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I don't really understand Dropbox's strategy. As a service, Dropbox does one thing pretty well – syncing data so that users can get a more or less seamless onl

I don't really understand Dropbox's strategy. As a service, Dropbox does one thing pretty well – syncing data so that users can get a more or less seamless online/offline experience using data that's shared on multiple devices. However, sharing a Dropbox with other people is a disaster. Anyone can delete or change anything in a shared volume. No access control is offered at all. All invited users are treated as fully trusted users by default. I suppose you could use the API to roll your own access control, but it baffles me that the default sharing defaults to such a potentially disastrous setting. Their documentation claims its because it's impossible to retain cross-platform access control settings, but that seems wrong – why not just verify access via the Dropbox app layer instead of trying to embed permissions metadata at the OS layer?

michaeldhopkins 15y ago
Well, there is the web interface for read-only. For write-only I suppose there is simply emailing a file to the person who owns the Dropbox. For accidental/malicious deletes there is version rollback as well as one's personal drive backups. I think in order for sharing to "just work" there must be limits to the way ordinary users can accidentally change settings. For those who absolutely require levels of access there are alternatives, just as there are alternatives for those who require something specific which Dropbox does not provide in every other aspect of file-sharing.
RVijay007 15y ago
The strategy is that they need to grow their company and potential revenue sourcing methods. The strategy for many is to build an ecosystem; for them, having developers that make it super easy to to put any kind of information anywhere into the cloud is going to cause users to mindlessly start using it as their online hard drive, and thus push more users from free to paid, thus capturing more revenue. The mobile future means that even more uncapturable data now becomes capturable in digital form, and they want people to store on their services. Sharing is awesome for them as it eats into both people's storage for the same amount of data on the cloud, so it's basically pure profit.

michaeldhopkins 15y ago

Well, there is the web interface for read-only. For write-only I suppose there is simply emailing a file to the person who owns the Dropbox. For accidental/malicious deletes there is version rollback as well as one's personal drive backups. I think in order for sharing to "just work" there must be limits to the way ordinary users can accidentally change settings. For those who absolutely require levels of access there are alternatives, just as there are alternatives for those who require something specific which Dropbox does not provide in every other aspect of file-sharing.

RVijay007 15y ago

The strategy is that they need to grow their company and potential revenue sourcing methods. The strategy for many is to build an ecosystem; for them, having developers that make it super easy to to put any kind of information anywhere into the cloud is going to cause users to mindlessly start using it as their online hard drive, and thus push more users from free to paid, thus capturing more revenue. The mobile future means that even more uncapturable data now becomes capturable in digital form, and they want people to store on their services. Sharing is awesome for them as it eats into both people's storage for the same amount of data on the cloud, so it's basically pure profit.