It's so easy to explain how it works to my non-techie parents ("It's just another folder on your computer, except it backs up your data automatically").
I hope Dropbox continues to thrive.
I don't know how to reconcile the negativity toward Dropbox with how what Dropbox did was very very technical and hacker-ish. Basically they spent 5 years just tracking down obscure operating system bugs and making their app work seamlessly across all platforms. I mean they really did the hard slog. A kind of slog I thought technical people here would respect.
If I really look into it I'd have to say the negativity here toward Dropbox stems from people thinking, "But I could do that! But I do that already!" And sort of having this bitterness that something so "their-territory" was done successfully by someone else. But I think, "don't they realize the hard slog Dropbox did to actually make that work everywhere?" I think in the case of Dropbox, it was that obsession with the details, that is a driving force of their culture and business. If people fail to appreciate that, and are negative based on the impression they get with that obsession omitted, they're not seeing Dropbox clearly, in my opinion.
I love it though, and I use Cryptomater [2] to sync my docs folder across machines without having it be on Dropbox's servers in the clear.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2017/01/30/dropbox-launches-smart-sy...
But, at least on Windows, only being able to sync 1 folder is a serious limitation.
Again at least on Windows, CPU and disk utilisation goes through the roofnon start-up, rendering your machine all but useless for half an hour.
And the final nail in my Dropbox coffin - it seemed to quite often choose the wrong file when there were conflicts, and at times it mistakenly deleted a lot if files. I just couldn't trust it.
Oh, and support via their forums was rubbish. Dozens of people would report the same problems, and they'd be ignored for years.
Every other sync service I've tried has major bugs, from Google Drive URL-encoding the filenames in an entire directory tree and deleting the original to Bittorrent Sync silently corrupting large files...