
The New Dropbox Sucks - payne
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/06/13/dropbox-sucks
======
tschwimmer
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
Bad example - Apple is transitioning to a services company and released iCloud
for Windows 2 days ago.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283](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.

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iCloud has been on Windows for _years_ and this is the same unusable, out of
date app...they just listed it in the Microsoft store.

~~~
jxdxbx
It's a brand-new version of the app that uses Microsoft's new APIs, and it
probably part of a deal to get OneDrive to better use Apple's own file APIs on
the Mac and iOS. Maybe the rest of it is old and sucks but the file sync parts
are all new.

------
hunter23
I think the Dropbox announcement is a sign that the enterprise has superceded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...

~~~
tschwimmer
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.

~~~
xupybd
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.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Curious why they would be operating at that level?

~~~
epberry
I would guess it was an encrypted Linux filesystem. We went through that. It
was a pain to get it switched.

~~~
AndrewDavis
It's not just encrypted file systems that are no longer supported.

Ext4 is the only supported filesystem. No xfs, btrfs, zfs etc.

~~~
marchenko
It was quite aggravating when my shared Dropbox folder on a dual-boot
Windows/Linux System lost support. It was the main reason I switched from
GDrive to Dropbox (besides trying to gradually de-Google). Now I have 2
Dropbox folders on one machine.

------
saaaaaam
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
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?

~~~
winrid
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.

~~~
michaelhoney
Got it. Toilet paper, but 6 inches wide?

~~~
winrid
To be honest, wipes are best...

~~~
pkroll
Terrible for the sewer systems though. Solve that problem for the general case
and you can make some coin.

~~~
winrid
Even decomposable ones?

~~~
daotoad
Supposedly decomposable, flushable wipes are neither.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-15/what-
s-a-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-15/what-s-a-fatberg-
nyc-goes-to-war-against-flushable-toilet-wipes)

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

------
SomeHacker44
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_user
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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
xupybd
A better option might be this
[https://syncthing.net/](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.

~~~
passthejoe
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.

~~~
bad_user
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.

------
inspector14
I could tell something was wrong during the whole "Paper" thing.

~~~
owenwil
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.

------
lyonlim
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?

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

------
oldgun
Not Apple enough?

------
dandare
"IsCondoleezzaRiceStillDropboxBoardMember.com"?

------
aliswe
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
If you were curious you could perhaps look him up:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber)

But among other things he invented Markdown.

