The New Dropbox Sucks

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/06/13/dropbox-sucks

by payne • 7 years ago

124 58 7 years ago

oldgun• 7 years ago

Not Apple enough?

I agree. I reduced my Dropbox account to the free tier last night. I have been a happy paying customer for a long time, but since I mostly use iOS for everything but coding on a MacBook, a $1/month iCloud subscription meets my needs. I do use a Linux system with a GPU for machine learning, but I can make do with the iCloud web interface. I am a happy OneDrive customer, and the web interface is all I use for zoneDrive.

inspector14• 7 years ago

I could tell something was wrong during the whole "Paper" thing.

owenwil2• 7 years ago

Huh, Paper was the first time I thought Dropbox might actually be able to go beyond files. It's one of their best products since their original, simple tooling was released.

dandare• 7 years ago

"IsCondoleezzaRiceStillDropboxBoardMember.com"?

xupybd3• 7 years ago

A better option might be this https://syncthing.net/. I'd like to have a play and see if I can get this to sync with a backblaze bucket. Then it would do everything I want. But not for work :(. Dropbox has been certified as secure so we're allowed to use it and nothing else.

winterec• 7 years ago

One option is to get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

dewey• 7 years ago

That sounds like a comment on the original Dropbox launch thread here ;)

passthejoe• 7 years ago

I have been testing Syncthing, and I like it. It doesn't rely on a client/server model -- it's client to client, and I rarely have two laptops running at the same time, so I set up a Raspberry Pi Zero W with Syncthing, and it acts as my always-on PC for syncing purposes.

I've had a few problems with temporary Vim files that are long gone but which Syncthing refuses to forget about, but other than that it's been smooth.

hddherman• 7 years ago

Does the Pi write data to the SD card or to some sort of external storage? If the latter, is the Syncthing configuration file located on the SD card?

My experience with Syncthing on a Raspberry Pi has been that corruptions happen very often if you write to the SD card a lot. I have set my Raspberry Pi in a way that the Syncthing config and the synced data all reside on an external USB HDD, this keeps the amount of writes to the SD card low and helps avoid issues down the line.

bad_user2• 7 years ago

Syncthing doesn't do encrypted folders, at least last time I checked, so you can't keep a server in the cloud if you care about the safety of your files. And maintaining a Raspberry Pi at home isn't what I would call smooth.

It's also endless tweaking and managing of conflicts.

Also it might work out for people on the free Dropbox plan, however I've got over 350 GB of files in Dropbox and growing. Dropbox makes this easy especially with their Smart Sync.

With Syncthing you'd either keep them on only one computer and risk losing those files, or you'd synchronize that 300 GB on each computer you have.

saaaaaam• 7 years ago

It really does suck. I think the worst thing is that now it’s all bells and whistles I don’t feel like I can properly trust it not to have changed settings on my files, or accidentally shared things with people it shouldn’t be sharing things with. The complications feel like that suddenly becomes many times more likely. I don’t want another social network. I don’t want a file based media “experience”. I don’t want to have to get my head round “features”. I just want a folder that syncs across my devices without me having to do anything.

Call me a Luddite, but the thing I’ve paid Dropbox for seven years for is its “set and forget” simplicity. I’ve paid them hundreds and hundreds of dollars and I’m pretty sure they just lost me.

ryandrake• 7 years ago

You’re not a Luddite. You’re a normal tech consumer who found a product that does that one thing you need really well, and you simply want the company to continue doing it well. So many tech companies can’t seem to manage to not change the thing that is great. Just fix the bugs! Don’t add a social network. Don’t add a chat feature. Don’t add notifications and loot boxes. Don’t redesign the UI every year. Just keep being the best at that core thing you do! Why do so many tech companies fail to do this?

thatoneuser• 7 years ago

I'd assume it's corps blindly following metrics. "Apps with a chat feature increase engagement by 50%!!!". Hm well that correlates with more retention thus profit so let's do that.

I guess the unknown for me is are these bone headed moves overall the better choice? Are they getting more by flipping off people like here in HN or is the blind metric following actually losing them more than gaining?

winrid3• 7 years ago

Because leadership doesn't realize you can build a great company selling toilet paper.

They think they increase their chances of profitability by adding breadth instead of depth.

mixmastamyk2• 7 years ago

Stock markets demand growth, which drive executive compensation.

hunter23• 7 years ago

I think the Dropbox announcement is a sign that the enterprise has superceded consumer as the 1st priority for Dropbox executives.

