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This seems like a good time to resurface the worlds best Quora answer, by Michael Wolfe. Answering “Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar fu

• kilroy123 7y ago
  I still think this is 100% true and that's still exactly what I want, as a paying Dropbox customer. What they're trying to build now are all things I'll never use.
  • wmeredith 7y ago
    Same. I bailed when they started shoving their paper thing down my throat.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's a nice example of why "voting with your wallet" doesn't work. I've been a paying Dropbox customers for years now, and not on the lowest tier either. How much more money and to whom can you or me give, for Dropbox to stop doing the shit they're doing, and forever just remain a folder that syncs on every platform?
    • 29083011397778 7y ago
      Just like in politics, you need the majority to vote with you. Voting in elections can work, and so can voting with your wallet. Neither work unless you have enough people though.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs. Even though I agree with the conclusion, because I think files & folders is one of the very few computing interface metaphors that has proven itself, I disagree with the reasoning here. Maybe that's too many years of hearing similar language in arguments from Linux Desktop evangelists. I think the real reason it works so well is not that people don't want that other stuff, but that it is straight-forward for users to architect solutions to a lot of those other things on top of a simple folder-wat-syncs because they can very easily wrap their head around how a folder-wat-syncs will behave. Case in point: many people, like myself, use Dropbox as a password store by keeping a KeePass database in it. For a short time when a buddy and I had the fool notion to start a business, we coordinated and kept track of things through documents on Dropbox. Simple tools one can combine to perform complex tasks; sound familiar?
• formercoder 7y ago
  Based on anecdata I'd say that a bigger and bigger chunk of people do in fact sit at Chrome all day long: - At Google everyone had linux, and non-developers effectively only used web-apps. - My girlfriend is at a startup but has a similar workflow on a Mac. - I recently rejoined a gym I was a member of in '14, at that time they had some native windows CRM type app that their employees used, when I glanced at the screen recently it was just a web app in Chrome.
• bhouston 7y ago
  > "But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!" > > No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs. This argument is a good one but it only covers the rise of Dropbox. We are now in a different era. Dropbox's functionality is now table stakes and not something new. Windows by default has cloud sync, macOS does as well. We switched at our company from Dropbox to Google Drive Stream. Box is really focused on enterprise solutions -- lots of permissions, probably too much in my opinion but C-suite like that shit. This quora answer is irrelevant in the current context. Dropbox needs to figure out how to stay in a commoditized market where their special sauce is being integrated into OSes and larger offerings (G-Suite.) Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs. And others are just never adopting it in the first place because it is built into their OS or their app suite. Dropbox has a long-term relevancy problem here that they have not cracked.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • ChrisRR 7y ago
    We're in a different era, but the issue is still the same. Lots of competitors have popped up in file syncing, but they all want to link in with additional services and other crap that people don't want. There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Strongly agreed. "A folder that syncs" is the only thing I ever wanted from Dropbox, it's still the only thing that I want, and it's the only reason I pay them. Everything they've been adding for the past years is pure, useless bloat to me. (Well, what I really want is a folder that syncs and which lets me get URLs to raw files in the cloud to share. They used to have this, then they dropped it for some silly business reasons. Tough luck, I learned to live without it. Still, throughout the decade or so I've been using their service, they added exactly zero useful things for me, and managed to lose one feature I cared about.)
• criddell 7y ago
  Steve Jobs may have been right when he said something to the effect of Dropbox isn't a product, it's a feature. If all you want is a folder that syncs, then don't we get that from every commercial operating system?
  • AstralStorm 7y ago
    The remote storage and availability combined with the feature is the product. They sell this and it is important for it to be seamless as well. (Unlike say current iteration of Google Drive which sells both of the above but is not seamless.) Note that it is very easy to compete with them for any of the big players.
    • bhouston 7y ago
      SoundBlaster sold sound cards as well, but then sound cards got integrated into the motherboards and now only <0.01% of people buy sound cards.
      • speeder 7y ago
        What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards. It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies. It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition to DVDs, it killed sound cards (because no more advanced 3D sound rendering that sound blaster could do), CRTs (no more funky resolutions, no more overlay mode, and other fancy CRT features), and initiated the slow death of VGA (that also happened for other reasons but this contributed a lot).
