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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition in their interface, I might have missed it). After I started uploading pics on Google photos, I have little to store on Dropbox.

Synced storage might be big enough problem for it to continue to grow bigger, but I wonder if it's a meaningful moat. What if the storage + software gets commoditized to an extent that it becomes essentially free for most people?

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Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision.

I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well.

A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.

Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?

The people who erroneously valued it are shareholders in the company, the company exists to benefit its shareholders, ergo (the shareholders would say) it's a problem for the company.

Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money.

Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work.

So yes that's a problem for the company. Ultimately this model of "investment" can kill a business that is technically succeeding because the speculators don't see a high enough return. That's also a problem for society as it creates instability and prevents technologically successful companies from prospering long term.

At least that's one narrative that appears to fit well with my observations.

On the other hand if the speculators also reward people doing the work, they incentivize lots of them to do that work. Hence startup economy, where many companies blatantly lie that they care about users, where in fact those companies are only vehicles for the founders to get a good exit.

If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.

Plenty of investors are risking other people's money, though. Venture capitalists themselves are prime examples of this.

So what? That's literally their jobs. In fact, both parties entered into that contract knowingly with the expectation that it will be mutually beneficial.

How is that money "free"?

Free as in no time or labor spent by themselves. At least that is what I think he meant

It turns out being an institutional investor is a fulltime job. It's quite ridiculous for GP to believe otherwise.

Be that as it may, this is pedantic quibbling outside of the point the GGP post author was actually trying to make: speculative pressure by investors (lazy or otherwise) conflicts with the aim of stable long-term equilibrium doing +/- one thing well.

If you actually care about building a sustainable business, not Unicorns and moonshots and other things investors want you to become and do, don't take investment, or at least not much.

Hah. It becomes a problem for it's users. When they are chasing quarterlies and the focus shifts from providing a good experience to making numbers, you'll feel it. Most companies DNA is pretty baked in by the time they offer publicly.

Evernote is a good example of that.

"When you owe the bank $1000, you're in trouble. When you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 the bank is in trouble"

Similar mechanics apply to having a large valuation, no?

In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, where N >> 1) at some point.

That's not how investing works. People don't invest because they think a company is worth X, they invest because they think it will be worth X at some point in the future adjusted for the risk of not being worth X. Further, they don't necessarily buy stock from the company.

In other words startups have a small chance of being worth a much larger X, and Exxon has a very large chance of being worth a slightly larger X. If you need zero risk buy government bonds not stock.

Um, it certainly is how investing works. They think the company will be worth >X in the future ( >>X in the case of pre-IPO investing).

Stock and Bonds are very different things. A bond is an agreement with a company to hand back X amount of money at time Y. Stock is an agreement to share in future profits.

Importantly, when you buy stock from a someone other than the company then the price you pay has little to do with the company. But, again my point is risk is an inherent part of the process. If you invest in a startup and they use all of that money to buy government bonds and then fold in five years you would be pissed because they avoided risking your capital.

I think you are talking past each other because you are not talking about the same party when asserting whether there is or isn't a problem. It's true that the investors don't have a problem if Dropbox fails to live up to its valuation. Venture capitalists expect that most of their investments will fail. But a company that has accepted venture capital is beholden to its investors and will almost certainly have a problem if it fails to live up to their expectations. Remember that investors are part owners, and get to make decisions about how the company should be run. The more dissatisfied they become, the more drastic the changes they will demand.

I recall this being something pointed out in "Silicon Valley" where an offer/valuation was way over the top and would leave the team in this same kind of situation. Dropbox had to accept the offer, so they did agree to the terms that put themselves where they are now.

They can survive, but from an investment standpoint they need to be able to expand and grow for it to make sense.

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.

As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost.

Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.

> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free

I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?"

This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.

Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user.

rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.

I've been looking at rclone but am always leery of trusting any new software project with my data. Have you had any issues with it? Thanks.

I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.

I wasn't involved in these design discussions early on, and Skydrive certainly didn't use rsync, this was just meant as an example of "this is essentially a solved problem, we just need some UI". It isn't, and presenting it as such just gets you into a bad situation.

But Dropbox doesn't handle any merging of changes; any conflicts are left for the user to resolve. In this way it's basically an automatic version of Unison, which is exactly "some UI" around a "solved problem." Right?

