Dropbox - No release candidate for almost nine months and counting | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox - No release candidate for almost nine months and counting

forums.dropbox.com

21 pointsBlazingFrog16 comments

Lesson learned: even if you build an amazing product that basically is magic and way better than anything else out there, there will still be assholes bitching about how you're just not doing enough to meet their inflated expectations.

Exactly. Here I am thinking Dropbox is awesome because it's both stable and just works. Who knew a product needed to have a steady stream of feature updates until it subsumed the very operating system it sat on top of.

I have three computers running OS X. Currently Dropbox eats around 33% CPU on all of these modern machines. Am I the only one experiencing these problems?

Do you have processes that actively write to files in your Dropbox folder on a regular basis? Dropbox averages < 0.5% CPU on my Mac, but your mileage may vary. I do consider even that much somewhat odd considering that I'm a very occasional user.

And he also spent time to spam this thread up to the front page of HN, what an amazing douchebag!

Agreed. The poster is speaking for himself: "This is obviously not an optimal development practice - customers paying monthly are starved for new features during these dormant periods"

Personally, I love that they are just leaving sh__ alone. It works. And amazingly well. Just don't touch it. I'm not starving for a dang thing.

As a member of the Dropbox team, I can say without a doubt that everyone on the Dropbox client team is working hard to make the next version of the Dropbox client as stable as possible before release. The Release Notes Page ( https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes ) shows that we have been making fixes to the next (testing) version of the client on a near daily basis for months.

In many ways the new client has been updated to be as stable if not more so than the current stable build. However, new features open new possibilities for bugs and we want to make sure that our software is bulletproof before we label it a stable build. Pushing the client out before completion would be far more dangerous in our opinion. I do apologize that we have not been able to release the latest build sooner, but I can assure you that we are working hard to get the current release ready.

While the client has been under development, we have been able to complete a large number of other features including mobile clients for all of the major handheld devices, an API for interacting with Dropbox as well as numerous improvements to the Dropbox web portal.

I can assure you (because I can see the client team right now) that they are working as hard as ever to get the current testing build ready for every one of our users.

When we get users like this at TekPub we kindly refund all of their money and cancel their service - life is too short to deal with assholes.

Regardless of what one thinks about the service vs. product discussion, it's hard to argue that no official Dropbox client released in 9 months is reasonable. Especially when important features are not in the current client (selective syncing, performance improvement...)

If you feel it is so unreasonable, why continue to pay for the service? Perhaps there is a competitor that can better cater to your needs?

And depending on what features the Dropbox team is working on, 9 months might be a perfectly reasonable amount of time.

I don't see why it is prima facie unreasonable. I use plenty of applications which are at least nine months old (including the Dropbox client). None of them has failed due to old age yet...

If the current client works, then what is Dropbox's obligation to provide a new one? As I understood it when signing up for a 50 GB account, my payment was for increased storage. There is no sales language on their website indicating that I'd benefit from any future features. They don't sell you on future benefits, and looking at their features page [1], I don't see any language that would imply anything to this effect either.

1 - https://www.dropbox.com/features

"Development clients are inherently unstable. If a dev client blows up on a client's machine and deletes all of his or her data - or releases it into the wild - the customer bears the full liability for having taken a chance on a dev client."

How is that any different with a client that isn't "beta" or "dev"? What are you going to do, bring a civil suit against Dropbox because a bug corrupted your data?

I would venture to say that they have something very large in the works. I checked out their team page and they have quite a few employees. They have been funded and are also looking for new hires.

http://www.dropbox.com/about

Regardless, when you purchase something you are buying its current iteration, not something that you hope for it to one day be. This was alluded to in the comments of the original article and I thought it was worth repeating.

Sure he was an arsehole about it but he had a question, I say this as a dropbox pro customer, closing the thread with the Happy syncin'! signoff comes across really badly for me, It would have take 20 seconds to say something like, we don't comment on releases or things were tougher than we thought they would be (Hell Valve delay every bloody release but at least they are upfront about it) but ignoring the issue and making a snappy comment just leaves a bad taste..

That's only for the desktop client. They've been updating their mobile clients quite rapidly, as well as promoting their API allowing for awesome apps like PlainText (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/plaintext)

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