        • koolba 7y ago
          Where can I read more about this?
        • thedaemon 7y ago
• pixelrevision 7y ago
  It does more than that. It's quite good for selectivly sharing files and the versioning portion is well done. But those features also really stay out of your way more than competitors.
• mbesto 7y ago
  I've tested all of the major file sync tools and nothing compares to Dropbox's ability to simply sync files very well (merge conflicts, offline vs online, etc).
  • GordonS 7y ago
    This surprises me. I tried Dropbox a few years ago and found it's conflict resolution, even with just 2 machines, to be shockingly bad - it was constantly notifying about conflicts, even when there really shouldn't have been one. Going from the Dropbox forums at the time, a lot of people were having similar issues. The performance on Windows was also ridiculous - it literally rendered my PC useless for 1h on every boot. I poked around and discovered that the Dropbox client was basically some Python scripts that enumerated and hashed every.single.file on startup, then used an unreliable Windows API to check for realtime changes after that - how a company the size of Dropbox thinks that is a good idea truely boggles the mind! NTFS change journal? File system minifilter driver? Nah, let's hash every file on startup and use a the easiest realtime change detection available, just to ensure we miss some changes - oh, and we'll do it all in Python, just to make sure performance is as bad as possible! Anyway, the final straw was when it deleted a lot of data because of a "conflict". At the time, the restore mechanism was terrible if you wanted to restore more than a handful of files - you basically had to restore files one-by-one, paging through hundreds of pages of files (I don't know if it's still like that). There was also some data that was permanently gone. Dropbox support was also a joke - you had to post on a public forum and hope they replied. And if they did reply, they always shut you down with "no, Dropbox wouldn't delete your files", "no, Dropbox wouldn't raise a conflict for that" or whatever. Again, I don't know if it's still like that, but it really left a sour taste in my mouth, and coupled with the comedy Windows client, I won't be touching it ever again. I ended up building my own solution using Seafile, using Azure blob storage as a backend. I run Seafile and Minio in Docker containers on a cheap Azure VM, and the whole thing "just worked" from the get-go - it's much easier than it sounds. Haven't looked back since!
• tarsinge 7y ago
  That was maybe true before, but in that era for me it's pretty clear that they are chasing the bulk of new internet users for which the folder/files metaphor is not intuitive. They use social media websites and apps and have photos/videos that they access through an app, not from a file explorer (desktop OS are moving in the same direction of abstracting the filesystem too). That's why they (and Google Drive and others) are moving from "a folder that sync" to "let's auto detect and sync media".
  • jbverschoor 7y ago
    Good luck organizing. “Search” is not an archiving mechanism. And I don’t like containers per app. It makes no sense. You have something, could be a project, event, a library and there is data associated with this. The data are files. If I’m looking at scans of of receipts, I do not want and currently I’m not able to search for all receipts in a given period. I don’t want my photos to be in one big folder. I have my own mental model of how it should be organized. There’s a reason gmail supports “folders” these days
• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  That quoted Quora answer sounds comically tone deaf and deeply inconsistent with the way users of even very simplistic products like this demand features of growing complexity, let alone how companies make money off this by cost effectively reaching use cases in the long, weird tail not addressed by the basic version (especially when eventually selling to enterprise). What a monumental lack of imagination.
• brokenmachine 7y ago
  Lol, it's sad to see how far Dropbox has gone from the idea of a folder that syncs. I recently had the unhappy experience of trying to share a picture that I'd saved to Dropbox from my Android phone. After noticing that I can now leave comments on my files (?), I discovered that the "Share" button, which on every other app on Android means I can just choose the App to share with, does not operate like that. No, from the special snowflake Dropbox app you need to choose an email address to which it will presumably email a link url to the file. No, Dropbox, I want to share a file using another app, just like any other file in a folder on my phone. Eventually I figured out that "Export" is what you need - deliberately hidden to force lock-in for unsavvy users. I understand why they do it, but the quora answer you quoted is now hilariously dated. So, shut up. The Dropbox app on Android does not operate like a folder on Android.