This makes sense, as essentially they wanted a 10 billion+ valuation and the consumer market wasn't big enough to get to that valuation. The problem is their enterprise products don't look look much better than their competitors while their consumer product (sync a folder) was best in class...

If dropbox hadn't raised so much money they could have stuck to their core vision. Instead they will have to compete into the crowded world of mediocre SAAS products that duct tape different solutions together badly.

All because they wanted that sweet VC money so they could have a $100K chrome bear in their office and dropbox branded water in their fridges...

tschwimmer4• 7 years ago

I think your first point about enterprise vs consumer is very true. I don't even think it's a recent change.

What I disagree with is your opinion about VC money. If they didn't take VC money Dropbox in its current state wouldn't exist. The costs to support free accounts is staggering - there is a very real dollar cost associated with running a giant farm of storage servers. But free accounts are also crucial to Dropbox's business. It's very natural to run out of space and then decide to upgrade to a paid account. So you can see there's a bootstrapping problem. How do you support these free users while they add enough stuff to convert? This seems like a pretty good usecase for VC to me.

I'd also push back a bit on sticking to 'their core vision.' I don't know how much more there is to do there: Dropbox is already best in class in sync and backup. I'm not saying there are no improvements, but they are decidedly more incremental than in the business collaboration space.

xupybd3• 7 years ago

I used to pay for Dropbox but they removed support for my file system at work. So I no longer have a use case for Dropbox.

sidcool• 7 years ago

Absolutely. Because enterprises are where the real money is. Even Google, who has been pretty bad at enterprise, are getting warmed up to it.

tschwimmer4• 7 years ago

Disclosure: I am a former Dropbox employee. The below is my own opinion. I don't have a financial interest in Dropbox.

Gruber (implicitly) proves why this is the right move for Dropbox in the space of a few paragraphs.

Many people only use Dropbox as a backup and file share product. That's great. However, it's a terrible business, especially for Dropbox. Backup (and to a large extent) sharing is a commodity product where companies like Google, Amazon and Apple have a massive advantage in terms of scale and in Apple's case, OS integration. Easily moving over to iCloud Drive is exactly why Dropbox cannot build their business around that sort of feature.

You know what isn't a commodity? A single place for all your digital stuff. The big players there are actually disincentivized to build interoperability. iCloud is a product differentiator for Apple, they're not about to build a first class integration for Android and Windows and Google Sheets. Dropbox has the advantage of being platform agnostic. They've spent the last few years building out a dizzying suite of integrations to make this "single place" vision a reality.

So yes, it may not be what you want if you're a backup user, but if you're a business with digital assets scattered across a dozen surfaces and products, this could be very valuable to you.

devonbleak• 7 years ago

Bad example - Apple is transitioning to a services company and released iCloud for Windows 2 days ago.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

Time will tell if they'll release anything like iCloud for Android, at least in terms of something similar to what they did for Windows (not necessarily full device backup), but I think it's more likely now than it was a couple years ago.

Now if they'd just release Messages for Windows I could finally delete Skype.

tschwimmer4• 7 years ago

Yeah, this is interesting. I still think my argument about having features as a differentiator still stands - Apple would never build (and Google would never allow) Apple to have a seamless backup and restore solution like iCloud on Android. Maybe they'll build a client, but it's always going to be a second class citizen when compared to the native clients.

StudentStuff• 7 years ago

iMessage will likely never be cross-platform. Apple sees the writing on the wall, only ~10% of their userbase gets the fully integrated iOS/Mac experience, and they know they can't leave the remainder out in the cold wrt accessing their own files (hence iCloud being web accesible).

Yet you won't see Airdrop, proper Time Capsule support or other core features that don't make Apple recurring revenue add support for Windows, Android or Linux. Apple has been selective about what they're willing to do on other platforms, and its whatever they think they need to do to ensure their 1 billion iOS users are somewhat happy, while not letting their Mac sales lag (by letting the moat disappear).

owenwil2• 7 years ago

iCloud has been on Windows for years and this is the same unusable, out of date app...they just listed it in the Microsoft store.

tinus_hn• 7 years ago

iCloud for Windows has been around for years, it isn’t new.

projectileboy• 7 years ago

A great business move for Dropbox might just not be a great product move for me, a paying customer. In trying to lock me in, they might just ensure that I’ll leave.

lancewiggs• 7 years ago

It’s removing any advantages for enterprise by doing too much.

