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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

It nags me that even at this great price I'm not jumping up and down to switch from Dropbox. Why is this?

-- Once you start using Dropbox there are some serious network effects. It takes a lot of work to get all your friends (both work and personal) to move.

-- Even though Google Drive is so much cheaper it just doesn't seem to have the usability of Dropbox. I find the web interface really hard to use for some reason. Finding documents, figuring out who share what with who.

I don't know. At this point Google might need to pay me to switch.

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For a while, I had Google Drive and Dropbox. That was when Gdrive was $5 for 100GB, and that price couldn't make me switch.

Seriously, Gdrive does not measure up to Dropbox. The Dropbox client is so, SO much lighter on system resources than the Gdrive client, it's stupid. I've had Gdrive end up sitting on 300+Mb of data while Dropbox happily ran with 50Mb.

As well, Google Drive has exactly one mode: on. There is next to no configuration, which led to some humorous situations.

At one point, I took down all the bandwidth at a Hackathon because Gdrive wanted to sync a bunch of files, and there's no way to limit network activity.

I do not like Gdrive, and honestly I don't feel like I need it. Their main selling point is cheapness, but my working data-footprint is only about 40GB, which fits nicely within my Dropbox account (and on my very small SSD's). I don't need, nor could I use 1TB of online space.

I am moving about 5 gigs worth of data from Box to GD. No glitches, no hogging. GD is taking about 62 Mb of memory and is pretty consistent around there.

Serious - how are friends involved with dropbox ?

Now I'm a (traditional?) dropbox user, using dropbox as a synchronized folder between various computers combined with a remote backup. All I would need to do to transfer is send a few links to people to my new shared stuff (folder / album )

My only technical issue with transfer is actually transferring the file from Dropbox to Google ( 1 MBps upload ) and getting all the machine synchronized.

What keeps me on Dropbox is a few years of flawless reliability. I still remember the dark times of syncing before dropbox, YMMV, but I intent for losing files, silent conflict, ... to stay a thing of the past.

However, first it was https://hubic.com/en/offers/, now Google. Even box.com is significantly cheaper. In a few months, that will be difficult to ignore, I hope dropbox is listening.

Small use case to address your first question, but that I used all the time in school (and occasionally now at work): because everyone had the Dropbox client installed we would just create a shared folder that we'd all contribute to. Maybe only a couple of people ever had the Google sync client installed, and it was a lot more friction to upload/download files all the time.

On the converse, whenever we collaborated on an actual text document or presentation, we'd turn to Google Docs to do it, then when finished convert it into Word/PPT and stick it in Dropbox.

DropBox client is better, DropBox web interface is easier to use and syncing is faster. I've had many issues with GDrive in the past that led me to stop using it abandon it and go back to DropBox. Sync issues, some files just refused to upload/sync, memory usage, speed, battery killer ... DropBox for me.

What's the difference between paying you to switch, and just being vastly cheaper?

Well, by definition being 'cheaper' has a hard upper bound: you can't get cheaper than free, so the total gain is limited to the price of the more expensive product. (If Dropbox costs you $100 a month and Drive drops to as cheap as possible, $0, you only gain $100.) But if they pay you, there's no such limit (perhaps they'll pay you $200, or $2 billion).

There isn't. Apparently some HNers don't understand how to reason about economics.

It's conversational English. Consider applying the Principle of Charity. He meant "Google would need to pay me to use the service in order for me to switch.". This doesn't even explicitly mean that. It just means "I don't find this offering compelling.".

See, we could have avoided this whole thread by applying the Peter Principle in conversation.

> What's the difference between paying you to switch, and just being vastly cheaper?

Time value of money.

I think what he means by that is "even if it was free, I still wouldn't switch". And from free the only way they could make the price even better would be to pay him.

His point was that it could not be cheaper enough without going negative.

Google sucks at interfaces. Dropbox blows them away in usability.

> I don't know. At this point Google might need to pay me to switch.

That's just being a troll about things.

As for me, I'm considering switching now, but as you said, it's not a strong feeling, Dropbox is a big part of my life now.

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