The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
dropbox.tech
dropbox.tech
"Hey Dropbox, why can't I compare file versions like this?" https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/whycanticomparefileversio...
I do also wish it didn't lock up my entire computer whenever I make a big change to Selective Sync. I talked to a Dropbox PM after my blog post got some traction and he seemed surprised that this is still an issue.
Just something I've learned to live without, at least for the foreseeable future.
> Compare versions of your Dropbox or pCloud text files in-browser or with your configured diff tool.
I guess there's just no money in "very easy, super reliable, many device file sync."
Imagine if you were the Stripe of multi-device sync. Sure maybe end users will never know your name but damn you’d be drowning in money.
Like imagine adding multidevice sync to your product with a simple library instead of everyone cobbling it from scratch and hiring huge teams to make it reliable.
Bigger companies are able to reduce the price of storage based on it's value to other features.
Some companies make storage cheaper by going through your data and/or selling it, this goes against our values and we won't do it.
Funny you give this as an example, that feature is completely unreliable for me. Netflix frequently forgets where I left off, and in the case of TV shows, which episodes I really did see all the way to the end, and which I didn't. Similarly on Prime Video, it's quite unreliable.
So a company tht solved it well enough as a backbone tech could be quite valuable on the market
See: multiple ways to skin a cat
Aside from that it does seem that Netflix sometimes 'forgets' if I wait a long time to go back to something, in which case I suppose there can be some sort of cleanup going on. I mean sure I would want to keep these timestamps forever, but probably at a certain scale you want to get rid of old ones as much as it might annoy me.
(except me, I guess)
Caveat: I don't use any Dropbox desktop apps, and I think Paper is the only mobile app I use, so I may not notice/suffer feature creep the same way.
Now Dropbox has become a product and we don't like it.
> While many companies struggle through the pandemic, Dropbox seems to be doing well. In its first quarter, it brought in $455 million, an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year. According to Bloomberg, last quarter was the first time that Dropbox recorded net income since going public in 2018. In other words, it took a pandemic to make the company profitable.
For Apple, everything is either a feature or a product you can skim 30% of.
G Suite is $12 USD / user / month. It gives you unlimited storage. AND everything else like Meet, Forms, Docs, Slides, Mail, Sheets, Apps Script, etc.
Dropbox is $15 / user / month. For 5 TB. How does that even make sense? The features are also lacking. SSL is apparently a feature now.
In my understanding my 20TB isn't just 20TB sitting in their datacenter, it's de-duped across accounts. But still, amazing value.
EDIT Also I had an issue with my mac pinwheeling google's 'Backup and Sync' agent. It's fixed now after a couple months, but there was nowhere I could find to report the problem to Google.
Given Google's reputation to ditch their own products, I guessed this was some side projects that some Googlers did, and it was never in Google's main strategy to allow people to sync their Google Drive to their local machines. Quite the opposite, actually.
My current gripe with Dropbox is that I'd like to basically be able to pay 4x the "Dropbox Plus" cost in order to get 4x the storage (without having to manage 4 separate accounts). Having 2TB isn't enough, but having "infinite" with Dropbox Business certainly is more than I want.
I'm not really that tempted to use Google Drive.
I've never understood how Dropbox could be a sustainable business. All the walled gardens have legitimate UX and anti-competative / anti-interopt reasons to get away from files, and the actual core service Dropbox provides is quite commoditized.
- Just storage: it's commoditization so you have your own hardware and compete at that level
- Other stuff: Now you are alt GSuite. Google needs competition, not know you are fighting and N front war and your old users may not care.
Now VC usually tries to avoid competing head-on with FAANG, and the current situation was definitely inevitable, so quite confused why Dropbox got funded in the first place.
Because they're still worth 8 billion dollars now?
One day, last year, he calls me exasperated that his DropBox no longer worked. I discovered they killed the feature and "controlling his digital life" wasn't all that important to him.
I had moved to iCloud Drive a while back and told him to do the same. No more DropBox.
This line from the linked post is a great summary of exactly how I think Dropbox's product direction has taken a turn for the worse.
This is no sleight against the author (who seems to be doing great work; I enjoyed this read!) or the engineering team. Just like, the general direction of the company. This line also stands out:
> it had been a while since we delivered new value to our personal users.
I can't speak for all paying users, but the value I derive from Dropbox is how it syncs fast and "just works". I do _not_ find new value in popups and notification badges about features that other companies have already perfected (much like I don't need to go anywhere else for file syncing).
I realize I'm not representative of the userbase as a whole, I'm just frustrated.
