Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

My anecdotal sample size of one makes me wonder how Dropbox means to sustain itself.

I'd been on a $20/month plan with Dropbox for a few years now. I recently cancelled down to the free tier because...

* I didn't want to pay more to store/sync even more data.

* All my apps that add great convenience by leveraging Dropbox for sync will work fine and consume just a fraction of the free tier space.

This is actually the "killer" feature right now. If I had to pay to keep this functionality, I'd probably pony right up, but it would be tough to start demanding payment for that.

* Dropbox is actually pretty slow.

Sure, I'm just one person, but their percentage of paying customers has always been small. Just a few years ago, there weren't many if any viable alternatives - now there's a whole slew of them and Dropbox hasn't changed much if any in that span.

Also, since it seems to come up so often. I've seen nothing in the way of moves by or significant interest in Dropbox in the enterprise. Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing SkyDrive, Google has Drive and Box is stating that they're fully enterprise focused.

Our startup uses and pays for Dropbox for Business. All the alternatives (including Google) believe that Linux isn't worth bothering with. Dropbox has a decent client, both graphical as well as command line for Linux. We keep a lot of stuff in Dropbox, as well as having various tools produce reports and similar into it.

The single biggest headache with Dropbox is that it doesn't support multiple accounts. This is a problem when people have both personal and work stuff on the same machine (we do lots of BYOD). There are unreliable hacks for desktop operating systems, but no solution on mobile.

Other than that they want people to individually "subscribe" to shared folders rather than letting the admin set the defaults. This is unpleasant and does not scale well consuming too much people time.

Last on the list would be allowing/using signing in using Google accounts.

They have asked how things are going every six months or so, although I get the vibe the question is more of "what can I upsell you on today" rather than anything that results in any action (so far nothing has happened with any of my feedback from 12 months ago).

I've got only one complaint, but it's a big one : IOS client and long filenames. AAAARGH.

Not all the alternatives: http://copy.com/ has a decent Linux client.

Their last blog post was 5 months ago, the website footer is copyright last year, you are the only person to mention them in all these comments, and their website seems to say the only thing they offer over the competition is being cheaper. That is going to be a big hole for them to climb out of!

I had no idea :-) they seem to work well enough...

+1

I think I was on the $20/month plan. My overall impression of Dropbox was that it was always there when I didn't need it / never really there when I wanted it.

1. Most of the stuff I need to share with myself or others lives in Github.

2. When I want something to sync with my laptop (usually when I'm running out of the house) it's often behind of bunch of other files and means it will have to sync over a mobile connection if I'm going to get it. This usually means using a thumb drive rather than deal with syncing.

3. And this is entirely my fault: I had a handful of older projects in my Dropbox folder that weren't mirrored on Github or anywhere else. When it came time to actually dig one out it turned out that Dropbox had had some manner of sync issue and had renamed dozens of files in my .git folder. It was unusable.

I dropped down to the free plan and uninstalled Dropbox from my laptop. Haven't missed it at all.

Conversely my business of 10+ people uses Dropbox for its file sharing! costing us well over $1k a year. That's clearly the market they're making their butter from...

Dropbox taught me a lesson: you can be careless about security, directly and blatantly lie about security to users then handwave when caught and still be massively successful.

I haven't kept up on things but when has Dropbox lied about security/had exploits/etc? Not saying they are perfect but other than some random people on twitter claiming they exploited them have there been other issues?

Dropbox stated that they could not access your data ("employees aren't able"), which was simply and obviously just false. They mumbled and backpedaled and said "ok well employees can access you're data, they're just not allowed to". Instead of an immediate retraction saying their previous statements were invalid and obviously a mistake, they tried to justify it and blame users for being confused.

Dropbox also had a deploy that disabled password checking. As in, anyone could log into any account because passwords weren't checked. I suppose that's understandable - people make mistakes and sometimes you deploy things you shouldn't.

+1 as well. just downgraded to free one or two weeks back and use dropbox only as shared storage for some iOS apps now. For actual sharing/backups i use AeroFS which works fine with off site storage (limited only by my ability to add cheap redundant disks) and is much quicker & cheaper.

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