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This. Recently came back to macOS after a decade on the other side, and one surprise was how terrible the official Dropbox client was. Installed Maestral instea

This. Recently came back to macOS after a decade on the other side, and one surprise was how terrible the official Dropbox client was. Installed Maestral instead and it just works -- just like Dropbox used to. <begin rant>I see Dropbox as one of the biggest failures of the VC model. If only they had been bootstrapped, they would probably have stuck with their initial sync offering: A perfectly executed solution to a problem everybody has. And a small team could have made a good living here -- even with reasonably priced non-free options. Instead I imagine some VC partner convinced them to "grow their market" (or maybe "prepare for cloud"), and now they are descending into irrelevance. <end rant>

geophile 3y ago
Yeah, I remember when they were briefly going to solve the problem of being a universal translator of file formats. They announced this at a conference I attended and I could see the thought bubbles of everyone in the audience: What? That will fail, are you nuts?
dunham 3y ago
Yeah, I bailed around the time they switched to a gigantic electron app and increased the prices with no added functionality that I wanted.
xorcist 3y ago
Sure, but without VC money the product space wouldn't exist at all, at least not as a free service. Who doesn't want free storage? No one, that's who. See also: everything from Sourceforge to Docker Hub. Very few can complete the transition into a paid service. The important distinction is whether you sell a product or a service. Dropbox is clearly a service, but it's easy to envision a product instead. Had the user paid for storage up front, the product would be incentivized to support multiple backends to be able to compete on cost. But it doesn't, because it is the storage service that is the actual thing being sold.
- Fatnino 3y ago
  People have been burned enough times by now that any fly-by-night that shows up promising free storage gets taken with a huge grain of salt. Why would I upload my data for you to hold for free if history shows you are going to be gone in 6 months? So to answer your question "Who doesn't want free storage?", everyone who's been burned before, that's who.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    ...Or worse, they start mining and monetizing your personal data under the pretense of a "free" service. There's no free lunch.
mmargerum 3y ago
i've never had a single issue with dropbox on 3 macs in 10 years. Plenty of issues with google drive and one drive (or whatever it's newest name is).
- mbrochh 3y ago
  Yea same. Have Dropbox on all my macs, ipads and iphones, never a single issue whatsoever.

geophile 3y ago

Yeah, I remember when they were briefly going to solve the problem of being a universal translator of file formats. They announced this at a conference I attended and I could see the thought bubbles of everyone in the audience: What? That will fail, are you nuts?

dunham 3y ago

Yeah, I bailed around the time they switched to a gigantic electron app and increased the prices with no added functionality that I wanted.

xorcist 3y ago

Sure, but without VC money the product space wouldn't exist at all, at least not as a free service. Who doesn't want free storage? No one, that's who. See also: everything from Sourceforge to Docker Hub. Very few can complete the transition into a paid service. The important distinction is whether you sell a product or a service. Dropbox is clearly a service, but it's easy to envision a product instead. Had the user paid for storage up front, the product would be incentivized to support multiple backends to be able to compete on cost. But it doesn't, because it is the storage service that is the actual thing being sold.

Fatnino 3y ago
People have been burned enough times by now that any fly-by-night that shows up promising free storage gets taken with a huge grain of salt. Why would I upload my data for you to hold for free if history shows you are going to be gone in 6 months? So to answer your question "Who doesn't want free storage?", everyone who's been burned before, that's who.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  ...Or worse, they start mining and monetizing your personal data under the pretense of a "free" service. There's no free lunch.

mmargerum 3y ago

i've never had a single issue with dropbox on 3 macs in 10 years. Plenty of issues with google drive and one drive (or whatever it's newest name is).

mbrochh 3y ago
Yea same. Have Dropbox on all my macs, ipads and iphones, never a single issue whatsoever.