I'm not familiar with Unison, and have no idea how successful it is, nor where it falls down.

It doesn't handle merging of changes within files, however, if you take a step back, consider that you're essentially merging lists of metadata (with hashes of blobs), not just uploading these blobs; and because the systems that need to be synced are distributed, not always connected, and users want to read/write all of them you get the limitations of the classic CAP theorem.

E.g. the quite feasible scenario with two computers, both partially synced, and both getting files changed/added/removed/moved while the sync is happening. Consider applications creating temporary files while a document is being edited, and expecting to be able to create those files... and then it results in some app being unable to open the same document because it's "already open" on another machine. There are all kinds of interesting conflicts and race conditions possible, and you need to resolve them all in some way that doesn't weird out the users.

Stock git explodes when dealing with binary files that are above a certain size or are changing frequently. So forget about photo collections, shared Photoshop files, or any other non-text document formats. The workarounds had a lot of pain points for a while (that maybe are fixed now in 2017, haven't explored that recently).

I was more thinking the concept of source code control than the specific, but used a specific since a specific file transfer program was mentioned. Some source code control programs handle binaries just fine.

Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation.

Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS.

Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client.

Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux client.

Google Drive: Stories of unreliable syncing behavior, app instability, and so forth. No Linux client. Google history of killing non-core products.

Not only did Dropbox get there first, they did it mostly right, to the point where their competitors can be described as also-rans.

The other thing is that Dropbox has "good file sync service" as their entire mission, while every other provider of note has it as some value-add into their other services, meaning it's subject to the whims of what those companies are doing on a particular day.

rclone serves as a great Linux client for OneDrive. I run it in a cron on my home server and at-will on my laptop.

And that's fine for you and me, but limits its adoption (hence appeal, hence longevity) to people that download unofficial, unsupported third party clients and manually set up cron jobs.

The reason Dropbox is kicking ass is that nobody wants to deal with the manual work. Download a program, put stuff in folder, stuff appears elsewhere. No thought required. Simple.

I had to stop using Dropbox because it was unusable on Linux. It leaked memory, hogged CPU cycles, and cranked up IO Wait times.

It was simple and thoughtless, for sure; and that reflected in its decrepit behaviour.

I've been using Dropbox on Linux for many years, and it's definitely had some occasional issues with memory leaks, and its general CPU and memory usage has definitely increased. Used to be it never went over 100 MB RSS, but now it's always well over that, at about 250 right now.

Anyway, I run it at nice 5 and "ionice -c3", and even though I'd like to switch to something else, I still haven't found anything better for Linux use. Everything I've looked at has some issue that makes it a non-starter.

> I run it at nice 5 and ionice 18

No thought required. Simple.

;)

Oops, I meant ionice -c3, not 18. I run a backup client at nice 18.

I was all in on iCloud Drive, except when I discovered you can't share folders. So I had to go back to Dropbox...

> Google Drive: Stories of unreliable syncing behavior, app instability, and so forth. No Linux client. Google history of killing non-core products.

OverGrive is great. Not official, but it handles and looks just as well as the macOS client.

Also, Dropbox is the only one that offers delta-sync which is a godsend when editing multi-gigabyte PSDs/Media Files. Other providers would simply not work for this use-case with my 100KB/s upload speed. Seems very wasteful as well, uploading every file from scratch for every edit.. kinda curious how users on these providers deal with it?

For iCloud, you actually can use iCloud Drive via a web interface from other OSes - I think the biggest limitation is actually that you can't share arbitrary files, only certain types of files (Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Notes, Photos).

I could easily go all in on iCloud Drive if I could make arbitrary files available to other users.

Apple also has a Windows client for iCloud Drive, and you can use standard Word/Excel/PowerPoint files and still edit them through Pages/Numbers/Keynote on a different Mac.

> The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.

Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Google[3], and Amazon[4] already do have comparable products, with comparable prices[5].

1. https://www.apple.com/icloud/icloud-drive/

2. https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/

3. https://www.google.com/drive/

4. https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home

5. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/onedrive-dropbox-google-drive-an...

You'd think so, but it's not that easy.

Even the big service providers, like Dropbox and Microsoft have run into issues of scale that result in price increases or reduced storage quotas, later in the product cycle, forced onto existing customers. Typically a result of poor early planning or lack of insight into actual resources required per user.