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
FWIW you can turn off all the notifications in the preference panel.
Which notifications option do I uncheck to stop from getting the popup asking me to upgrade to dropbox plus that I got this morning?
TBH the whole point of Basic is to be a trial sku so I don't know if you can turn those off. We do want you to become a paying customer :D
Currently, I am wrestling with the fact that I just bought a new computer and the initial sync took 2 days for ~100GB stored (because there appeared to be per-file overhead and I have a lot of small files). I would not call this performant.
When this finally completed, I discovered that actually I had not downloaded all my files, because even though I turned Smart Sync off, Smart Sync is still invisibly turned on. I learned this when I went to prep for a meeting and my IDE hung for 8 minutes when one of my project folders had to Smart Sync in the background. Again, I have Smart Sync turned off.
What I learned was that in order to turn Smart Sync off, you should ignore the Smart Sync settings, and instead sign into Dropbox.com, click Settings, (again, ignore the setting on that page that says Smart Sync is turned off), and turn off "Dropbox System Extension", which is actually the setting that controls Smart Sync. Then reboot, sign into Dropbox again, and let it go through a sync cycle.
As far as I can tell this feature mostly benefits boomers who think cloud is magical infinite storage, at the expense of people who actually have enough storage and want to use Dropbox for what it was actually good at.
I think it’s not about the price you or I pay. It’s about living up to investors’ expectations. They don’t need to be “just profitable”, they need a massive cash cow and ride it out.
Storage is a commodity now, so no way to achieve it with that. They need more value-add, and apparently a “hub for your digital life” is what they decided it needs to be.
In the marketplace or as a public company with a crazy market cap?
Glad to hear, though I really wish you guys had stayed as a storage company. You're not going to replace all the apps that I use Dropbox to bridge too, yet your apps seem to do their best to keep me in your ecosystem. Please stop that.
Those are what you pick if you want lock-in and bundled features. Dropbox and others are what you (used to) pick if you want to work cross-platform with a heavy focus on sharing real files, not tools. I think that's why the bundled tools strike so many as a bad idea: if we wanted that, there are more sensible options for it already. I get that they're kinda stuck trying it if they want/need huge growth, but it seems destined to fail, to me.
I just wish the need for constant growth wasn't the reality of tech companies in 2020.
I've recommended or installed DropBox on over 200 SMBs over the last (close to a decade - I don't know how long specifically).
There are things you do great. There are some things you used to do great (or OK) but stopped. There are some not-great things. Compared to Google Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Microsoft One Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Box.com (which I have to use for some clients), I would prefer it if DropBox would simply solve for my technical and business needs (and I don't think, as an engineer, that they are that hard - I mean some of them you already did and removed).
I would love to talk. Please let me know if/how/when that could happen. If you are not interested, that is fine too. I am on the road for the next week-or-so, but just give me the sign, and I'd love to talk to you about your excellent core product.
EDIT: Oh! Ha - My email address is in my profile.
This update went unnoticed by me, which is a good thing in my mind. I rarely use the web interface.
Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows. Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.
I think everyone outside knows where it's headed, and it's either enterprise-ware (clearly that's what they're aiming for, as they literally rebranded the whole thing to "Dropbox Business", it's right there on the home page) or slow death probably ending in an ignoble acquisition. Too much investment involved for them to just keep delivering the same service that made them a household name, taking a small and steady profit.
> Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.
They're not all-but saying that, they are saying that, if you're a non-business user.
Your insurance company pays part of your premiums to another insurance company to cover them in the case of truly catastrophic events. It's called an underwriter. It's why State Farm didn't go under after Hurricane Andrew, despite the fact that State Farm had a wide majority of policies in the affected areas. They weren't just writing checks, they were cashing them too.
Instead of signing up for 3 different Clouds to make sure my data is safe, maybe my Cloud provider should be doing that for me. But that does nothing to address another concern (lock-in) and could very well make it worse, unless the "underwriter" also facilitates data transfer between clouds.
If I remember correctly, it's using Amazon in the backend. So how exactly is it that it is independent of all the other major providers?
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450280565/Dropbox-gears-...
Others are its own.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...
They should talk to Mozilla. An OS-agnostic, ad-free, FAANG-independent cloud-hub integrated in the browser...? YES-fucking-PLEASE.
Even their rebranding to "Dropbox Business" everywhere basically says "individuals and solo/small business people, please do consider leaving, we aren't doing what we started out doing and aren't for you anymore".
Looking at the home page, though, it's very clear where the focus is. The only link I can even find to the Plus option is in the footer and it's not even clear it's not a business plan (truly, why would any of the plans on a site that brands itself entirely as "Dropbox Business" not be business plans?
