From the service provider perspective storage is a feature not a service. From the customer perspective it is a pretty important product. The customer may not

From the service provider perspective storage is a feature not a service. From the customer perspective it is a pretty important product. The customer may not be aware of this until it is too late. It becomes tempting to store your data with application providers because it seems more "cost effective". I try to avoid storing a lot of data with services that offer online storage as part of a product. For instance image storage coupled with image processing applications. Because I really care about my pictures, so I don't want to have my choice of image processing software dictate where I store them. There's also the fact that I do not trust the company that makes the software I use for image processing. I use their software because in the pre-enshittification era of their business, I got used to using it. Switching has a cost. Now the image processing software I use is a bit of a liability. They haven't done anything that is so bad that I'm motivated to ditch them, but it feels like they are one bad product decision away from me jumping ship. I haven't looked at Dropbox from an investment point of view, so I can't say if their business is growing, declining, still sound, or just unsexy because it is undramatic. Perhaps there has been drama and I didn't notice. But from a user point of view it is really attractive to have storage services that are JUST storage. I find real value in not having storage tied to Google, Microsoft, Adobe and whatnot. And if that makes Dropbox boring: good. They should be utterly dull.