Or bait and switch to grow fast quickly.

Dropbox, recently (quietly) raised prices on their Business plan, forcing existing Business customers to choose between a fixed storage space quota or a price increase. The decision will be forced on users on renewal in 2018, which is why we haven't heard much about this yet. https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/30/dropbox-smart-sync-and-paper/

Microsoft had to do similar a year ago. Forcing all users off their unlimited plan, and reducing storage quotas for free users. It was painful. http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-onedrive-un...

At the same time you've got a race to the bottom from big companies targeting the consumer market. These providers most likely have no hope of generating revenue directly from the cloud storage itself, and instead use cloud storage as a loss leader for other channels and products.

For example, Google integrating free "unlimited" photo storage into their products, Apple iCloud integration and significant price cuts. If these loss leading experiments fail there will be another round of forced price increases or reduced storage quotas. Only time will tell.

So far it's a good bet against "Unlimited" free services:

Near-Unlimited Cloud Storage Service Copy.com Is Shutting Down: http://lifehacker.com/near-unlimited-cloud-storage-service-c...

Bitcasa kills infinite cloud storage plans, increases pricing as much as 10x http://www.geek.com/apps/bitcasa-kills-infinite-cloud-storag...

Then you've got Amazon cloud drive, offering unlimited Storage, but only for non-commercial personal use, with all sorts of restrictions. Sole practitioners and small businesses not welcome.

Using Your Files with the Services. You may use the Services only to store, retrieve, manage, organize, and access Your Files for personal, non-commercial purposes using the features and functionality we make available. You may not use the Services to store, transfer, or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service ...

And this open-ended goodie:

The Services are offered in the United States. We may restrict access from other locations. There may be limits on the types of content you can store and share using the Services, such as file types we do not support, and on the number or type of devices you can use to access the Services. We may impose other restrictions on use of the Services.

https://www.amazon.com/cd/tou??ref_=cd_unlimited_tou

And finally most consumer grade cloud providers offer little protection in terms of encryption. Google, Amazon and Microsoft might get big brother on your data. You might even have real people looking at your files for whatever reason.

Our Use of Your Files. We may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Services to you, enforce the terms of the Agreement, and improve our services, and you give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, use information about Your Files to organize them on your behalf, and access Your Files to provide technical support https://www.amazon.com/cd/tou??ref_=cd_unlimited_tou

Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored. https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

Big brother with good intentions:

Microsoft Anti-Porn Workers Sue Over PTSD - ex-employees of the company’s online safety team say they had to watch horrific online videos of child abuse, bestiality, and murders—and that Microsoft ignored their PTSD. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/11/microsoft-a...

Finally, as a few others in this thread have stated, the underlying technology behind syncing and sharing is quite complicated. Cross-platform compatibility and maintaining backwards compatibility with older operating systems is mind boggling difficult.

In this regard in might be better to choose a cloud provider that offers end-to-end encryption, and has been in business for more than a few years (to ensure they've got the business model worked out).

Here's a few that come to mind:

https://www.spideroak.com https://www.sync.com https://www.tresorit.com

DropBox has the same Big Brother clauses in their terms of use.

https://www.dropbox.com/terms#acceptable_use

* you must not even try to ... sell the Services unless specifically authorized to do so; publish or share materials that are unlawfully pornographic or indecent, or that contain extreme acts of violence; advocate bigotry or hatred against any person or group of people based on their ... *

https://www.dropbox.com/terms#privacy

we store, process, and transmit Your Stuff—like files, messages, comments, and photos

Interesting. I had to sign something saying that I would be exposed to terrible stuff during the course of my job at MSN, and I wouldn't sue the company for damages. This was back in 2003. Maybe they stopped asking employees to sign this document?

> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free

This kind of thinking is exactly why Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon will never deliver something better.

Yes - they can deliver something better for free but they think "it shouldn't take a lot of effort" so whatever they deliver is not adequate.

They also do not have no business reason to do it since valuable engineers and time can be better spent on other business sectors. For example, Amazon Cloud Drive is just a checkbox (look you can save you photos and videos also on our storage) from point of view Amazon management. Google Drive is the same. Microsoft has the same thinking: look here is OneDrive - but we really want you to buy Sharepoint.

So do not expect anything of Dropbox quality from these companies.

> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.

