I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software.
It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside the Dropbox directory. My file system is busy all day long from building in Xcode and other things.
What I need is for Dropbox to improve that by making an efficient, battery-saving, native macOS client. What I don't need is what is announced in this post.
The two other things that I hate are the fact that they don't support symlinks and that they use a kernel extension. All of these things together made me start the search for a replacement.
Does anybody know how the CPU/power impact of Microsoft's and Google's offerings are on the Mac?
After receiving an email like:
> This is all for just $20.88 more a year
1. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price
I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise customers.
I had the same inclination as you. Dropbox was cooking my 2015 Macbook Pro. What I can tell you might reduce research time.
Google Drive has no differential sync. Any changes you make re-upload the whole file. This is a hard no for me. Also Google.
I moved to Sync[0]. The pricing tier was more what I wanted (500GB). They support symlinks, differential syncing, selective sync as well as a 'Vault' for storing files in the cloud but not on your machine. I think it's end-to-end encrypted as well, not going to commit to saying anything specific in that regard. The Mac app is also a lot better, I find it spinning up a lot less for me and its a lot lighter in general. To be fair though, even with iCloud I get my fans whirring up when I start uploading lots of changes.
I've also heard good things about pCloud[1] but I don't see any reason to change my workflow now after have to already change it.
My previous experience with Google Drive was that it would chew up CPU and memory a lot more than I liked.
I've been pretty happy with iCloud Drive since I switched to it. Works seamlessly and effortlessly on my Mac and iPhone, affordable pricing fo storage which can be shared with family, and also solves my photo storage needs with Apple Photos. The only drawback is the lack of shared folders, but they just announced that is coming soon.
Yes, their symlink handling is absurd, and they have the usual sanctimonious defense when questioned about this. To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong.
A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cloud service into special behaviour (like syncing folders elsewhere) are also wrong. You no more want a cloud service going off and "thinking" about a symlink, than you wanting it going off and "thinking" about porn it finds on your computer. These are just files; their contents or meaning are absolutely not any cloud service's concern.
For example, a MacOS application bundle typically includes internal symlinks that most users are unaware even exist. Yes, DropBox breaks these, too. They tell you that their service is not intended for synchronizing entire file systems, as if properly handling an arbitrary file is somehow rocket science. I'll grant them that this is over their heads, but it's not hard.
There's exactly one sync program that gets it all right: Unison, written by Benjamin Pierce, a world-famous computer scientist. Yes, he actually thinks about this more clearly than any of the programmers of commercial services, and the best community ideas are adopted.
Unison handles symlinks properly.
Atomic directories are a relatively new feature in unison: One can declare a directory atomic, forcing the user to choose at the directory level when there’s a conflict.
I declare .git directories atomic. A better example: A MacOS .sparsebundle disk image file appears as many files (bands) inside a directory, but is intended to be seen by the user as an atomic file, not a directory. This has the advantage of more efficient backups: If one makes a minor change to a large mounted disk image (say, a few MB to a multiple GB disk image) then backup software isn’t forced to make a new copy of the entire multiple GB disk image.
If one makes minor changes to the same mounted disk image on two machines, and then does a two-way sync, one could buy the farm. Most likely, there will be a conflicting root file alerting one to the problem. Far cleaner to simply be forced to choose one disk image directory over the other. Functionally, the entire disk images are in conflict, not specific files within.
The ability to declare atomic directories is not a feature of any other two-way sync software, and it should be. A good heuristic: If a naive user can’t easily open a folder to reveal its contents (say, a Mac application bundle, or a sparse disk image) then the supporting directory should be treated as atomic by default.
Is this really true? wow. I'm shocked that a company of Dropbox's size hasn't built native clients for each platform (or rearchitected the core to be based on something like Go or Rust that is fast and cross platform, and just building the UI parts in the native frameworks)
I switched a few years ago. It works really well. Unless you are using Dropbox with a team or a corporate environment, iCloud is better. I use a combo of iCloud (love the desktop syncing between my machines btw), and Google File Stream for team documents.
