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Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning.

Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning. I was an early adopter of both of them, and they worked well. Dropbox sync between different machines worked like magic. I still remember some of the nightmares my coworkers had with OneDrive in meetings when the files for the presentations were missing because of the poor sync capabilities of OneDrive. Dropbox is no failure. Their projected revenue for 2020 is $1.8B. This is 3x more than Slack, but their market cap is 3x smaller. Both Slack and Evernote are facing the most powerful companies in the world offering their products for free or at really discounted rates. What makes their situation even worse is that they don't own the content (documents, pdfs, spreadsheets). The documents will be edited somewhere else and then shared in dropbox. On top of that many other applications like chat offer file transfer and sharing. Bottom line: I don't want them to fail ( I don't want Evernote to fail too), because it points to a world where only 5 to 10 big tech companies can survive. We need smaller innovative businesses to succeed too. It will be a sad day when a $2B business can't survive and is forced to sell.

aeturnum 6y ago
There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google gives away a shitty form of your service for free because the costs are a rounding error to them, people will feel like the service has no value. I don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this. Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from entering into competition without any potential for profit? At the end of the day, maybe the world as a whole doesn't care that they are missing out on small cool tech companies that will never get huge? But, of course, in an environment where small cool tech is unsustainable we'll never know if they would eventually get huge.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSuite
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    I think it's absolutely correct that, for Google, it doesn't make sense to charge for sync. I also think that anyone who's ever relied on sync knows that there is a lot of value in doing it well - especially in a B2B context. It's true that "just" filesystem sync isn't a full product. The product would probably be sync-as-a-service where you can manage distribution and deduplication of resources across your systems. So we have a situation where it doesn't make sense for Google to focus on the feature, but the fact that they have the feature at all trips up specialist companies.
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    Isn't this just it? There's no doubt that there's value and that the software is excellent in both cases. I'm just not sure we should try to turn every software project into a moonshot and expect anything sustainable as a result. It's not sustainable in most industries.
  - paxys 6y ago
    That was and still is a terrible take. You don't get to an annual revenue of $2B and market cap of $10B with a "feature, not a product". In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.
    - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
      You do if you have the only product that is doing the feature well. But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras. After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.
schnable 6y ago
I think both of these companies could be successful, profitable small software shops if they stayed focused and lean. But they raise money and need to shoot for the moon, and it becomes all or nothing, and that's how they end up in trouble.
- awill 6y ago
  I understand that Dropbox feels they need to add features to compete, especially as they compete with Google and OneDrive, which both bundle a bunch of extra free stuff. But that should never be at the cost of your core product. Dropbox purchased zulip, and then dropped it. They also launched paper. Not sure anyone uses that.
hiimtroymclure 6y ago
man I love evernote. I dont want to use ios notes and deal with all the confusion icloud brings. I love using a service that is hyper focused on one thing and does it well.
bachmeier 6y ago
> Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. I was also going to comment on their similarities. It's not mentioned as often, but Evernote's biggest selling point in the beginning was that they figured out how to make multidevice sync work. The product was good, but not unique. In the early days there were no competitors that could offer the comfort of Evernote's sync. Unfortunately both companies still have a 2010 mindset, at least when it comes to setting price. Neither seems to understand that their pricing is insane in 2021. $120/year is just too much for Dropbox (and nobody's going to fall for the 2 TB thing). Neither has a competitive free offering, so they're dropping off the radar for anyone looking for a free plan. Anyone working at either company that's not looking for a job should be.
- avrionov 6y ago
  Very good point about the pricing. Looking at their income statement [1] DropBox is not a very efficient company: Cost Of Revenues: $413.7M (22%) in software companies this includes Operations and customer care. There are spending as much as video sharing sites or video conferencing app. R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup. The average for bigger companies is below 20%. If their growth doesn't recover, which will be difficult, they are going to be a prime target for acquisition from Private equity. PE will slash the expenses significantly and run them for a profit for 5-10 years. [1] https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement
