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Comment by retox | Hacker News Reader

I was told a story about the Dropbox sales team a while back that swore me off using them. They contacted the company I worked at, that didn't have a business contract with Dropbox, offering a great deal and a meeting was quickly arranged. The meeting (which I only heard about secondhand from a good friend) quickly turned into a strong-arm operation.

Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were using Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files were no longer available and it would be in our best interest to sign up for a business account or we might legally be in breach of some terms of service. Some detective work later it was determined that people had been signed in to Dropbox from company machines, but there were no accounts opened with a company email and nothing business related was being synced. All Dropbox binaries and network connections have been blocked since.

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The best answer to this tactic is, “Nice Dropbox you have there. Shame if OneDrive were to happen to it.”

The O365 integration with OneDrive is so seamless relative to other options, employees won’t even complain after an initial learning curve. In fact, many will start subscribing to O365 on iOS etc. and start having access to the same content synced across Windows, MacOS, iOS, Xbox, etc.

At this point, with employees adapted and the “M365” data visibility and DLP tools switched on, the enterprise can switch off Dropbox or other file depots so even personal accounts won’t work.

It takes a year or so to play out, but that’s how you lose 20,000 customers at a time.

This is an interesting take, and i agree with you. I myself have used dropbox for personal stuff, and onedrive with several of my previous employers for years now. For any person or business that i know who is all-in on microsoft products/services, i recommend to just adopt leveraging oneDrive, and life for them gets easier. (I didn't say better in other ways...but certainly easier.)

In fact, oneDrive is good enough that i signed up my family for the o365 family plan, because the cost is hard to beat (and because my family doesn't care if their machine is windows or linux)... But, when i went to start mixing in my files (vs my partner's and rest of family's files)...I learned that onedrive does __NOT RUN NATIVELY ON LINUX__ ...and linux is my personal daily driver. Hence, while my family, and all of our collective and shared files (including family photos) live on a paid oneDrive account, my stuff (files that really only pertain to me like dev. projects, etc.) live in dropbox, because dropbox runs decent enough on my linux machine. I can not wait for the day when dropbox is NOT the only decent option for linux machines. (Caveat: I am a big fan of nextcloud, but they're not there just yet...hopefully soon though!)

I mount onedrive on linux pretty well with rclone.

1. Setup rclone with onedrive (you have to copy an oauth token iirc)

2. Run mount

    nohup rclone --vfs-cache-mode writes mount onedrive: ~/onedrive &

I recall giving rclone a glance...but I thought it was more suited for a 1-way file send? (Like a sort of backup approach) So, does rclone work bi-directionally? In other words, if I add a file to my oneDrive via, say,mobile...as long as I setup rclone it will sync back to my laptop, and vice versa, etc.??

Rclone doesn't support bi directional sync. The only way to do this is to create two different folders and sync them seperately

Ok, yeah that was what I recalled too. Although that does not diminish the coolness of rclone, and I will have other use-cases that requires its use. I just need a bidirectional synch for my linux machines. Thanks!

I have been happy with this OneDrive client on Ubuntu for the last year: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/

Thanks! I had heard of another popular onedrive client for linux too (can't recall the name)...but have been hesitant to use such a client. Maybe it's time to try one; this one! Thanks for sharing!

We use Onedrive at my work. It's a little annoying because OneDrive reads through your Word documents and tells you that you actually can't save that file here, because it has some external font or macro inside it. I like that Dropbox and Box don't look inside your files and I really hope Microsoft copies that feature soon.

I'm going to hazard a guess that this is a function of saving into a Sharepoint Library that appears as file/document storage. This would likely work if you were saving into a folder that's then synced via OneDrive.

The commentary that I've seen really has Sharepoint as the storage for anything that may be shared with other users (via file, Teams, whatever) and OneDrive as storage for files that are strictly for one user.

Caveat: not an expert on this

Yes the O365 integration is relatively seamless and we were forced to move from Dropbox to Onedrive after our IT guys consolidated all of our subscriptions.

But damn, the OneDrive client at least on my MacBook is complete garbage, it seems like basic features compared to the Dropbox Client are completely missing, and OneDrive regularly likes to randomly use so much CPU that the fans spin up.

Given how heavily OneDrive is targeted towards businesses and offices, you'd think that LAN syncing would have been one of the first features to include....

> Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were using Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files were no longer available and it would be in our best interest to sign up for a business account or we might legally be in breach of some terms of service.

That's such a dumb sales tactic. Having users inside a company without any contracts with the company means that there are probably evangelists for the product working there but management won't buy. Time to give a free trial of the pro-enterprise-moneymaker version and hope that someone decide it's worth it.

Well, the tactic worked for Oracle, and I would assume some of those lawyers landed at other SV companies. Although, to be fair to Oracle, they didn't do dark pattern stuff when I used them.

The problem for Dropbox is that social media makes these strong arm tactics harder, as the victims have an opportunity to put the company on blast publicly and trash their reputation. 20 years ago companies could do this repeatedly for a longer period of time before they’d gain a reputation for being scummy.

But then look at how their "cloud" is doing.

Is anyone anywhere in SV building new products on top of Oracle?

Oracle isn't an SV focused company. There is plenty of money in all those non-tech businesses to be a big winner.

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