At least when I tried it a few years ago, the Windows client was also a crappy Python app that ate CPU and disk for around an hour after every startup.
Why? To detect changes, they were storing a snapshot and comparing everything on disk to the snapshot. Which is madness when Windows has methods that don't require reading every damn byte on the disk - at the least, they could use a filesystem minifilter driver, or the NTFS USN change journal.
As if that wasn't enough, after the startup scan they were using an unreliable method to detect further changes (same one as dotnet's FileSystemWatcher, I forget the name of the underlying Windows API).
And to top it all off, even with only 2 systems sharing the data, there were conflicts all the time that required manual resolution (and I seem to recall Dropbox wasn't very good about surfacing these when they happened). Then there was a data loss incident, I presume due to some kind of conflict snafu - Dropbox only support at the time was a forum, and they were completely uninterested in even acknowledging that there was an issue.
I switched to Seafile after that, and haven't looked back. I honestly don't understand why people would put up with that crap, but given the size of Dropbox they obviously do...
I've used Dropbox since the beginning, and Nextcloud for the last few years. Nextcloud client seems to use %10 of the memory of Dropbox on my machines. I'm now in the process of switching to SyncThing. The advantage of Syncthing over Nextcloud, is you can used it centralized or decentralized (without a server), I dont need to manage SSL certs and I dont have to poke holes in my firewall. Syncthing client also uses very little memory (a bit more then Nextcloud, but hey Syncthing is both a client and a server). Each of these services have their own strengths, so it depends on the features you want.
Have you considered Keybase KBFS for this? You get 250 GB for free, public/private with not too much metadata getting leaked, FUSE for desktop and also access on mobile devices.
I haven't actually moved over to this myself yet, but it does look much better than Dropbox or Sync.com (which I stupidly am still subscribed for despite their client being even worse than Dropbox - but at least it's encrypted...)
Nextcloud mentioned previously is the obvious choice for the privacy-conscious, but does take some further responsibility to ensure integrity and availability.
Google's is much worse for any significant number of files. It burns a bunch of CPU/battery like you described for Dropbox, but it also freezes eventually and has to be force-killed. I gave up trying to sync my former Dropbox files to Drive.
I strongly feel this is a bad direction for Dropbox. Many companies have tried to integrate tools together. It's always half-baked simply because those tools aren't designed to be integrated. I find it kind of odd Dropbox would be bragging about a dropdown menu to create a Google doc. Surely if that's important to me I get Google drive - the integration will be better because the same company makes the different tools and you can actually stay within the eco-system. If Dropbox are planning to compete with this it's very difficult to see how they win over Google.
The integration with Google makes sense because they already own the tools that you're moving between. It seems really funky to have Dropbox crash that party. If you're trying to integrate with tools outside of the Google eco-system maybe dropbox atleast tries to allow it, I just can't see how it'd be anything other than clunky though.
Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Obviously storage has turned into a commodity and dropbox are trying to compete on a new level, it just seems boggling to me that this is the direction they've taken.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.
Back around 2000 programs were instead expanding until they were able to burn CDs. And apps a few years ago - until they included Snapchat-like stories.
Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”?
I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don’t see the integration working in that direction.
Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it’s available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integration with MS Office makes sense — where Office is aware when you’re working on files that are stored in Dropbox.
This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy...
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”?
When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow.
Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice.
You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you.
You're doing things well, but it no longer really feels well, because your success in the marketplace no longer correlates with the maturity and quality of the product you're offering. You may have an incredibly mature and well-supported product, but it feels stale. It turns out that customers appreciate qualities like "refreshing" and "modern" that your product seemingly lacks.
As you start to lose customers, your declining revenue forces you to lay off employees and your stock starts to decline. Without a big change, you go out of business and shutter your doors for good. The executives are forced to sell the IP for pennies on the dollar to some patent troll as part of the company's bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings, and might open-source the IP if no buyer can be found.
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”?
It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding.
In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.
They need to hit their growth numbers. Either they come up with something new ( which is really hard) or they keep expanding their current main product. The latter is much easier.