Meanwhile the evolution makes me feel ill at the number of times I’ve recommended it to people, only to have the product turn into an expensive mess. I’ll be looking at Box now.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the company reduced development costs, focused on doing what it does well and made a tidy profit?

jxdxbx2• 7 years ago

This is a great point, but

* The best platform that unites "all your digital stuff" is the desktop or mobile operating system and its APIs. This is not an answer for collaboration and such necessarily--but I mean the whole point of an OS is to allow people to use lots of different apps together.

* Every time I hear about some fancy new way for apps to "integrate" I think of OpenDoc.

* But, if people really do want everything in the cloud...I think most business are better off just going all-in on Microsoft or Google. A number of the products will be inferior but the integration will be smoother.

Balgair2• 7 years ago

First, congrats on the Beschizza link. This is the first time that I've seen a direct HN link from BB. Guess we should talk about HN less, yall, Eternal September and whatnot.

Second, this example is an illustration of 'Stallman is right'.

By that, I mean, DB is acting as back-up and thumb-drive for a lot of people that don't pay a lot for those servers. As pointed out, DB can't actually support themselves by doing this, thus DB is squirming away from what made them popular and towards the money. As such, DB is going to abandon those people that made them what they are and go towards F500s and the like, because money.

I get it, but Stallman is right: "Now that corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users."

Here, DB is trying to fork from what is good for the users (backups and thumbdrives) to what is good for DB and the F500s.

tschwimmer4• 7 years ago

I don't understand what "First, congrats on the Beschizza link. This is the first time that I've seen a direct HN link from BB. Guess we should talk about HN less, yall, Eternal September and whatnot." means in the context of my comment.

techpop10• 7 years ago

Lol. The big guys actually use NAS and/or obeject stores for Enterprise files, with on-premesis, in a cloud provider or hybrid. Even at reasonable scale, it's cheaper than Dropbox. You can do this with distributed file shares and they all sync. Dropbox isn't inventing anything new here.

matthewmacleod• 7 years ago

I saw the subject of the email they sent me this morning - one of those cheery ones that says “important information about your Dropbox account” that you just know means bad news.

I pay Dropbox a bit of money every month to give me an easy implementation of an local-but-also-online-virtual-drive that I can store all my files in. This is convenient, and the selective sync feature works very well. Aside from sometimes sharing those files with people, I don’t require any other features. If this continues to work well, I will keep giving them money. If they completely fuck it up and add loads of shit I don’t want while interfering with those features, then I’m off somewhere else. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see which it is.

konspence• 7 years ago

I'm in the same boat, and thinking of some sort of open source utility which will bridge rsync and AWS Glacier.

SomeHacker44• 7 years ago

I am tired of this company. First they remove my ability to add more devices, and now this... Sorry, but the only use case I had for DropBox wad syncing my 1Password, so I will just pay them instead and use my iCloud and Google Drive and OneDrive accounts. Two of which I pay for (and should probably stop for one of them).

I just need something that minimizes vendor lock-in and works on all platforms. These days maybe that is, surprisingly, Microsoft.

bad_user2• 7 years ago

They restricted devices on the free accounts.

So you weren't paying them anyway, while you openly admit that you pay for their competition. The chances of you becoming a customer where none to begin with.

I find your message funny because it reflects the consumer mentality. People don't blink on buying a venti latte from Starbucks, but prefer to be freeloaders when it comes to online services that keep their emails or files safe.

And that is why the Internet is full of services that violate your privacy via an ads driven model. Because freeloaders can be milked.

lyonlim• 7 years ago

It's a terrible move for consumers. I continued with my Dropbox subscription only because of their reliability and really good mobile apps. It's a big battle to compete with Google or Microsoft in the Enterprise space. Is Box doing well?

aliswe• 7 years ago

Who is this John Gruber? He's written several prolific posts through the years, but he's more than a little shy about who he really is. Perhaps he's a founder of some sort?

stevekemp• 7 years ago

If you were curious you could perhaps look him up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber

But among other things he invented Markdown.

dkobia• 7 years ago

I've been on the fence about iCloud for sometime. Dropbox made the choice easy for me.

The New Dropbox Sucks

Related Stories