  - josteink 6y ago
    > R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup. Last I just checked they tried to crawl out of their “it’s all about files. Simple!”-niche and become a fully web-based project management, chat, collaboration, office-thingie with links to GSuite and Office365. As a long-time user it was quite incomprehensible, and definitely nothing I appreciated or felt added value to my Dropbox. On the contrary, I was annoyed by all the product-nagging about these features I didn’t want. Combine that with them obsoleting long-established features in their desktop sync-software which made them the only universal file-sync solution across all platforms, the reason I chose Dropbox over competing offers. Do all that, and you lost people like me as a user. I’m on Nextcloud now and not coming back. I really don’t think they have worked out their survival plan yet. Trying to outcompete MS and Google on their own turf is obviously not a fight they’re going to win.
awill 6y ago
Both evernote and dropbox started making the free service worse by limiting how many devices you could connect. Dropbox also dropped support for xfs filesystems on Linux (which they later brought back, but not after infuriating Linux users). That's when I stopped using both. I then moved to Google Drive (which is half the price of Dropbox), and moved to using markdown note apps sync with Google Drive (which is free!) I don't think there's a single example of a company where >90% of their userbase if free, and they succeed after making the free user experience worse. They're thinking in terms of money (or reducing costs), but the other view is that they're making the experience for >90% of customers worse. What dropbox seems to forger is that many of their enterprise contracts happened precisely because the decision makers used dropbox personally, and liked it. By screwing over your free customers, you are actually only hurting future sales.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  > markdown note apps sync with Google Drive Can you recommend the app please? I migrated away from Evernote when it started to have too much features, and was no longer convenient note taking app. I'm using Apple Notes now, which is more or less good, but it is vendor-locked, and I plan to move away from iPhone to Android.
  - bihla 6y ago
    I've recently move to using a git repo has my store for notes, and different clients for access and editing. On Desktop I use Obsidian (although most anything will do) and on mobile I use GitJournal which easily links into an existing git repo.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      > on mobile I use GitJournal Is it good? On mobile the common case is to launch an app and immediately see/search the notes. Or type something, close the app and assume notes are synched. But git pull and git push are not blazing fast operations. And there are no pushes, to get updates from the server immediately. Git is a good storage, but I doubt it is suitable for notes without intermediate service handing note-specific scenarios.
sizzle 6y ago
Office 365 with MS Teams seems to have reached feature parity with Dropbox and slack in one nice suite of products that just work together seamlessly. You hit on an important insight, with O365 you can edit your documents right from the cloud and cross platform integration is tight with OneDrive and MS Teams. What does everything think?
- ramraj07 6y ago
  I want the company I treat as my primary file storage solution to be fully committed to that feature as their primary selling point. The last thing I want is Google deciding I don't get to save my files there anymore.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  I use both and Dropbox is miles better. I don't understand OneDrive and the way everything is linked together in O365. It's a mess and I have no idea what is really going on in there. It reminds me a little of the icloud experience. Just give me a bog standard directory and let me manage it.
- JorgeGT 6y ago
  I miss native OneDrive Linux support, but otherwise it is quite good. I can even avoid running office in WINE most of the time. And in Windows the experience is very nice, specially the on-demand file sync.
- pedro2 6y ago
  Are you sure OneDrive works well? Can you sync PST files? [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-to-madness/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-to-...
  - RachelF 6y ago
    That's a great article in the link.
kersten 6y ago