OneDrive is perhaps not quite as polished and its Linux support is lacking/unofficial/nonexistent depending on your viewpoint, but Microsoft's push to Office365 means that if you subscribe to it you're getting at least as much storage as Dropbox offers at a monthly cost that's ~70% of Dropbox for a single user, or 5x that (5 * 1TB/user) at the same annual price as Dropbox. On top of that, you get the assorted Office apps.

One notable weakness of the non-Business version of OneDrive is the lack of version history, so if that's important or you have no other forms of backup then that could be a deciding factor.

I'll leave out of it the question of whose servers data resides on and passes through.

OneDrive supports version history for Office documents but not other file types.

I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox...

Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

[2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home

It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.

Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.

Dropbox is remote backup and cloud storage. It solves a rather different (larger) problem from a local backup.

Is this a hidden plan? The cheapest unlimited plan I see right now on their website is 54€/month, which is the advanced business plan for 3 users. Even if I take the annual plan and divide the price by 12 it's 45€/month. Also these prices don't include VAT, while the personal plans do. Perhaps you were unaware that the business plans can't be bought for a single user?

I stand corrected, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.

Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page make this clear. You have to click into the business section to actually see that. Super annoying.

Does anything stop you from uploading 10s or 100s of TB? I recently crossed 1TB of storage use on S3 (which costs around $20/month) and am in the process of exploring alternatives.

I've never really understood how companies can offer "unlimited" storage at low prices.

"Unlimited" space in any online service almost always means "there is a soft cap where we start threatening to shut down your service, but we won't tell you what it is ahead of time".

Actually quite an interesting point. Consider S3. They provide unlimited storage, but their software has to be able to keep up with the insane growth of data, albeit the hardware storage demand as well.

S3's cost to the consumer scales with the amount stored. That's different from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google, who offer enterprise-facing non-developer storage options at a flat rate for "unlimited".

They can do this because these enterprise-facing products offer fewer performance guarantees relative to their developer-facing products. But, ultimately, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, in literally all of these products.

I would think enterprise offering would have a stricter SLA than developer-facing product. The only thing between Dropbox and Amazon is that there is no independent enterprise offering for S3, except Amazon pays a penalty for violating said SLA.

You still pay per TB. So yes, if you pay, you can have "unlimited" storage.

Overage? Like they can offer 30 people a terabyte of storage for every 10TB available because very few people will use their full quota.

Simple bandwidth would stop most people from uploading that much. It would take a long time at typical ISP speeds.

AFAICT only if you buy 3 licenses minimum.

That's a bummer. I have a sizeable chunk of raw image files I'd love to back up somewhere without having to have it on my machine, Dropbox would be a good fit if it wasn't for the 1TB limit on individuals. Ended up uploading directly to S3 and archiving to Glacier.

Amazon Prime Photos allows unlimited photo storage (RAW included) with any $100/yr subscription to Amazon Prime. If you're already paying this for the other benefits, then it is free.

At the risk of "ruining" it for some users, Amazon doesn't appear to validate nor re-compress uploaded images. I uploaded some bits from /dev/random as a .png, and it counted towards photo storage, and I got the same bits back re-downloading the test file. So you don't even have to resort to stuffing metadata or steganography.

For the record, I don't exploit this loophole and only tested to satisfy my curiosity. At $60/yr. it's already very cheap for unlimited -- it's my tertiary backup so I'll accept the risk that "unlimited" is qualified -- generic file storage.

Correct, didn't realize that, thanks for pointing out.

As others have pointed out, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.

Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page state this minimum. You have to click into the business section to actually see that.

> Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server).

Syncthing with a node on the NAS, and then use Duply to backup to the cloud. There's clients for everything, and you can keep history too.

Yes, that's possible, but I was indicating that if Dropbox would move into a full backup business it would be a big move and might worth consider.

>S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox...

Might be worth looking into Duplicati [1]. You choose the backend, and it does the other things you mention ("Backup files and folders with strong AES-256 encryption. Save space with incremental backups and data deduplication. Run backups on any machine through the web-based interface or via command line interface. Duplicati has a built-in scheduler and auto-updater.")

[1]: https://www.duplicati.com/

Try Google Drive and Google Photos. Google Photos offer unlimited space for high-res photos.

Dropbox won't analyse and sell you left and right.

You cannot compare these two services. One is a service, one is an ad machine.

