I wish dropbox had fewer features not more. Peak dropbox was like 5 years ago
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.
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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?