I agree and I'd love to support Dropbox. But I think in order for me to consider that they'd need to have a somewhat competitive pricing model. For example: I'm currently slowly running out of my free Google cloud storage that came with my Gmail account (15GB?). The next step for me is to upgrade to 100GB which will probably be enough for at least the next 10 years or so. With Google Drive that will cost me $1.99 per month which is more than reasonable. With Dropbox the next biggest package (after exceeding the free storage limit of 2GB) is to upgrade to a $11.99 plan for 2 TB (waaaaay more than I will ever need). I'm willing to pay 5.99 for idealistic reasons but I'm not willing to pay more than that just for the sake of supporting a "smaller" non-FAANG company. They need to provide a better deal for something between 2 GB and 2 TB.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  You're not a potential customer. They gave up on consumers and focus on companies. Cannot blame them they don't want to lose money on individual users like the competition.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    And yet they are cutting 11% of their staff because they are losing money... Maybe they should figured out somewhere inbetween.
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    Even the business plans make no sense. 5TB to share between all employees? Or pay a lot more and get no real answer on what their 'as much as you need' means. It sounds like you have to contact their support and explain why you could possibly need more and then its up to them to decide. Google workspaces is still a better deal and they're not currently even limiting storage.
  - blntechie 6y ago
    They are losing big enterprises to Office 365 too. I know at least three 100k+ companies which moved to OneDrive from Dropbox (with lot of grumble from employees to add) in the last couple of years. They compete with Google for startups and small companies. They are stuck in the middle and both Google and Microsoft are crushing them from above and below. Having healthy consumer subscriptions wouldn’t hurt.
zillennial 6y ago
Bottom line: Dropbox has 0 relevance for gen Z users, we all use Wetransfer for sharing, iCloud or Google Drive for storing https://imgur.com/a/6gtowek https://imgur.com/a/6gtowek It peaked in 2012 when the millennials were in college, but it hasn't been cool for the past 5 years now. I never use dropbox ever again after they got rid of Carousel and Mailbox because I frankly don't trust them with my files
- Strom 6y ago
  Google trends can be interesting, but it's important to keep in mind that people who have dropbox installed and are paying the subscription don't spend their time googling for dropbox.
iamsb 6y ago
Currently there are 93 Internet companies with more than 1 Billion dollar in revenue and that list growing every year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...
- avrionov 6y ago
  Thank you for the list. Going quickly through the companies there: - Rackspace was sold to private equity and restructured and made public a second time. - LogMeIn was sold to private equity - Kaplan is part of bigger company - Ultimate software merged with Kronos - Shutterfly was acquired by private equity - Wirecard is a scam. - Grubhub is going to be acquired by a bigger competitor - Travelport, Expedia and Bookings are 3 very similar companies which bought all the smaller competitors.
  - iamsb 6y ago
    Also note that these are internet companies and do no include myriad other software companies, including enterprise tech. So I am not sure if I agree with your concern on tech being reduced to 5-10 big companies.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jwr 6y ago
Dropbox is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine. Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of growth. I hope somebody will start a Dropbox competitor as a bootstrapper, with a long-term outlook, no VC funding, and no crazy growth targets. Just do file sync right without eating so much CPU and battery, and without pestering me with useless add-ons, and you'll have my money.
- UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  From a business perspective, this is how to succeed. From a shareholder perspective, this is how to fail. They are diametrically opposed, which is hysterical. There can be overlap, but not until your original sword is sharpened to a razors edge, to borrow a phrase.
- greatgirl 6y ago
  I've always felt this, I've never seen a business actually _do_ this. Why don't businesses just stop employing so many people? Stop expanding? Stop trying to acquire more users? I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.
  - dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
    They got where they are by raising from investors on the premise they would 10x the money, and also hired top talent with stock options that are only worth anything if the company similarly increases in value. If ambition wasn’t in their DNA, they never would have gotten to the good state you liked in the first place. The payoff if the growth attempts work is asymmetric, so it’s worth the risk.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    As a mid-30s engineer, one evening I went to my VP of Engineering and suggested that we could be a lot more profitable if we cut back to half our staffing levels and concentrated on excelling at just our core product. She smiled politely and told me we had much brighter future than that. As a late 40s VP at that same company, we’re about 25x the revenue and a greater ratio than that of free cash flow, employ far more people, and serve far more customers. That’s not in any way sad.
deeviant 6y ago
