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Dropbox needs to figure out how to stay in a commoditized market where their special sauce is being integrated into OSes and larger offerings (G-Suite.)

With respect, that is Dropbox's problem. Dropbox needs to do that, But I don't need Dropbox to do that.

The same is true of music-playing apps. Once they cost money and added value. Then platforms all started making "play this music file" free. The purveyors all tried to add more value. And there are a few specialized music players kicking around.

But most went away, the business model was no longer viable, and the move into adding lots of functionality pushed them into a niche.

I agree that Dropbox is facing an existential crisis. If Apple delivers on some of its promised new iCloud folder sharing functionality, I will end my Dropbox subscription, and no amount of "We're a collaboration platform" will change that.

Dropbox knows that, and is going in the direction of getting money from someone else. Will they succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, most of their existing user base is finding their less useful and less valuable as they make this transition.

Shrug.

I have witnessed this so many times over the last thirty-five years. One set of forces acts to take something that was originally just for companies, and "Consumerizes" it. Spreadsheets are common for people to track all kinds of personal things. Kids use them in school.

In the opposite direction, companies chasing the money "Enterprise" their consumer offerings, abandoning the users that built them in the first place.

Same as it ever was.

Regarding music apps, VLC did that for me. No need to ever buy a music player when the best is available for free...

And famously, Apple did that to Panic's "Audion" music player.

https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775098

Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break.

OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff.

We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day.

Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well.

I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.

We just had to switch from Box to OneDrive at work, and it's caused massive headaches. Most days no one can log in, and some Excel sheets uploaded have been corrupted or have missing sheets - I don't know how that happens unless Microsoft is scanning our files.

OneDrive is an abomination. We use it at work and I have to manage it for everyone on top of my other duties (medium non-profit). It's not the panacea everyone thought it would be. I inherited it upon coming here. I've tried to see this as more or less a devops experiment. I try to control as much as I can with PowerShell, but some things don't lend themselves well to that method. Oddly enough, the lion's share of all end users are on Macs that are on a Windows domain. It proved interesting to get everything working.

What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic.

It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments.

Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.

Google File Stream (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7329379?hl=en) is the bomb - many TBs of files in it, can not even count how many and it is fast and adaptive.

If you haven't tried it, you do not know what you are missing.

Gonna try it... tried OneDrive but oddly enough, Microsoft Office documents and files are a complete pain in the rear to open/save there because the microsoft apps treats it differently than just a storage device.

What's up with them? They now have three applications to do file syncing? Google Drive, Backup & Sync, and Drive File Stream?

I've kept using Dropbox for all these years because they never confused people like this. There was a single app that gave you a folder that synced.

Also, Dropbox is not going to drop file syncing; it is who they are.

Google might drop any of their file syncing solutions, possibly even all three!

Personally, I think rsync.net is the best if you're in IT, particularly if you're a *nix user. Nothing better yet unless you wanted to roll your own. And the fact they use ZFS makes it great. You can choose where your data resides and it's fairly inexpensive all things considered. And to the best of my knowledge, I don't recall them being involved in anything overtly political. I like tech companies doing what they do best. Tech.

Thank you for your kind words - appreciated.

I hope that it will be useful and interesting to note that we have added 'rclone'[1] to our platform[2] which means that your rsync.net account is truly a swiss army knife for cloud storage organization.

This is very much like our 'borg' support - we actually have the binary executable installed on our end so you can run it properly. There is also a discounted signup for these two use-cases.[3][4]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/3254

[3] https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

[4] https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

Just two, I think, the Drive applet was named Backup and Sync, while the Drive cloud-thing is still Drive. And DFS is a beefier, enterprisier, version of Backup and Sync.

I think?

Drive stream pretends to be a network drive and hides syncing. It locally caches files on demand and uploads and deleted local copies in the background. From my perspective it is just always up to date and let's me have tbs of files on a small computer.

It is a game changer because it is simple. It is a virtual drive in the cloud that is fast and seamless and behaves as if it is local.

I don't know. I had ten of thousands of files once and wanted to delete them. Dropbox client hangs and then gives an error. API doesn't work with that many files, web version doesn't work either. I ended up writing a script that uses API call for every separate file and it took like 3 days to delete them all. I really don't think they handle many files well after that experience and wouldn't trust them if I needed really a lot of files in the future.

We have over 1 million files in our dropbox and it's never been a problem..

Yesterday OneDrive asked if I wanted to sync Documents. I replied 'yes', expecting to find my Documents folder appear in my OneDrive account.

When I came by a few minutes later, all my laptop's docs had been moved into `C:/Users/<user>/OneDrive - <company>/Documents` and the Documents library adjusted to point there. And then all my non-Windows applications stopped working.