In my view a lot of products could be frozen once they are mature . MS Office could have stopped most development a decade or more ago, Gmail could have stopped years ago. Windows could have stopped UI changes with XP or 7. But what are all these people supposed to do if not tweaking their product?
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”?
Investor demands for growth. Dropbox already did one thing well. But they took money on the promise that they'd do more things and make more money than they could with that one thing they did well.
“do one thing and do it well” - I've liked that approach, but being on the buying side and as the number of solutions needed keeps on increasing, I'm getting second thoughts.
Like what you might end up with with this approach and selecting best of breed: Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Office 365 desktop, Google Apps (email), Some CRM solution, Github, client security solution, VPN solution, Jira, Confluence (wiki), Zendesk (helpdesk).
If you want things like single-sign-on and some additional security and management capabilities then you typically need to pick some higher pricing tier for each service. The price per user per month adds up. And as a added bonus, you also need to spend time managing all these and handle the monthly invoices/receipts.
What Dropbox is now doing is of course not solution to my problem. The only solution to the issue I'm having is consolidation of the services or smaller players teaming up and giving me unified package (like Dropbox+Slack+Zoom). Fully integrated packages like Microsoft 365 are quite tempting, even though I know the individual pieces are not "best of breed".
This is the problem with VC funding: any simple utility will inevitably become a confusing tangle of services that nobody wants. Dropbox became ubiquitous because it was a dead-simple folder that automatically synced, but that just doesn't rake in the big bucks. So they're forced to glob on pointless features until the whole thing collapses like a flan.
For me, the "killer" feature of Google Docs/Sheets is the ability of multiple users to be in the document at the same time, all making changes, and all those changes being seen by all in real time. I don't think that shared Dropbox files can replicate this same functionality, so maybe apps on their side is the way to bridge the gap.
I agree with the sentiment that dropbox is doing too many things that don't make the most sense but sometimes the company doesn't have a choice but to try new things to extend the userbase into different markets because that's what VCs are demanding and expecting them to do. VCs want a 10x return and not a 2x return on a lifestyle business.
> This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy...
I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run it through voice recognition, and turn it into a OneNote transcript to sit alongside your repo of project docs for the same meeting.
Sometimes well-integrated solutions are more than the sum of their parts, and that's the problem Dropbox is facing.
> gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting.
Do you ever right-click a file on your desktop and expect to be able to do an “Open With” action to open it in a Zoom meeting?
Dropbox is trying to recreate/recapitulate that functionality—the functionality of OS file-explorer GUIs, and how they act as a launchpad for feeding files to third-party intent providers.
What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user’s workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers.
We’re going to see this more frequently and it’ll look weird coming from different tools trying to level up and pull this off (i.e. what will email look like with this?).
One issue is as incumbents partner/buddy-up and competition heats up, we’ll see a bunch of bundling, increasing consumer costs while locking out newcomers.
Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us).
The primary reasons:
- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.
- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.
- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.
If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.
What a disaster. The entire initial premise of Dropbox was to sync files reliably. Then I can use real, native apps to edit them. The new Dropbox approach on the other hand inherently requires everything to be in the cloud--I already hate that, but even if I didn't, others already do this and do it better.
I feel like Microsoft actually has the balance right. OneDrive still behaves just like a normal sync client. But to do certain kinds of real-time collaboration you can just point native, desktop Office apps to the cloud version of the file. But when you're offline you still have the same kinds of access you need.
I do a lot of UI/UX design as a part of what I focus on, both at work and for fun. This page is a juxtaposition of well thought out elements and things that make me go `???`.
Like:
- Good product marketing messaging
- Well done images and GIFs that get to the point
- News-site like past first article scrolling, I bet it drives more engagement. I even like how the UI elements change color when you go to another article.
What?:
- Huge spinning circular thing at the top
- Content not taking the whole size of the page but strangely taking the right 2/3rds~
- Non-retina images
Would love to see metrics on:
- Tweet highlight integration. Does it drive valuable KPIs?