I dunno. I feel dropbox has been getting less and less usable as their UI tries to get further away from the very light wrapper around windows explorer(or whatever file explorer your OS of choice uses). I really just wanted it to be a folder that exists on all my computers. That's it. Now when I ask it to open the dropbox folder it stays within it's own application window and attempts to recreate windows explorer, but without all the features of windows explorer and tons of gunk I don't want. This seems to be a problem of both the "lets push our userbase into patterns that work for us rather than them" and "Hey I'm a UI designer so I have design me some UIs, and I'll never stop, even though the UI is correct, I'll keep changing it forever!"
- JeffL 6y ago
  Yeah, when I forget and accidentally click on the Dropbox icon when I want my Dropbox folder and get whatever abomination it is that comes up now instead of the folder, I get real ragey. It's such an anti-consumer thing when companies take a nice product and add a bunch of crap to it that no one wants.
  - mkr-hn 6y ago
    I liked Dropbox Paper a lot, but then they took away the ability to bulk export notes. There is no good reason to do that. Only bad ones.
- brownbat 6y ago
  This and constant nagging that I'm running out of space (I'm definitely not), and (tightening?) limits on number of machines, had me migrate to Synology Drive this last week. Now I have basically unlimited space and devices. I'm sorry to the hard working devs, I'm part of the problem I guess. But it's tough to pay for something with free alternatives that have fewer limitations and better features.
- kccqzy 6y ago
  While I agree their UI is getting more flashy and unusable, that's not all of it. I used to pay for Dropbox Plus. I no longer do because they removed symlink support. Genuinely useful feature, although I imagine difficult to implement and maintain. They lost me as a customer because of this one feature.
inerte 6y ago
I get your overall point, but isn't Salesforce buying Slack? Just noting on the "it _will_ be a sad day" - perhaps it already is?
watermelon59 6y ago
I hope those products have enough customers that think the way I do. The reason I use and pay for Dropbox is that the primary focus of the company is to offer a product that syncs my files across multiple machines and keeps a copy of those files online. The have to do it well, or else they fail. It makes me nervous as a customer whenever I see them trying to "grow" by offering other products. I don't trust Microsoft, Google or Amazon one bit with their competing products. Those are gigantic companies that don't depend on those working well, and they could kill them overnight. The problem though is this mindset that everything has to constantly grow. That's what makes me nervous as a customer. I don't see what could be so wrong with building a product that works well and maintaining that long term, being satisfied with having a customer base that allows the business to be self-sustainable. If that customer base grows, great. More money. Otherwise, as long as it doesn't shrink to the point where it becomes unsustainable, it should be just fine. But often I have a feeling that that kind of feeling is verboten for tech companies.
dannyw 6y ago
It doesn’t take thousands of engineers to build Dropbox. WhatsApp had 11 engineers. Be scrappy, and don’t buy the expensive “your success is measured by your fundraising” trap.
amelius 6y ago
> It will be a sad day when a $2B business can't survive and is forced to sell. You're forgetting that Dropbox has a very generic product, that eventually any large company like Google or Apple needs to replicate (or already has replicated).
fabianhjr 6y ago
> We need smaller innovative businesses to succeed too. It will be a sad day when a $2B business can't survive and is forced to sell. That is normal under capitalism; There are some allowed advantages like vertical integration and economics of scale for dominant buisnesses and many recognized monopolistic practices (like bundling across markets, zero-rating your service trough mobile providers, and free-offerings to undercut competition, etc)
smcleod 6y ago
Purely from a product perspective I think Evernote still has one big advantage over competitors - it's web clipper and related browser plug-in works almost flawlessly. I know there are other applications to save websites offline, but there aren't many that have the functionality built into your notes editor. The ones that do offer one such Bear and Notion have a vast amount of stability, performance and content / layout preservation problems making their web clippers all but useless for anything other than a plain text site. If anyone does have a recommendation of an Evernote alternative (preferably a native app for macOS and iOS) with an excellent web clipper - I'd be very interested to check it out.
- schnable 6y ago
  Bear web clipper has worked great for me over the past year or so. It was definitely not great before that.
  - smcleod 6y ago
    Does it preserve web page layout? It badly malforms things like tables, lists, diagrams that contain multiple images etc... for me. The Firefox plugin seems to frequently fail to communicate with bear. It also can't seem to clip any website you're logged into, for say you have a private wiki you're logged into, you try clipping it and it ends up just clipping the authentication page.
tinus_hn 6y ago
It’s crazy difficult to survive in a market where your competitor is Microsoft who gives their product which is almost your product away for free. Microsoft is at the ‘good enough’ stage for most people with OneDrive already. Dropbox is going to have a really hard time competing.

