Comment by tschwimmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tschwimmer | Hacker News Reader

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Disclosure: I am a former Dropbox employee. The below is my own opinion. I don't have a financial interest in Dropbox.

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.

Bad example - Apple is transitioning to a services company and released iCloud for Windows 2 days ago.

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.

iMessage will likely never be cross-platform. Apple sees the writing on the wall, only ~10% of their userbase gets the fully integrated iOS/Mac experience, and they know they can't leave the remainder out in the cold wrt accessing their own files (hence iCloud being web accesible).

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).

Yeah, this is interesting. I still think my argument about having features as a differentiator still stands - Apple would never build (and Google would never allow) Apple to have a seamless backup and restore solution like iCloud on Android. Maybe they'll build a client, but it's always going to be a second class citizen when compared to the native clients.

And yet, Apple TV and AirPlay now as native capabilities on TV sets...

iCloud has been on Windows for years and this is the same unusable, out of date app...they just listed it in the Microsoft store.

It's a brand-new version of the app that uses Microsoft's new APIs, and it probably part of a deal to get OneDrive to better use Apple's own file APIs on the Mac and iOS. Maybe the rest of it is old and sucks but the file sync parts are all new.

Some of the dialog boxes look the exact same, but the underlying storage engine is entirely rewritten with the big change being that files are now stored with the same Windows API that backs OneDrive's "Files on Demand" feature where File Explorer now shows the entire contents of iCloud whether or not it is available offline, and Windows will ask iCloud to download files if you try to use them.

How is it unusable? I set it up once and it works perfectly

iCloud for Windows has been around for years, it isn’t new.

As mentioned above, the new version has a new API and features to it.

A great business move for Dropbox might just not be a great product move for me, a paying customer. In trying to lock me in, they might just ensure that I’ll leave.

This is a great point, but

* 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.

First, congrats on the Beschizza link. This is the first time that I've seen a direct HN link from BB. Guess we should talk about HN less, yall, Eternal September and whatnot.

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.

I don't understand what "First, congrats on the Beschizza link. This is the first time that I've seen a direct HN link from BB. Guess we should talk about HN less, yall, Eternal September and whatnot." means in the context of my comment.

In the 80s and early 90s, when the vast majority of people with access to the internet were university students, there would be an influx of new users every September to usenet discussion groups--users who didn't understand the rules and conventions of the space. September was the time when every newsgroup would go to shit for a while, and we'd have to educate the newbies. "Eternal September" was a term coined when internet access started arriving for everybody in the mid 90s; there was a constant influx of new users.

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.

https://boingboing.net/2019/06/14/new-dropbox-uses-half-a-gi...

It’s removing any advantages for enterprise by doing too much.

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?

Lol. The big guys actually use NAS and/or obeject stores for Enterprise files, with on-premesis, in a cloud provider or hybrid. Even at reasonable scale, it's cheaper than Dropbox. You can do this with distributed file shares and they all sync. Dropbox isn't inventing anything new here.

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