I'm old enough to remember a world pre-Drobox (and pre-high bandwidth). I used to work at different places. I kept a laptop in each office, and carried with me Iomega disks that I synced every morning. It was slow and complex and error-prone.
Alternatives from either Apple or MS will never work as well, they will always favor the platform they come from (if they don't eventually drop the others).
It's not an overstatement to say that Dropbox changed my life; here's to hoping it never goes away.
This used to be true, but has gradually become less true. Linux support has certainly taken quite a dive.
They also removed features I really liked. I used the Public folder a lot :(
(I actually used to pay for Dropbox, because I genuinely thought it was a great product. It’s still probably one of the best syncing services, but at this point I’ve just moved off of syncing services.)
Nope. My 2-3 windows installs fail way too often. And totally silently. And don't restart. Had to drop from the paid version to bare minimum and move to Syncthing which for me works far better at the cost of more options to config.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016598
They are cash flow positive though.
Also of note, unlike Dropbox, Backblaze was able to release a new slightly more enterprisey product - B2 - without losing focus on the main product.
On the other hand, it does take a certain amount of 'privilege" (yes I hate that word, couldn't think of a better one) to have five founders who could afford to not take a salary for a year....
But one criticism, any time you post a link to the Backblaze blog it should come with a warning. It quickly led me down a TVTropes type rabbit hole of reading more interesting articles.....
Hah! That's a good thing! As for VC vs. Bootstrap - our five founders all worked together previously at a company that raised VC funds and while they weren't made millionaires from that company, it did give them enough cushion to go without salary for a bit. Originally it wasn't supposed to be 2 years though, so when it started to drag out there were definitely some...uncomfortable times, but they pulled through them. That's not say that we HATE the VC model - it definitely works for a lot of companies out here, but there is something nice about being able to choose your own adventure.
Re: Dropbox as a competitor -> You hit it, they kind of are, but I think that's mostly because people don't really know enough about how things work to tell the difference. Part of what I do with the Backblaze consumer service is a lot of education on why you should use both :)
They can do what they like with their business. But I, like jonknee upthread, don't want their new changed thing, and an=m somewhat disappointed at having the feature I'm subscribed to turn into a product/business I would not have subscribed to if they'd told me up front.