aeturnum 6y ago

There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google gives away a shitty form of your service for free because the costs are a rounding error to them, people will feel like the service has no value. I don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this. Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from entering into competition without any potential for profit? At the end of the day, maybe the world as a whole doesn't care that they are missing out on small cool tech companies that will never get huge? But, of course, in an environment where small cool tech is unsustainable we'll never know if they would eventually get huge.

thinkharderdev 6y ago
The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSuite
- aeturnum 6y ago
  I think it's absolutely correct that, for Google, it doesn't make sense to charge for sync. I also think that anyone who's ever relied on sync knows that there is a lot of value in doing it well - especially in a B2B context. It's true that "just" filesystem sync isn't a full product. The product would probably be sync-as-a-service where you can manage distribution and deduplication of resources across your systems. So we have a situation where it doesn't make sense for Google to focus on the feature, but the fact that they have the feature at all trips up specialist companies.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  Isn't this just it? There's no doubt that there's value and that the software is excellent in both cases. I'm just not sure we should try to turn every software project into a moonshot and expect anything sustainable as a result. It's not sustainable in most industries.
- paxys 6y ago
  That was and still is a terrible take. You don't get to an annual revenue of $2B and market cap of $10B with a "feature, not a product". In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    You do if you have the only product that is doing the feature well. But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras. After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.

schnable 6y ago

I think both of these companies could be successful, profitable small software shops if they stayed focused and lean. But they raise money and need to shoot for the moon, and it becomes all or nothing, and that's how they end up in trouble.

awill 6y ago
I understand that Dropbox feels they need to add features to compete, especially as they compete with Google and OneDrive, which both bundle a bunch of extra free stuff. But that should never be at the cost of your core product. Dropbox purchased zulip, and then dropped it. They also launched paper. Not sure anyone uses that.

hiimtroymclure 6y ago

man I love evernote. I dont want to use ios notes and deal with all the confusion icloud brings. I love using a service that is hyper focused on one thing and does it well.

bachmeier 6y ago

> Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. I was also going to comment on their similarities. It's not mentioned as often, but Evernote's biggest selling point in the beginning was that they figured out how to make multidevice sync work. The product was good, but not unique. In the early days there were no competitors that could offer the comfort of Evernote's sync. Unfortunately both companies still have a 2010 mindset, at least when it comes to setting price. Neither seems to understand that their pricing is insane in 2021. $120/year is just too much for Dropbox (and nobody's going to fall for the 2 TB thing). Neither has a competitive free offering, so they're dropping off the radar for anyone looking for a free plan. Anyone working at either company that's not looking for a job should be.

avrionov 6y ago
Very good point about the pricing. Looking at their income statement [1] DropBox is not a very efficient company: Cost Of Revenues: $413.7M (22%) in software companies this includes Operations and customer care. There are spending as much as video sharing sites or video conferencing app. R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup. The average for bigger companies is below 20%. If their growth doesn't recover, which will be difficult, they are going to be a prime target for acquisition from Private equity. PE will slash the expenses significantly and run them for a profit for 5-10 years. [1] https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement
- josteink 6y ago
  > R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup. Last I just checked they tried to crawl out of their “it’s all about files. Simple!”-niche and become a fully web-based project management, chat, collaboration, office-thingie with links to GSuite and Office365. As a long-time user it was quite incomprehensible, and definitely nothing I appreciated or felt added value to my Dropbox. On the contrary, I was annoyed by all the product-nagging about these features I didn’t want. Combine that with them obsoleting long-established features in their desktop sync-software which made them the only universal file-sync solution across all platforms, the reason I chose Dropbox over competing offers. Do all that, and you lost people like me as a user. I’m on Nextcloud now and not coming back. I really don’t think they have worked out their survival plan yet. Trying to outcompete MS and Google on their own turf is obviously not a fight they’re going to win.

