Just three months ago Dropbox was the darling of the tech world. Now they're putting out fires every other day. Just goes to show you how tightly you have to control your image — and how quickly things can slide out of control.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft...all were everybody's favorite scrappy insurgents at one point.
Once perception shifts the other way, it's hard to turn things around because everyone starts assuming the worst. This incident is a perfect example: the old ToS were standard boilerplate that appears in a bunch of other places, and had most other companies done it, it would have been seen as a non-issue. However, since Dropbox has been receiving other negative press lately (some centering around real issues, some centering around similarly trivial nonsense), that changes how every new story about them is perceived.
Apple has the best products and basically good intentions. No one believes Steve Job's cares more about money than making good stuff.
Google has the best products and undeniably great intentions. No one believes Larry Page wants anything more than to improve the world.
Facebook's product is sort of mediocre (as Google+ proved) and their intentions have always been kind of borderline acceptable.
Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time.
Apart from:
XBox
XBox 360
Numerous XBox Games
XBox Live
Kinect
Expression Design
I'm not even sure their intentions were very good except in the very early days. Hard to imagine Google charging $900 for a $90 memory stick like Sun did.
Just because they are not your personal preference doesn't mean that they aren't good products.
Which reliability issues did you meet on which version?
[1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.
I remember reading similar advices in other places as well (and for other languages/platforms, too).
[1] http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-c...
1. Everyone even the most loyal apple fanboy now believes that there is some evil in there. Even pg wrote an essay about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html
2. Google got lot of bad press after the deal for internet deal with sprint and since then have lot of trust in its users.
3. I think microsoft's evilness is perhaps more influenced due to mediocre products than anything else. Its no more evil than modern apple.
No good products? Maybe we define "good" differently, but saying that MS hasn't had any good products for a very long time is just not true. Maybe this proves how dangerous the press and the bad reputation really is.
>No one believes Steve Job's cares more about money than making good stuff.
Really? He gets blasted for being evil almost daily. Personally, I think he doesn't even care about money (since he's thrown away huge sums of money by just not exercising stock options), but a very loud minority (?) disagree.
>Google has the best products and undeniably great intentions.
Disagree on both counts.
>No one believes Larry Page wants anything more than to improve the world.
Couldn't disagree more. I believe Page wants people to think that's all he wants but I don't buy it.
>and their intentions have always been kind of borderline acceptable.
You're being overly kind here, but I agree with the sentiment.
Why should you care what's motivating them? And even if you do care, how can you know, other than by observing their actions?
They've done a piss poor job of having a public voice. They don't respond to things quickly and when they do they're somewhat defensive and dismissive.
The truth is most of the noise actually is bullshit. They know that. The problem is public perception isn't fair. You can't ignore false hysteria and expect it to go away. People will form opinions based on headlines alone.
They need to humanize the company. Make sure everyone knows Dropbox is run by good people who have good intentions. More Google, less Microsoft.
They still have a ton of momentum, but it's all based on word of mouth. If they lose the warm fuzzy feeling people have about them they will suffer badly in the long term.
And it (partly) comes down to something someone else has mentioned already here on HN:
Hire a good PR person.
The controversy about Microsoft is long forgotten by most people. Google on the other hand can come over as quite creepy to non-techies: They offer something for free, which is always creepy, they harvest all this information about you and they come of as quite emotionless.
I think Google might have a little bit of the same problem with the general public, as Dropbox does now in the tech-world. Even though Google is working on it, with their recent ad campaigns.
Actually, I think they shouldn't be either and just be Dropbox. That is why I have stuck with them through all of this. They're like the Mom & Pop store that doesn't exist in so many towns these days. Yes, they have done a terrible job with their "voice" of late, but I'm sticking with them because I know there isn't some huge corporation behind it and they are trying hard to put out a great service.
I don't think anything has slid out of control for Dropbox. They're simply making an incremental improvement to their Terms for the 10% of users who do care, the same way they would any small feature.
The language change here is fantastic - it's easy to understand and isn't overly broad.