VCs won't accept that.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

tomc1985 10y ago

Why must these things always be looked at through the eyes of business? Why can't Dropbox just do file sync really effing well? Companies need to stop trying to take over the world, and focus on product/service mastery

hkmurakami 10y ago
Because when you raise VC, you have made a pact with the devil to take over the world. Your customers aren't just your customers, but also your financial backers at that point.
- hinkley 10y ago
  One of the hardest at things my teams have struggled with is the fact that for large parts of the software world, the user is not the person with the checkbook. Getting both of them what they want is a constant challenge, full of compromises.

Pigo 10y ago

I was a big fan of dropbox until I bought a Chromebook and got T's worth of space in Google Drive for free. I don't think I've used my dropbox in a long time. I don't think I know too many people who use them either.

danieldk 10y ago
I was a big fan of dropbox until I bought a Chromebook and got T's worth of space in Google Drive for free. Just FYI in case you don't know: unless you have a paid GSuite account¹ or an educational GSuite account, Google's privacy policy allows them to mine data in your Google Drive for advertising purposes. Even if you pay for extra storage. This may or may not be acceptable to you, but for a lot of people it isn't. 1. Former Google Apps for Work.

szermer 10y ago

I just presented a deck on this topic today. The 30 year evolution of the document goes something like: Paper > Word Processing > Email Attachment > Collaborative (Google Docs) > Cloud Storage > Meta Information The last part, Meta Information, is the ‘conversation about the document’ and represents the evolution from a physical piece of paper that I hold in my hand to having a conversation around a document that I might only view as a file name in a folder and never open it up (or just click on the preview). Box notes is a good first phase of this evolution, however Conversational UIs will lead that next evolutionary phase. Dropbox needs to support the communication pathways that are formed around the documents that people are storing.

goldenkey 10y ago
I don't mean to offend or be crass but I couldn't help but laugh. I think you are overanalyzing documents. What you said could be word for word out of the Silicon Valley show script.
- szermer 10y ago
  As I prefaced in my comment, I presented a deck (the need to move enterprise IIOT towards conversational UI) and the evolution of documents was a part of that. I don't sit around thinking of documents in such a lofty manner ;-) If you disagree about the evolution, I'd love to discuss and learn more from your POV. Much like documents, I'm looking to evolve into meta conversations.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. On the flip side, it works really, really well cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, iOS - you name it, they have it. And it's 100% hassle-free.

smpetrey 10y ago

That's exactly why I cancelled my account. There were rumors they were going to launch an email service, then a basecamp competitor, then it was a race against iCloud and Google drive... Honestly after cancelling my account I've never looked back. I get more storage per dollar with google and iCloud and the Dropbox macOS integration is a joke. With all the acquisitions Dropbox has made in the past decade, they couldn't have created a more useful macOS app? Read a blog post by any former dropbox employee and you'll hear the same thing over and over: Dropbox is littered with management problems and their leadership has no idea what the future of the company and will look like because cloud storage is a race to zero.

hinkley 10y ago
> a race to zero That's a much nicer phrase than the one I used to use: "complicit in your own destruction". One is too bland, the other too strong. Certainly there's got to be one in the middle.

andyjsong 10y ago

If that was a real concern, doesn't Google and Facebook also face this same issue? Isn't like 80% or more of their revenues come from ads? The other business units and moonshot projects are just rounding errors on their balance sheets.

aphextron 10y ago

Steve Jobs said it best: "[Dropbox] is not a product, it's a feature."

thirdsun 10y ago
While this may seem like an obvious observation, I have yet to see a cloud storage service that does it as well as Dropbox. And that includes attempts by huge companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
draw_down 10y ago
He did say that. He was also the CEO of a company that still sucks at solving these kinds of problems. Guess it's harder than he gave them credit for.