Okay, but that's the sort of tradeoff you have to make when you you won't pay freight on things. Backup is basically a solved problem, you just have to pay for it.

Arq is a well-supported piece of commercial software. It's a one time $50 license, but works with a half dozen different cloud services. Another commenter mentioned the open source Duplicati, which sounds similar. I haven't looked into it, but probably would if I wasn't already set up with a decent solution.

Folks often end up with a tonne of excess space either on a paid Dropbox account, or Google Suite via their university or company. You can also get unlimited space on ACD for $60/a (some people on /r/datahoarder claim to have uploaded over a petabyte), and Glacier is quite affordable on a per GB basis. It's pretty easy to get reliable versioned encrypted cloud backups on different providers that run overnight without requiring a lot of attention from an end user.

The biggest gap I have left is that most of my photos are on iCloud and if you don't have space on your Mac to store local copies to back up to somewhere else, it's easy to end up with only one copy of vital data.

You could go with something like https://www.cloudfuze.com/ But then you would end up paying 5$ a month. It gives you the freedom to choose the storage provider or multiple of them transparently.

I agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.

I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".

Why is synced storage such a hard thing to disrupt with an open source app? Like nextCloud?

And before you say "open source is only for geeks to install" consider this: Firefox is open source, and it was beating IE.

So my question is, what's really so hard about making an open source app that will sync to ARBITRARY servers AND encrypt everything, and those servers all run nextCloud?

I think it's most about awareness/marketing. Just go out in the streets and ask people if they know about nextCloud. If they do, ask them if they run it. Most don't because it takes time and effort to run things. nextCloud is squarely in the enterprise space. nextCloud-as-a-service is a supremely hard market to enter because you need investment from day 1 (storage has to be very high and pricing has to be very low since it's the first thing people will compare against).

IMO open source projects need a critical mass of developers to achieve "polish". All the edge cases and so on that isnt' a matter of writing clever code, but sitting there for days writing tests or manually investigating corner cases, or putting in resources for good crash reporting, seamless updates and things like that. I have yet to see an open source project that deals well with this (Firefox doesn't count because they have a lot of $$ and can employ devs to work on all these things.)

When you reach a scale of millions of users, all these tiny details start to affect a sizeable amount of users.

I think part of the challenge is manufacturing and handing out a distributed system to nontechnical users and then trying to debug their issues without having central control. (Or any control, really)

As someone who built an OSS synced storage server, scratching my own itch was pretty easy but responding to bug reports that are far outside of my use cases can get tedious. And somehow it feels like there are just so many, compared to other areas.

Edit: git-annex supports encryption and webdav remotes (and thus, ownCloud/Nextcloud/others) and it works pretty well.

Normalley I'd say - "There's nothing wrong with that and they can do what they want."

but... .they're filing for an IPO.. so their shareholders are going to start hitting them with the "If you don't always make more money than last time we'll fire you and find someone who will."

If you don't want to expand your business far beyond what it's already doing then you don't IPO and take on shareholders.

To this point, Dropbox does an excellent job of what they set out to do. I haven't seen anybody do it better and I'm a happy paid user. Being able to pay $10 / month for 1TB of fast, instantly synced and versioned online storage integrated directly into the filesystem is hard to beat.

The place where Dropbox is spectacularly bad is multiple account support. Google does a good job of multiple account support - you log in to the relevant multiple accounts and things work.

Dropbox expects you to pseudo-merge exactly one personal account with exactly one business account. You end up with a mess. It gets even worse when trying to unmerge them. And is not useful should you have more accounts than exactly one of each. That mess will keep coming back to bite you almost every month as Dropbox doesn't do what you'd expect.

Dropbox is lucky that that they do two things their competitors don't: they support Linux and syncing generally works.

I could see that. I'm _only_ using it for personal so I haven't really run into the issues that you're talking about.

I think for Dropbox to operate in a pure filesystem-native-first experience they're probably approaching it from the 1 computer = 1 person standpoint (or one logged in user on the computer at least).

I've got one colleague who mistakenly let Dropbox psuedo-merge his personal and business accounts several years ago. He still hasn't completely fixed it!

I was around when they introduced the "multi account" support, and it was very easy to see how/why they did it. Instead of updating their clients to support multiple accounts (which they should have done), the client just keeps supporting only one account. Then on their back end they return "merged" content to the client. You can easily see how this can create chaos, because other people can also be updating your personal and business content, and untangling it all is a mess.

