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> "But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders

> "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.)
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  But is that value people will pay for? Clearly Dropbox doesn't think so.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    This is 100% anecdata but it seems like among my friends, family, coworkers Google Drive has eaten Dropbox's lunch for casual file syncing and remote storage. I mean it used to be that everyone had a Dropbox account, it was basically synonymous with file storage, but now people talk about their "Drive". "A folder that syncs" was never the killer feature, it was the ability to download and upload files from any machine connected to the internet and get sharing links.
- josteink 7y ago
  > There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly. I gave up on Dropbox for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread (and lacking ZFS on Linux being the final straw). Nextcloud fills this niche for me now. And it offers practically unlimited storage, is free and even open-source. I’m not coming back, Dropbox.
mrlala 7y ago
Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break. OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff. We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day. Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well. I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.
- PascLeRasc 7y ago
  We just had to switch from Box to OneDrive at work, and it's caused massive headaches. Most days no one can log in, and some Excel sheets uploaded have been corrupted or have missing sheets - I don't know how that happens unless Microsoft is scanning our files.
  - stirfrykitty 7y ago
    OneDrive is an abomination. We use it at work and I have to manage it for everyone on top of my other duties (medium non-profit). It's not the panacea everyone thought it would be. I inherited it upon coming here. I've tried to see this as more or less a devops experiment. I try to control as much as I can with PowerShell, but some things don't lend themselves well to that method. Oddly enough, the lion's share of all end users are on Macs that are on a Windows domain. It proved interesting to get everything working. What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic. It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments. Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.
braythwayt 7y ago
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.) With respect, that is Dropbox's problem. Dropbox needs to do that, But I don't need Dropbox to do that. The same is true of music-playing apps. Once they cost money and added value. Then platforms all started making "play this music file" free. The purveyors all tried to add more value. And there are a few specialized music players kicking around. But most went away, the business model was no longer viable, and the move into adding lots of functionality pushed them into a niche. I agree that Dropbox is facing an existential crisis. If Apple delivers on some of its promised new iCloud folder sharing functionality, I will end my Dropbox subscription, and no amount of "We're a collaboration platform" will change that. Dropbox knows that, and is going in the direction of getting money from someone else. Will they succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, most of their existing user base is finding their less useful and less valuable as they make this transition. Shrug. I have witnessed this so many times over the last thirty-five years. One set of forces acts to take something that was originally just for companies, and "Consumerizes" it. Spreadsheets are common for people to track all kinds of personal things. Kids use them in school. In the opposite direction, companies chasing the money "Enterprise" their consumer offerings, abandoning the users that built them in the first place. Same as it ever was.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Regarding music apps, VLC did that for me. No need to ever buy a music player when the best is available for free...
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    And famously, Apple did that to Panic's "Audion" music player. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775098
papln 7y ago
> Windows by default has cloud sync on Mac and iOS and Linux and Android? > macOS does as well. On Windows and Linux and Android?
- lostmsu 7y ago
  If you install OneDrive, you can sync Android photos.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have. For instance, the only thing I really need Dropbox for at this point is one shared folder with friends who use both Mac and Windows (which could likely be handled by Google Drive, and might even be able to be handled by iCloud Drive by the end of the year) -- and Scrivener, because its developer apparently can't figure out how to make syncing between Mac and iOS work reliably on anything else. (One can argue he hasn't really figured out how to make it work reliably on Dropbox, actually, but that's a different thread.) There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain. For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs. The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues. It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share. IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers. Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO. IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.
maire 7y ago
Every time I get a new OS upgrade with even more iCloud functionality I question why I still have Dropbox. Luckily for Dropbox they don't charge much so I don't cancel. I don't move new data to dropbox any more and I would never sign up for it today.
nonbirithm 7y ago
> Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs. Or maybe the simple solution worked well enough but they still moved away because of some obligation to keep growing, which would be impractical without needing to add many more monetized features. When I see extensive rebrandings and additions of features that I would never have started using the service for in the beginning, I can't help but think this. In this case it doesn't help that the only useful feature of Dropbox is being integrated into all these other products either.
ryandrake 7y ago
I don't think the argument is irrelevant. For most utilities, people use your software because it is the best at doing one core thing. I don't think this changes just because OS vendors start bundling half-assed versions of your idea. Pour your resources into focus rather than de-focus. Spend your development effort on fixing bugs, best-in-class cross-platform support, and other things that the OS vendors won't do. Instead, everyone succumbs to the urge to feature-cram their way to differentiation, so we get chat functionality in your navigation software, location sharing in your music app, and team management in your paint program.
didip 7y ago
What about killing on-prem NAS/SAN or sell a high performance on-prem blob store? Every single one sucks and requires a specialized Devops team. I think the whole premise of files and folders are far from dead, just gotta look from different angles.
bassman9000 7y ago
Windows and mac have sync too Sync to where? To other Windows or macs? Limited usability. Dropbox was the first to offer true seamless sync at scale, across ALL common OS/devices. Dropbox has a relevancy problem That's like saying email is dead because FB can embed videos on posts. Like the Quora guy said, we don't want crap. Email will still be around 10y from now, and Dropbox has, at a minimum, another 5.