awill 6y ago

Both evernote and dropbox started making the free service worse by limiting how many devices you could connect. Dropbox also dropped support for xfs filesystems on Linux (which they later brought back, but not after infuriating Linux users). That's when I stopped using both. I then moved to Google Drive (which is half the price of Dropbox), and moved to using markdown note apps sync with Google Drive (which is free!) I don't think there's a single example of a company where >90% of their userbase if free, and they succeed after making the free user experience worse. They're thinking in terms of money (or reducing costs), but the other view is that they're making the experience for >90% of customers worse. What dropbox seems to forger is that many of their enterprise contracts happened precisely because the decision makers used dropbox personally, and liked it. By screwing over your free customers, you are actually only hurting future sales.

lightgreen 6y ago
> markdown note apps sync with Google Drive Can you recommend the app please? I migrated away from Evernote when it started to have too much features, and was no longer convenient note taking app. I'm using Apple Notes now, which is more or less good, but it is vendor-locked, and I plan to move away from iPhone to Android.
- bihla 6y ago
  I've recently move to using a git repo has my store for notes, and different clients for access and editing. On Desktop I use Obsidian (although most anything will do) and on mobile I use GitJournal which easily links into an existing git repo.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > on mobile I use GitJournal Is it good? On mobile the common case is to launch an app and immediately see/search the notes. Or type something, close the app and assume notes are synched. But git pull and git push are not blazing fast operations. And there are no pushes, to get updates from the server immediately. Git is a good storage, but I doubt it is suitable for notes without intermediate service handing note-specific scenarios.

sizzle 6y ago

Office 365 with MS Teams seems to have reached feature parity with Dropbox and slack in one nice suite of products that just work together seamlessly. You hit on an important insight, with O365 you can edit your documents right from the cloud and cross platform integration is tight with OneDrive and MS Teams. What does everything think?

ramraj07 6y ago
I want the company I treat as my primary file storage solution to be fully committed to that feature as their primary selling point. The last thing I want is Google deciding I don't get to save my files there anymore.
rorykoehler 6y ago
I use both and Dropbox is miles better. I don't understand OneDrive and the way everything is linked together in O365. It's a mess and I have no idea what is really going on in there. It reminds me a little of the icloud experience. Just give me a bog standard directory and let me manage it.
JorgeGT 6y ago
I miss native OneDrive Linux support, but otherwise it is quite good. I can even avoid running office in WINE most of the time. And in Windows the experience is very nice, specially the on-demand file sync.
pedro2 6y ago
Are you sure OneDrive works well? Can you sync PST files? [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-to-madness/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-to-...
- RachelF 6y ago
  That's a great article in the link.

kersten 6y ago

I agree and I'd love to support Dropbox. But I think in order for me to consider that they'd need to have a somewhat competitive pricing model. For example: I'm currently slowly running out of my free Google cloud storage that came with my Gmail account (15GB?). The next step for me is to upgrade to 100GB which will probably be enough for at least the next 10 years or so. With Google Drive that will cost me $1.99 per month which is more than reasonable. With Dropbox the next biggest package (after exceeding the free storage limit of 2GB) is to upgrade to a $11.99 plan for 2 TB (waaaaay more than I will ever need). I'm willing to pay 5.99 for idealistic reasons but I'm not willing to pay more than that just for the sake of supporting a "smaller" non-FAANG company. They need to provide a better deal for something between 2 GB and 2 TB.