Someone who didn't know otherwise would assuredly bounce off the site having ascertained there are no personal plans. That has to have been a deliberate choice. I guess it could be some kind of grievous mistake to have somehow entirely failed to account for someone interested in an individual plan visiting "dropbox.com" to find it, except it fits with the rest of the publicly-visible moves coming out of Dropbox.
Please respect the honest opinion from the users and try to work with them and show empathy. I am not seeing that.
I use Dropbox only because it's easy to edit/add files from the file system (and I don't like Microsoft or Google enough to give their services a chance).
I admire your goal to try to deliver value to both groups. I think this strategy is broadly underappreciated, and I expect it improves the product faster than focusing on either group exclusively.
We're just a bunch of people doing our best to do right by our users.
Excellent. I would go a bit further. I not only just want sync, but I'm willing to (mostly) give up the hosted mirroring in order to get unlimited user friendly device-device file synchronization[0]. On top of that, there are plenty of scenarios (largely around collaboration and/or mobile) where I would like to selectively opt-in to cloud mirroring, for which I'd be quite happy to pay a modest amount.
So this folder of personal documents and ebooks[1] synced across these devices (potentially including another user's, if/when they are on the same local network) but no mirroring in the cloud, and that folder of photos synced only between my laptop and my phone, including cloud storage backup and mirroring ($).
[0] Yes, I'm aware that there are plenty of solutions, starting with rsync etc., that I could cobble together, but most of them aren't particularly user-friendly.
[1] BTW, have you thought of selling a Dropbox-centric e-reader?
I appreciate the nudge to look at it again, and at the very least this will stop me from having to pay attention to Dropbox's enforced case-insensitivity.
My current Dropbox subscription term ends in February. At that time I currently plan to leave Dropbox in favor of a service that just does sync and no other garbage.
Is that a joke or a bug?
I consider what I see as process/project blogging to be one of the Internet's unsung heroes, but a lot of it has a narrow focus. As someone who hasn't worked on a project with this many hands involved (outside of OSS, at least), it's nice to get a peek behind that curtain.
Looking forward to giving it a more careful read.
DIG == Dropbox Interface Guide(lines)?
This has been invaluable in keeping my life in order, and I'm a happy customer.
When uploading a 100MB file on a gen8 Thinkpad:
- Dropbox uses 6 minutes of CPU time, basically maxing out a core for the entire upload
- offsite scp uses <1 second of CPU, so scp is >100x more efficient than Dropbox
- In wall clock time, Dropbox is 4x slower.
I imagine their sync problem is very very hard, but but pushing bits up for a large file should be much more efficient.
Good luck, Dropbox!
Is there a sizable market for people who require locally-stored content synchronised to the cloud (e.g. video editors?) Beyond that, the only people I encounter day-to-day who mention Dropbox are those not sufficiently tech-savvy to have known about the free alternatives mentioned above, and are still coasting on Dropbox's first mover awareness advantage.
I actually logged in just before posting to check if it was still there and yep. Giant popup in the corner of the window[1].
I have dismissed these types of notices multiple times. What I don't understand is WHY. Surely it can't be a good idea to harass every one of your individual users to become a business user.
[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hibz1zkohjnc2ly/Screen%20Shot%2020... (yes it did just sync that screenshot to Dropbox).
I felt like they really weren't interested in me as a consumer.
I have switched to OneDrive. I already had a subscription to Office 365 (Home), so I've not spent any extra. I can't complain so far. It actually feels like a consumer product.
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
I've been asking myself this question for a long time. Every other cloud storage provider has something like 100GB or 500GB for a nominal 3$ or 5$ per month. Dropbox works really great, but it's painstakingly frustrating that they their barrier to entry is too high that makes non-business users almost give up.
I am a paying gsuite user, and nevertheless I pay for Dropbox because Google is not even close to where Dropbox is in this area. How to verify this: try to resync every couple of minutes a file of 500mb or more with only few changes on Drive with the sync client, then do the same with Dropbox. Delta syncing in Dropbox is still unbeaten, even by those that claim they have it (Google doesn't to my best knowledge, I think Microsoft introduced it a while ago, but doesn't work as good, try the same test).
Likely not many, but that's likely at least partly due to a lack of exposure: The market is still severely under-saturated - Everyone should have one, but not that many non-techies do. Thus if you're in a position to make someone try your password manager that may be a serious advantage.
It's been a few years since I last checked but when I did Dropbox was the only one that didn't choke