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.)
UncleMeat 7y ago
But is that value people will pay for? Clearly Dropbox doesn't think so.
- Spivak 7y ago
  This is 100% anecdata but it seems like among my friends, family, coworkers Google Drive has eaten Dropbox's lunch for casual file syncing and remote storage. I mean it used to be that everyone had a Dropbox account, it was basically synonymous with file storage, but now people talk about their "Drive". "A folder that syncs" was never the killer feature, it was the ability to download and upload files from any machine connected to the internet and get sharing links.
josteink 7y ago
> There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly. I gave up on Dropbox for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread (and lacking ZFS on Linux being the final straw). Nextcloud fills this niche for me now. And it offers practically unlimited storage, is free and even open-source. I’m not coming back, Dropbox.

mrlala 7y ago

Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break. OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff. We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day. Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well. I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.

PascLeRasc 7y ago
We just had to switch from Box to OneDrive at work, and it's caused massive headaches. Most days no one can log in, and some Excel sheets uploaded have been corrupted or have missing sheets - I don't know how that happens unless Microsoft is scanning our files.
- stirfrykitty 7y ago
  OneDrive is an abomination. We use it at work and I have to manage it for everyone on top of my other duties (medium non-profit). It's not the panacea everyone thought it would be. I inherited it upon coming here. I've tried to see this as more or less a devops experiment. I try to control as much as I can with PowerShell, but some things don't lend themselves well to that method. Oddly enough, the lion's share of all end users are on Macs that are on a Windows domain. It proved interesting to get everything working. What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic. It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments. Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.

braythwayt 7y ago

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.) With respect, that is Dropbox's problem. Dropbox needs to do that, But I don't need Dropbox to do that. The same is true of music-playing apps. Once they cost money and added value. Then platforms all started making "play this music file" free. The purveyors all tried to add more value. And there are a few specialized music players kicking around. But most went away, the business model was no longer viable, and the move into adding lots of functionality pushed them into a niche. I agree that Dropbox is facing an existential crisis. If Apple delivers on some of its promised new iCloud folder sharing functionality, I will end my Dropbox subscription, and no amount of "We're a collaboration platform" will change that. Dropbox knows that, and is going in the direction of getting money from someone else. Will they succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, most of their existing user base is finding their less useful and less valuable as they make this transition. Shrug. I have witnessed this so many times over the last thirty-five years. One set of forces acts to take something that was originally just for companies, and "Consumerizes" it. Spreadsheets are common for people to track all kinds of personal things. Kids use them in school. In the opposite direction, companies chasing the money "Enterprise" their consumer offerings, abandoning the users that built them in the first place. Same as it ever was.

jammygit 7y ago
Regarding music apps, VLC did that for me. No need to ever buy a music player when the best is available for free...
- braythwayt 7y ago
  And famously, Apple did that to Panic's "Audion" music player. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775098

papln 7y ago

> Windows by default has cloud sync on Mac and iOS and Linux and Android? > macOS does as well. On Windows and Linux and Android?

lostmsu 7y ago
If you install OneDrive, you can sync Android photos.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have. For instance, the only thing I really need Dropbox for at this point is one shared folder with friends who use both Mac and Windows (which could likely be handled by Google Drive, and might even be able to be handled by iCloud Drive by the end of the year) -- and Scrivener, because its developer apparently can't figure out how to make syncing between Mac and iOS work reliably on anything else. (One can argue he hasn't really figured out how to make it work reliably on Dropbox, actually, but that's a different thread.) There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain. For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs. The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues. It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share. IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers. Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO. IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.

maire 7y ago

Every time I get a new OS upgrade with even more iCloud functionality I question why I still have Dropbox. Luckily for Dropbox they don't charge much so I don't cancel. I don't move new data to dropbox any more and I would never sign up for it today.

nonbirithm 7y ago

> Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs. Or maybe the simple solution worked well enough but they still moved away because of some obligation to keep growing, which would be impractical without needing to add many more monetized features. When I see extensive rebrandings and additions of features that I would never have started using the service for in the beginning, I can't help but think this. In this case it doesn't help that the only useful feature of Dropbox is being integrated into all these other products either.

ryandrake 7y ago

I don't think the argument is irrelevant. For most utilities, people use your software because it is the best at doing one core thing. I don't think this changes just because OS vendors start bundling half-assed versions of your idea. Pour your resources into focus rather than de-focus. Spend your development effort on fixing bugs, best-in-class cross-platform support, and other things that the OS vendors won't do. Instead, everyone succumbs to the urge to feature-cram their way to differentiation, so we get chat functionality in your navigation software, location sharing in your music app, and team management in your paint program.

didip 7y ago

What about killing on-prem NAS/SAN or sell a high performance on-prem blob store? Every single one sucks and requires a specialized Devops team. I think the whole premise of files and folders are far from dead, just gotta look from different angles.

bassman9000 7y ago

Windows and mac have sync too Sync to where? To other Windows or macs? Limited usability. Dropbox was the first to offer true seamless sync at scale, across ALL common OS/devices. Dropbox has a relevancy problem That's like saying email is dead because FB can embed videos on posts. Like the Quora guy said, we don't want crap. Email will still be around 10y from now, and Dropbox has, at a minimum, another 5.