- Font: They are using https://sharptype.co/case-studies/dropbox/ . The case study from the foundry that made that font has a section with color `rgb(181, 208, 230);` font on a `linear-gradient( #d20b28 , #d20b28 );` background. That's light blue on somewhere between scarlet, crimson, vermillion or venetian red color space. My brain slightly breaks reading it. Does having your own font drive engagement? What do the KPIs on that look like?
1. make something simple and useful
2. grow big
3. add more features
4. repeat steps 2-3 several times
5. congratulations your product is now bloatware
Whenever I see moves like this, I think to myself how little of a real positive impact SharePoint had in the Enterprise world. And that was linking Office products, in large organizations that already used the products, and already collaborated for their jobs, while including the ability to write code against it all.
Trying to build the same functional goals, for people who not under a single organization's umbrella, to link together products that are not coming from a single vendor, and not designed to work together... feels like a stretch.
My office uses Dropbox Business extensively, and I'm not excited by any kind of "new" Dropbox. Businesses need to trust in the stability of their tools, and this signals to me the exact opposite of stability. I haven't got any clue how this could interfere with the workflows we've already established. Major product changes like this give me anxiety.
I really love Dropbox Paper, so I get part of the collaboration story.
What I don't like is that it's so hard to share a file, or to send an image in a chat -- all paths lead to dropbox links instead. When I get a Dropbox link on mobile chat now, I know it's going to take nearly a minute to see the content. Why?
They added smart sync and 1TB extra to “plus” accounts, which is nice after their pathetic use of Finder integration + OS notifications to nag users to upgrade to the next paid tier (on a paid account!). It’s what they should have done in the first place.
It looks like Dropbox is completely focused on the business market and not improving the consumer experience anymore. I've stuck with them for years because of the linux support, but am probably going to jump ship soon. My main complaint is the lack of a way to build a shared photo library with my spouse. Both Google and Apple support this.
I'm a Dropbox Pro user, using it to store documents that have to be accessible from all my devices, as well as to share galleries with my clients.
None of these integrations with Slack and Zoom make sense. I don't need them, and now that a product I used to trust for its simplicity and reliability has become a horribly bloated beast, I don't trust it any more.
This is bad, Dropbox. Maybe sell this as a totally different product, but for people, including corporate users, that only want reliable file syncing, this is a big turn off.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
When they dropped support for XFS, I was locked out and happily went looking for a replacement.
Syncthing ( https://syncthing.net/ ) does everything I need. Instead of some nameless cloud company hosting my stuff, my 'cloud copy' is a big USB hard drive on a Raspberry Pi.
I still have to keep Dropbox because of a couple of multi-org projects I'm involved with use it. I'm done putting my personal stuff on it, though.
[+] [-] liyanage|6 years ago|reply
It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside the Dropbox directory. My file system is busy all day long from building in Xcode and other things.
What I need is for Dropbox to improve that by making an efficient, battery-saving, native macOS client. What I don't need is what is announced in this post.
The two other things that I hate are the fact that they don't support symlinks and that they use a kernel extension. All of these things together made me start the search for a replacement.
Does anybody know how the CPU/power impact of Microsoft's and Google's offerings are on the Mac?
[+] [-] vvoyer|6 years ago|reply
1. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price
I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise customers.
Use iCloud that's it if you're in the apple word.
[+] [-] jamesb93|6 years ago|reply
Google Drive has no differential sync. Any changes you make re-upload the whole file. This is a hard no for me. Also Google.
I moved to Sync[0]. The pricing tier was more what I wanted (500GB). They support symlinks, differential syncing, selective sync as well as a 'Vault' for storing files in the cloud but not on your machine. I think it's end-to-end encrypted as well, not going to commit to saying anything specific in that regard. The Mac app is also a lot better, I find it spinning up a lot less for me and its a lot lighter in general. To be fair though, even with iCloud I get my fans whirring up when I start uploading lots of changes.
I've also heard good things about pCloud[1] but I don't see any reason to change my workflow now after have to already change it.