tinyhouse 6y ago
You're not a potential customer. They gave up on consumers and focus on companies. Cannot blame them they don't want to lose money on individual users like the competition.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  And yet they are cutting 11% of their staff because they are losing money... Maybe they should figured out somewhere inbetween.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  Even the business plans make no sense. 5TB to share between all employees? Or pay a lot more and get no real answer on what their 'as much as you need' means. It sounds like you have to contact their support and explain why you could possibly need more and then its up to them to decide. Google workspaces is still a better deal and they're not currently even limiting storage.
- blntechie 6y ago
  They are losing big enterprises to Office 365 too. I know at least three 100k+ companies which moved to OneDrive from Dropbox (with lot of grumble from employees to add) in the last couple of years. They compete with Google for startups and small companies. They are stuck in the middle and both Google and Microsoft are crushing them from above and below. Having healthy consumer subscriptions wouldn’t hurt.

zillennial 6y ago

Bottom line: Dropbox has 0 relevance for gen Z users, we all use Wetransfer for sharing, iCloud or Google Drive for storing https://imgur.com/a/6gtowek https://imgur.com/a/6gtowek It peaked in 2012 when the millennials were in college, but it hasn't been cool for the past 5 years now. I never use dropbox ever again after they got rid of Carousel and Mailbox because I frankly don't trust them with my files

Strom 6y ago
Google trends can be interesting, but it's important to keep in mind that people who have dropbox installed and are paying the subscription don't spend their time googling for dropbox.

iamsb 6y ago

Currently there are 93 Internet companies with more than 1 Billion dollar in revenue and that list growing every year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...

avrionov 6y ago
Thank you for the list. Going quickly through the companies there: - Rackspace was sold to private equity and restructured and made public a second time. - LogMeIn was sold to private equity - Kaplan is part of bigger company - Ultimate software merged with Kronos - Shutterfly was acquired by private equity - Wirecard is a scam. - Grubhub is going to be acquired by a bigger competitor - Travelport, Expedia and Bookings are 3 very similar companies which bought all the smaller competitors.
- iamsb 6y ago
  Also note that these are internet companies and do no include myriad other software companies, including enterprise tech. So I am not sure if I agree with your concern on tech being reduced to 5-10 big companies.
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jwr 6y ago

Dropbox is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine. Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of growth. I hope somebody will start a Dropbox competitor as a bootstrapper, with a long-term outlook, no VC funding, and no crazy growth targets. Just do file sync right without eating so much CPU and battery, and without pestering me with useless add-ons, and you'll have my money.

UnpossibleJim 6y ago
From a business perspective, this is how to succeed. From a shareholder perspective, this is how to fail. They are diametrically opposed, which is hysterical. There can be overlap, but not until your original sword is sharpened to a razors edge, to borrow a phrase.
greatgirl 6y ago
I've always felt this, I've never seen a business actually _do_ this. Why don't businesses just stop employing so many people? Stop expanding? Stop trying to acquire more users? I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.
- dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
  They got where they are by raising from investors on the premise they would 10x the money, and also hired top talent with stock options that are only worth anything if the company similarly increases in value. If ambition wasn’t in their DNA, they never would have gotten to the good state you liked in the first place. The payoff if the growth attempts work is asymmetric, so it’s worth the risk.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  As a mid-30s engineer, one evening I went to my VP of Engineering and suggested that we could be a lot more profitable if we cut back to half our staffing levels and concentrated on excelling at just our core product. She smiled politely and told me we had much brighter future than that. As a late 40s VP at that same company, we’re about 25x the revenue and a greater ratio than that of free cash flow, employ far more people, and serve far more customers. That’s not in any way sad.

deeviant 6y ago

I dunno. I feel dropbox has been getting less and less usable as their UI tries to get further away from the very light wrapper around windows explorer(or whatever file explorer your OS of choice uses). I really just wanted it to be a folder that exists on all my computers. That's it. Now when I ask it to open the dropbox folder it stays within it's own application window and attempts to recreate windows explorer, but without all the features of windows explorer and tons of gunk I don't want. This seems to be a problem of both the "lets push our userbase into patterns that work for us rather than them" and "Hey I'm a UI designer so I have design me some UIs, and I'll never stop, even though the UI is correct, I'll keep changing it forever!"

