I kinda wish Dropbox would stick to dropboxing.
Always with the product-line creep. No doubt the next offerings will be Dropbox Email and "Dropbox the LLM" (better than Spaceballs the Flamethrower, I suppose).
Always with the product-line creep. No doubt the next offerings will be Dropbox Email and "Dropbox the LLM" (better than Spaceballs the Flamethrower, I suppose).
Like. Build a decent product. The lack of any major competition doesn't mean they should stop improving and branch out into costly absurdity, at least try to keep up with Maestral with 100x the headcount.
Man, wouldn’t it be so cool if tech companies actually were competitive instead of trying to establish parasitic marketshare or dying with no in-between?
Taildrop needs improvement with files over a gig and between other users though.
Everything I've looked at lacks a native client for at least one of my devices or has privacy concerns. Proton would be my first choice if they offered a Linux client.
The other route I need to explore is rclone - it claims to connect to everything. It would need to poll / cronjob to update rather than instant updates like the mainstream options. The downside is uncertainty - if Proton or whatever changes their private API or encryption scheme then things will cease to sync.
How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?
Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.
> The lack of any major competition
Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.
(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the software.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the cost, and is looking for alternatives, but the marginally-better software keeps them there for now (gdrive and onedrive have a fair number more issues).
Yes, I think it matters. But they exploded their headcount and now they have to compete in areas they aren't anywhere near as good in (document management, etc) to make the higher profit they need to keep going, and raise the cost for everyone who doesn't use it.
Basically they went B2B and have been coasting in a gradual decline on their consumer side. A tale as old as time.
If they offered a competitive 100 Gig tier or a cheaper 1 TB tier I'd instantly switch my entire family back from Google Drive because at a technical level Dropbox is just simply better. Insync + GDrive is much worse than the block based sync. If they just focused on this they have a good business. The headcount expansion and desperate horizontal creep into other services just makes miserable products.
How many other options are they to sync files between my laptop and my phone, especially if my Laptop is running Linux?
Been there, done that: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...