[0] - https://www.sync.com/ [1] - https://www.pcloud.com/
[+] [-] jwr|6 years ago|reply
In general, it is a CPU catastrophe, a penalty I have to pay in order to use file synchronization. I really hope that a better competitor appears.
Additionally, the software pesters me with annoying popups pushing me to upgrade.
[+] [-] pgm8705|6 years ago|reply
I've been pretty happy with iCloud Drive since I switched to it. Works seamlessly and effortlessly on my Mac and iPhone, affordable pricing fo storage which can be shared with family, and also solves my photo storage needs with Apple Photos. The only drawback is the lack of shared folders, but they just announced that is coming soon.
[+] [-] Syzygies|6 years ago|reply
A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cloud service into special behaviour (like syncing folders elsewhere) are also wrong. You no more want a cloud service going off and "thinking" about a symlink, than you wanting it going off and "thinking" about porn it finds on your computer. These are just files; their contents or meaning are absolutely not any cloud service's concern.
For example, a MacOS application bundle typically includes internal symlinks that most users are unaware even exist. Yes, DropBox breaks these, too. They tell you that their service is not intended for synchronizing entire file systems, as if properly handling an arbitrary file is somehow rocket science. I'll grant them that this is over their heads, but it's not hard.
There's exactly one sync program that gets it all right: Unison, written by Benjamin Pierce, a world-famous computer scientist. Yes, he actually thinks about this more clearly than any of the programmers of commercial services, and the best community ideas are adopted.
Unison handles symlinks properly.
Atomic directories are a relatively new feature in unison: One can declare a directory atomic, forcing the user to choose at the directory level when there’s a conflict.
I declare .git directories atomic. A better example: A MacOS .sparsebundle disk image file appears as many files (bands) inside a directory, but is intended to be seen by the user as an atomic file, not a directory. This has the advantage of more efficient backups: If one makes a minor change to a large mounted disk image (say, a few MB to a multiple GB disk image) then backup software isn’t forced to make a new copy of the entire multiple GB disk image.
If one makes minor changes to the same mounted disk image on two machines, and then does a two-way sync, one could buy the farm. Most likely, there will be a conflicting root file alerting one to the problem. Far cleaner to simply be forced to choose one disk image directory over the other. Functionally, the entire disk images are in conflict, not specific files within.
The ability to declare atomic directories is not a feature of any other two-way sync software, and it should be. A good heuristic: If a naive user can’t easily open a folder to reveal its contents (say, a Mac application bundle, or a sparse disk image) then the supporting directory should be treated as atomic by default.
[+] [-] atonse|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwthornton|6 years ago|reply
I switched a few years ago. It works really well. Unless you are using Dropbox with a team or a corporate environment, iCloud is better. I use a combo of iCloud (love the desktop syncing between my machines btw), and Google File Stream for team documents.
[+] [-] GordonS|6 years ago|reply
Why? To detect changes, they were storing a snapshot and comparing everything on disk to the snapshot. Which is madness when Windows has methods that don't require reading every damn byte on the disk - at the least, they could use a filesystem minifilter driver, or the NTFS USN change journal.
As if that wasn't enough, after the startup scan they were using an unreliable method to detect further changes (same one as dotnet's FileSystemWatcher, I forget the name of the underlying Windows API).
And to top it all off, even with only 2 systems sharing the data, there were conflicts all the time that required manual resolution (and I seem to recall Dropbox wasn't very good about surfacing these when they happened). Then there was a data loss incident, I presume due to some kind of conflict snafu - Dropbox only support at the time was a forum, and they were completely uninterested in even acknowledging that there was an issue.
I switched to Seafile after that, and haven't looked back. I honestly don't understand why people would put up with that crap, but given the size of Dropbox they obviously do...
[+] [-] wazoox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonotime|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Legogris|6 years ago|reply
I haven't actually moved over to this myself yet, but it does look much better than Dropbox or Sync.com (which I stupidly am still subscribed for despite their client being even worse than Dropbox - but at least it's encrypted...)
Nextcloud mentioned previously is the obvious choice for the privacy-conscious, but does take some further responsibility to ensure integrity and availability.