I mean, backup up is one thing. Relocating them is totally different. WTF Microsoft!

We're in a different era, but the issue is still the same. Lots of competitors have popped up in file syncing, but they all want to link in with additional services and other crap that people don't want.

There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly.

Strongly agreed. "A folder that syncs" is the only thing I ever wanted from Dropbox, it's still the only thing that I want, and it's the only reason I pay them. Everything they've been adding for the past years is pure, useless bloat to me.

(Well, what I really want is a folder that syncs and which lets me get URLs to raw files in the cloud to share. They used to have this, then they dropped it for some silly business reasons. Tough luck, I learned to live without it. Still, throughout the decade or so I've been using their service, they added exactly zero useful things for me, and managed to lose one feature I cared about.)

But is that value people will pay for? Clearly Dropbox doesn't think so.

This is 100% anecdata but it seems like among my friends, family, coworkers Google Drive has eaten Dropbox's lunch for casual file syncing and remote storage. I mean it used to be that everyone had a Dropbox account, it was basically synonymous with file storage, but now people talk about their "Drive".

"A folder that syncs" was never the killer feature, it was the ability to download and upload files from any machine connected to the internet and get sharing links.

> There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly.

I gave up on Dropbox for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread (and lacking ZFS on Linux being the final straw).

Nextcloud fills this niche for me now. And it offers practically unlimited storage, is free and even open-source.

I’m not coming back, Dropbox.

> Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs.

Or maybe the simple solution worked well enough but they still moved away because of some obligation to keep growing, which would be impractical without needing to add many more monetized features. When I see extensive rebrandings and additions of features that I would never have started using the service for in the beginning, I can't help but think this. In this case it doesn't help that the only useful feature of Dropbox is being integrated into all these other products either.

> Windows by default has cloud sync

on Mac and iOS and Linux and Android?

> macOS does as well.

On Windows and Linux and Android?

If you install OneDrive, you can sync Android photos.

Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have. For instance, the only thing I really need Dropbox for at this point is one shared folder with friends who use both Mac and Windows (which could likely be handled by Google Drive, and might even be able to be handled by iCloud Drive by the end of the year) -- and Scrivener, because its developer apparently can't figure out how to make syncing between Mac and iOS work reliably on anything else. (One can argue he hasn't really figured out how to make it work reliably on Dropbox, actually, but that's a different thread.)

There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.

There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.

For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs.

The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues.

It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share.

IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers.

Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO.

IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.

> Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have.

You still have the vendor lock-in problem though. Somebody might only have Apple devices now, but 5 years from now the fact that all their data is in Apple's cloud (and maybe they got their whole family to put it in there too) makes it that much harder to switch away when you realize that Apple still hasn't fixed its keyboards.

> Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have.

Not if you want to sync with other people, or with work. There are three major types of desktop OSes and two mobile ones; even if you just one of each, you probably know and interact with people using a different set.

Well, that was intended to be implied by the "not everyone" part, but re-reading, I should have say "you may only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have."

Personally, I only need Dropbox for Scrivener syncing at this point, because my current workplace (and my previous one, IIRC) is standardized on Google Drive for document sharing -- and I don't share work documents to my personal devices.

OneDrive has iOS, MacOS and Android clients. iCloud has Windows and Android clients. As far as I know the only way to access either on Linux is to use a browser.

Every time I get a new OS upgrade with even more iCloud functionality I question why I still have Dropbox. Luckily for Dropbox they don't charge much so I don't cancel. I don't move new data to dropbox any more and I would never sign up for it today.

I don't think the argument is irrelevant. For most utilities, people use your software because it is the best at doing one core thing. I don't think this changes just because OS vendors start bundling half-assed versions of your idea. Pour your resources into focus rather than de-focus. Spend your development effort on fixing bugs, best-in-class cross-platform support, and other things that the OS vendors won't do.

Instead, everyone succumbs to the urge to feature-cram their way to differentiation, so we get chat functionality in your navigation software, location sharing in your music app, and team management in your paint program.

What about killing on-prem NAS/SAN or sell a high performance on-prem blob store? Every single one sucks and requires a specialized Devops team.

I think the whole premise of files and folders are far from dead, just gotta look from different angles.

Windows and mac have sync too

Sync to where? To other Windows or macs? Limited usability. Dropbox was the first to offer true seamless sync at scale, across ALL common OS/devices.

Dropbox has a relevancy problem

That's like saying email is dead because FB can embed videos on posts. Like the Quora guy said, we don't want crap. Email will still be around 10y from now, and Dropbox has, at a minimum, another 5.