The New Dropbox Sucks
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Gruber (implicitly) proves why this is the right move for Dropbox in the space of a few paragraphs.
Many people only use Dropbox as a backup and file share product. That's great. However, it's a terrible business, especially for Dropbox. Backup (and to a large extent) sharing is a commodity product where companies like Google, Amazon and Apple have a massive advantage in terms of scale and in Apple's case, OS integration. Easily moving over to iCloud Drive is exactly why Dropbox cannot build their business around that sort of feature.
You know what isn't a commodity? A single place for all your digital stuff. The big players there are actually disincentivized to build interoperability. iCloud is a product differentiator for Apple, they're not about to build a first class integration for Android and Windows and Google Sheets. Dropbox has the advantage of being platform agnostic. They've spent the last few years building out a dizzying suite of integrations to make this "single place" vision a reality.
So yes, it may not be what you want if you're a backup user, but if you're a business with digital assets scattered across a dozen surfaces and products, this could be very valuable to you.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283
Time will tell if they'll release anything like iCloud for Android, at least in terms of something similar to what they did for Windows (not necessarily full device backup), but I think it's more likely now than it was a couple years ago.
Now if they'd just release Messages for Windows I could finally delete Skype.
Yet you won't see Airdrop, proper Time Capsule support or other core features that don't make Apple recurring revenue add support for Windows, Android or Linux. Apple has been selective about what they're willing to do on other platforms, and its whatever they think they need to do to ensure their 1 billion iOS users are somewhat happy, while not letting their Mac sales lag (by letting the moat disappear).
Meanwhile the evolution makes me feel ill at the number of times I’ve recommended it to people, only to have the product turn into an expensive mess. I’ll be looking at Box now.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the company reduced development costs, focused on doing what it does well and made a tidy profit?
* The best platform that unites "all your digital stuff" is the desktop or mobile operating system and its APIs. This is not an answer for collaboration and such necessarily--but I mean the whole point of an OS is to allow people to use lots of different apps together.
* Every time I hear about some fancy new way for apps to "integrate" I think of OpenDoc.
* But, if people really do want everything in the cloud...I think most business are better off just going all-in on Microsoft or Google. A number of the products will be inferior but the integration will be smoother.
Second, this example is an illustration of 'Stallman is right'.
By that, I mean, DB is acting as back-up and thumb-drive for a lot of people that don't pay a lot for those servers. As pointed out, DB can't actually support themselves by doing this, thus DB is squirming away from what made them popular and towards the money. As such, DB is going to abandon those people that made them what they are and go towards F500s and the like, because money.
I get it, but Stallman is right: "Now that corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users."
Here, DB is trying to fork from what is good for the users (backups and thumbdrives) to what is good for DB and the F500s.
It would seem that the commenter above thinks that HN is not that well-known, and getting linked from boingboing is going to lead to an influx of newbies. I think that's pretty silly, personally; these days HN probably has a significantly wider readership than boingboing.
This makes sense, as essentially they wanted a 10 billion+ valuation and the consumer market wasn't big enough to get to that valuation. The problem is their enterprise products don't look look much better than their competitors while their consumer product (sync a folder) was best in class...
If dropbox hadn't raised so much money they could have stuck to their core vision. Instead they will have to compete into the crowded world of mediocre SAAS products that duct tape different solutions together badly.
All because they wanted that sweet VC money so they could have a $100K chrome bear in their office and dropbox branded water in their fridges...
What I disagree with is your opinion about VC money. If they didn't take VC money Dropbox in its current state wouldn't exist. The costs to support free accounts is staggering - there is a very real dollar cost associated with running a giant farm of storage servers. But free accounts are also crucial to Dropbox's business. It's very natural to run out of space and then decide to upgrade to a paid account. So you can see there's a bootstrapping problem. How do you support these free users while they add enough stuff to convert? This seems like a pretty good usecase for VC to me.
I'd also push back a bit on sticking to 'their core vision.' I don't know how much more there is to do there: Dropbox is already best in class in sync and backup. I'm not saying there are no improvements, but they are decidedly more incremental than in the business collaboration space.
Ext4 is the only supported filesystem. No xfs, btrfs, zfs etc.
The cost of maintaining support was too high I think. There are very few of us using unsupported file systems.
Call me a Luddite, but the thing I’ve paid Dropbox for seven years for is its “set and forget” simplicity. I’ve paid them hundreds and hundreds of dollars and I’m pretty sure they just lost me.
I guess the unknown for me is are these bone headed moves overall the better choice? Are they getting more by flipping off people like here in HN or is the blind metric following actually losing them more than gaining?
They think they increase their chances of profitability by adding breadth instead of depth.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-15/what-s-a-...
I pay Dropbox a bit of money every month to give me an easy implementation of an local-but-also-online-virtual-drive that I can store all my files in. This is convenient, and the selective sync feature works very well. Aside from sometimes sharing those files with people, I don’t require any other features. If this continues to work well, I will keep giving them money. If they completely fuck it up and add loads of shit I don’t want while interfering with those features, then I’m off somewhere else. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see which it is.
I just need something that minimizes vendor lock-in and works on all platforms. These days maybe that is, surprisingly, Microsoft.
So you weren't paying them anyway, while you openly admit that you pay for their competition. The chances of you becoming a customer where none to begin with.
I find your message funny because it reflects the consumer mentality. People don't blink on buying a venti latte from Starbucks, but prefer to be freeloaders when it comes to online services that keep their emails or files safe.
And that is why the Internet is full of services that violate your privacy via an ads driven model. Because freeloaders can be milked.
I've had a few problems with temporary Vim files that are long gone but which Syncthing refuses to forget about, but other than that it's been smooth.
My experience with Syncthing on a Raspberry Pi has been that corruptions happen very often if you write to the SD card a lot. I have set my Raspberry Pi in a way that the Syncthing config and the synced data all reside on an external USB HDD, this keeps the amount of writes to the SD card low and helps avoid issues down the line.
It's also endless tweaking and managing of conflicts.
Also it might work out for people on the free Dropbox plan, however I've got over 350 GB of files in Dropbox and growing. Dropbox makes this easy especially with their Smart Sync.
With Syncthing you'd either keep them on only one computer and risk losing those files, or you'd synchronize that 300 GB on each computer you have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber
But among other things he invented Markdown.