JeffL 6y ago
Yeah, when I forget and accidentally click on the Dropbox icon when I want my Dropbox folder and get whatever abomination it is that comes up now instead of the folder, I get real ragey. It's such an anti-consumer thing when companies take a nice product and add a bunch of crap to it that no one wants.
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  I liked Dropbox Paper a lot, but then they took away the ability to bulk export notes. There is no good reason to do that. Only bad ones.
brownbat 6y ago
This and constant nagging that I'm running out of space (I'm definitely not), and (tightening?) limits on number of machines, had me migrate to Synology Drive this last week. Now I have basically unlimited space and devices. I'm sorry to the hard working devs, I'm part of the problem I guess. But it's tough to pay for something with free alternatives that have fewer limitations and better features.
kccqzy 6y ago
While I agree their UI is getting more flashy and unusable, that's not all of it. I used to pay for Dropbox Plus. I no longer do because they removed symlink support. Genuinely useful feature, although I imagine difficult to implement and maintain. They lost me as a customer because of this one feature.

inerte 6y ago

I get your overall point, but isn't Salesforce buying Slack? Just noting on the "it _will_ be a sad day" - perhaps it already is?

watermelon59 6y ago

I hope those products have enough customers that think the way I do. The reason I use and pay for Dropbox is that the primary focus of the company is to offer a product that syncs my files across multiple machines and keeps a copy of those files online. The have to do it well, or else they fail. It makes me nervous as a customer whenever I see them trying to "grow" by offering other products. I don't trust Microsoft, Google or Amazon one bit with their competing products. Those are gigantic companies that don't depend on those working well, and they could kill them overnight. The problem though is this mindset that everything has to constantly grow. That's what makes me nervous as a customer. I don't see what could be so wrong with building a product that works well and maintaining that long term, being satisfied with having a customer base that allows the business to be self-sustainable. If that customer base grows, great. More money. Otherwise, as long as it doesn't shrink to the point where it becomes unsustainable, it should be just fine. But often I have a feeling that that kind of feeling is verboten for tech companies.

dannyw 6y ago

It doesn’t take thousands of engineers to build Dropbox. WhatsApp had 11 engineers. Be scrappy, and don’t buy the expensive “your success is measured by your fundraising” trap.

amelius 6y ago

> It will be a sad day when a $2B business can't survive and is forced to sell. You're forgetting that Dropbox has a very generic product, that eventually any large company like Google or Apple needs to replicate (or already has replicated).

fabianhjr 6y ago

> We need smaller innovative businesses to succeed too. It will be a sad day when a $2B business can't survive and is forced to sell. That is normal under capitalism; There are some allowed advantages like vertical integration and economics of scale for dominant buisnesses and many recognized monopolistic practices (like bundling across markets, zero-rating your service trough mobile providers, and free-offerings to undercut competition, etc)

smcleod 6y ago

Purely from a product perspective I think Evernote still has one big advantage over competitors - it's web clipper and related browser plug-in works almost flawlessly. I know there are other applications to save websites offline, but there aren't many that have the functionality built into your notes editor. The ones that do offer one such Bear and Notion have a vast amount of stability, performance and content / layout preservation problems making their web clippers all but useless for anything other than a plain text site. If anyone does have a recommendation of an Evernote alternative (preferably a native app for macOS and iOS) with an excellent web clipper - I'd be very interested to check it out.

schnable 6y ago
Bear web clipper has worked great for me over the past year or so. It was definitely not great before that.
- smcleod 6y ago
  Does it preserve web page layout? It badly malforms things like tables, lists, diagrams that contain multiple images etc... for me. The Firefox plugin seems to frequently fail to communicate with bear. It also can't seem to clip any website you're logged into, for say you have a private wiki you're logged into, you try clipping it and it ends up just clipping the authentication page.

tinus_hn 6y ago

It’s crazy difficult to survive in a market where your competitor is Microsoft who gives their product which is almost your product away for free. Microsoft is at the ‘good enough’ stage for most people with OneDrive already. Dropbox is going to have a really hard time competing.