Why Dropbox is Failing

One thing Dropbox does which I think is pretty easy and yet noone has done is their Apps.

As a developer you can create a dropbox App which means there is a specific subdirectory in the users dropbox folder which you have access to. That's it, really simple. This lets me create for instance a purchase order distribution system in which the company drops their purchase orders in a folder and they will be distributed to their vendors with email notifications. What other system facilitates this?

In contrast Google Drive apps are all or nothing. You cannot ask for permission on a single folder!

Are there any other services that can do this like Box.net?

I used to love Dropbox because of how simple it was. You could even host static HTML websites through it. All links were direct links, it was beautiful. Now you have to go through splash pages that try and make you login to the service, it's a pain.

I see no reason to use it anymore though. It's expensive, there's little free space and it lacks in features compared to Google/One Drive.

Are things that bad at Dropbox? I know its user growth has been slowing down, but I thought it's more because they've been focusing on monetization. It does seem to me that Dropbox is a feature, not a complete product. If it goes away tomorrow, all I need to do is to move all my files from Dropbox folder to either OneDrive/GoogleDrive/AmazonDrive, and all is good.

I've seen some data sharing problem that's critical for business and I don't think Dropbox can help there. For example, we need to share (and work on) some very confidential and sizable datasets (think hundreds of GBs). After looking around a bit, we decided to go with an AWS VPC (two factor login required), and set up big Windows machine in the VPC, and everyone who need to work on the datasets have to remote desktop in. It's not ideal, but at least we can be reasonably sure that no one needs to make a copy of the data (one can not accidentally do that, and it's not trivial to do deliberately).

I've used Dropbox for a long time, and it's been really useful in school (as others have noted) and for sharing files, but recently I've actually moved to ownCloud (https://owncloud.org/). I hooked a 500GB HDD into my RasPi at home, spent some time on configuration and setup, and now I've got functionally the same product, but limited in space only by how much storage I want to buy (one-time cost, obviously) and plug in instead of the 13.25GB I have on DB that I had to scrounge around for offers and promotions to get.

It's nice because I have a backup of whatever files I'd like at home instead of somewhere else, and if I were super paranoid I could make that into redundant storage, back that up daily, etc. It's a little more work but a lot more control.

If the linked post is accurate, it sounds like an absolutely horrible work environment.

I have 23gb of free storage with DB (took advantage of early referral deals), and of the many sync storage services I've tried (many of which no longer exist), DB is the only one that's consistently worked near-perfectly for me. Aside from wondering at the products seemingly coming out of left field, had no idea of any internal company issues...

The only thing I use dropbox for is to publically store screenshots for easy sharing, and dropbox fails more than 50% of the time at that. (the "click to share public link" feature, sometimes takes upwards of 2 minutes, sometimes it's instant)

I'd pay except its impractical. My club uses Dropbox to hold our artwork (game design club). Its several GB of art.

But the pricing plan goes from free (and we've hit our limit on that) to over a thousand dollars annual. Yes, that's right. We are 10 people, times the monthly fee each, times 12 months per year. For a hobby club.

The worst part of that is, we'd be paying for what? To hold our own data on our own machines, sharing it with our own bandwidth. Dropbox adds a sync feature to that. Which seems like it would cost a fixed fee to access, now and forever. Not scaling with the size of our data (our data, on our machines).

Anyway, we don't pay.

This reminds me of working at Lycos as a PM a long time back, soon after they collapsed. I distinctly remember it taking 3 weeks to approve a community update email, and a 50k budget to outsource for a simple nav bar with categories...

It's been my experience that anytime you work for a company larger than about 50 people, it starts devolving into the sort of situation the OP describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle. The best you can hope to do in this situation is to put on the big boy/girl pants and be a champion for change.

Problem of Dropbox as a product I will possibly use, that functions I need from it, can be relatively easy achieved with git on your home server or NAS, and Working Copy.app on your tablet or phone. At a fraction of cost.

I have a 8GB iPhone 5c but I take a lot of pictures/videos. I'd like to have them stored in the cloud and maybe only have thumbnails on the device. Has anyone solved this? Music can now be cloud streamed.

Is Dropbox profitable?