Same thing for me. I think I have 2 or 3 accounts (by accident) that I created over the years. When I login I never know what files to expect... that being said I don't use DropBox that much, but occasionally someone shares something via DropBox and I almost inevitably have a login issue.

Huh. I have a personal account and a business account but I'm glad I've never tried to pseudo-merge them. I just shared a folder from one account to the other for the one set of files I wanted to share.

Paper is a great little part of Dropbox that is showing some real potential. They recently added task dates and assignments, and some nice formatting options (like code blocks with syntax highlighting).

I was a big fan of dropbox until I bought a Chromebook and got T's worth of space in Google Drive for free. I don't think I've used my dropbox in a long time. I don't think I know too many people who use them either.

I was a big fan of dropbox until I bought a Chromebook and got T's worth of space in Google Drive for free.

Just FYI in case you don't know: unless you have a paid GSuite account¹ or an educational GSuite account, Google's privacy policy allows them to mine data in your Google Drive for advertising purposes. Even if you pay for extra storage.

This may or may not be acceptable to you, but for a lot of people it isn't.

1. Former Google Apps for Work.

> One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software.

On the flip side, it works really, really well cross-platform. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, iOS - you name it, they have it. And it's 100% hassle-free.

Why must these things always be looked at through the eyes of business? Why can't Dropbox just do file sync really effing well?

Companies need to stop trying to take over the world, and focus on product/service mastery

Because when you raise VC, you have made a pact with the devil to take over the world.

Your customers aren't just your customers, but also your financial backers at that point.

One of the hardest at things my teams have struggled with is the fact that for large parts of the software world, the user is not the person with the checkbook.

Getting both of them what they want is a constant challenge, full of compromises.

That's exactly why I cancelled my account.

There were rumors they were going to launch an email service, then a basecamp competitor, then it was a race against iCloud and Google drive...

Honestly after cancelling my account I've never looked back. I get more storage per dollar with google and iCloud and the Dropbox macOS integration is a joke.

With all the acquisitions Dropbox has made in the past decade, they couldn't have created a more useful macOS app? Read a blog post by any former dropbox employee and you'll hear the same thing over and over:

Dropbox is littered with management problems and their leadership has no idea what the future of the company and will look like because cloud storage is a race to zero.

> a race to zero

That's a much nicer phrase than the one I used to use: "complicit in your own destruction". One is too bland, the other too strong. Certainly there's got to be one in the middle.

Maybe just having one good product is okay.

Not at the crazy level they've let their valuation rise to. VCs won't accept that.

If that was a real concern, doesn't Google and Facebook also face this same issue? Isn't like 80% or more of their revenues come from ads?

The other business units and moonshot projects are just rounding errors on their balance sheets.

I just presented a deck on this topic today. The 30 year evolution of the document goes something like:

Paper > Word Processing > Email Attachment > Collaborative (Google Docs) > Cloud Storage > Meta Information

The last part, Meta Information, is the ‘conversation about the document’ and represents the evolution from a physical piece of paper that I hold in my hand to having a conversation around a document that I might only view as a file name in a folder and never open it up (or just click on the preview).

Box notes is a good first phase of this evolution, however Conversational UIs will lead that next evolutionary phase. Dropbox needs to support the communication pathways that are formed around the documents that people are storing.

I don't mean to offend or be crass but I couldn't help but laugh. I think you are overanalyzing documents. What you said could be word for word out of the Silicon Valley show script.

As I prefaced in my comment, I presented a deck (the need to move enterprise IIOT towards conversational UI) and the evolution of documents was a part of that. I don't sit around thinking of documents in such a lofty manner ;-)

If you disagree about the evolution, I'd love to discuss and learn more from your POV. Much like documents, I'm looking to evolve into meta conversations.

That's why they're focused on the Enterprise now. I agree their acquisition strategy has been lackluster.

Steve Jobs said it best:

"[Dropbox] is not a product, it's a feature."

While this may seem like an obvious observation, I have yet to see a cloud storage service that does it as well as Dropbox. And that includes attempts by huge companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

He did say that. He was also the CEO of a company that still sucks at solving these kinds of problems. Guess it's harder than he gave them credit for.

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