[+] [-] redfern314|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traster|6 years ago|reply
The integration with Google makes sense because they already own the tools that you're moving between. It seems really funky to have Dropbox crash that party. If you're trying to integrate with tools outside of the Google eco-system maybe dropbox atleast tries to allow it, I just can't see how it'd be anything other than clunky though.
Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Obviously storage has turned into a commodity and dropbox are trying to compete on a new level, it just seems boggling to me that this is the direction they've taken.
[+] [-] jonstokes|6 years ago|reply
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
[+] [-] mattnewport|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orloffm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbreese|6 years ago|reply
I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don’t see the integration working in that direction.
Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it’s available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integration with MS Office makes sense — where Office is aware when you’re working on files that are stored in Dropbox.
This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy...
[+] [-] solatic|6 years ago|reply
When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow.
Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice.
You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you.
You're doing things well, but it no longer really feels well, because your success in the marketplace no longer correlates with the maturity and quality of the product you're offering. You may have an incredibly mature and well-supported product, but it feels stale. It turns out that customers appreciate qualities like "refreshing" and "modern" that your product seemingly lacks.
As you start to lose customers, your declining revenue forces you to lay off employees and your stock starts to decline. Without a big change, you go out of business and shutter your doors for good. The executives are forced to sell the IP for pennies on the dollar to some patent troll as part of the company's bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings, and might open-source the IP if no buyer can be found.
[+] [-] SamuelAdams|6 years ago|reply
It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding.
In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply
In my view a lot of products could be frozen once they are mature . MS Office could have stopped most development a decade or more ago, Gmail could have stopped years ago. Windows could have stopped UI changes with XP or 7. But what are all these people supposed to do if not tweaking their product?
[+] [-] ajross|6 years ago|reply
Investor demands for growth. Dropbox already did one thing well. But they took money on the promise that they'd do more things and make more money than they could with that one thing they did well.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|6 years ago|reply
Like what you might end up with with this approach and selecting best of breed: Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Office 365 desktop, Google Apps (email), Some CRM solution, Github, client security solution, VPN solution, Jira, Confluence (wiki), Zendesk (helpdesk).
If you want things like single-sign-on and some additional security and management capabilities then you typically need to pick some higher pricing tier for each service. The price per user per month adds up. And as a added bonus, you also need to spend time managing all these and handle the monthly invoices/receipts.
What Dropbox is now doing is of course not solution to my problem. The only solution to the issue I'm having is consolidation of the services or smaller players teaming up and giving me unified package (like Dropbox+Slack+Zoom). Fully integrated packages like Microsoft 365 are quite tempting, even though I know the individual pieces are not "best of breed".
[+] [-] archagon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] passthejoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkharderdev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelmota|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T-hawk|6 years ago|reply
This relies on composability, integrating together several such components into a coherent whole.
Users don't understand composability or want to do it. They want the integration to already exist and just work.
[+] [-] rodgerd|6 years ago|reply
I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run it through voice recognition, and turn it into a OneNote transcript to sit alongside your repo of project docs for the same meeting.
Sometimes well-integrated solutions are more than the sum of their parts, and that's the problem Dropbox is facing.
[+] [-] ori_b|6 years ago|reply
Turns out that it dies if you try to grow it near walled gardens. The soil doesn't suit it.
[+] [-] derefr|6 years ago|reply
Do you ever right-click a file on your desktop and expect to be able to do an “Open With” action to open it in a Zoom meeting?
Dropbox is trying to recreate/recapitulate that functionality—the functionality of OS file-explorer GUIs, and how they act as a launchpad for feeding files to third-party intent providers.
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
It was seldom the thing users wanted and could use, and ended up being relegated to the dev-oriented UNIX userland.
[+] [-] icelancer|6 years ago|reply
VC Money.
[+] [-] Dwolb|6 years ago|reply
What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user’s workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers.
We’re going to see this more frequently and it’ll look weird coming from different tools trying to level up and pull this off (i.e. what will email look like with this?).
One issue is as incumbents partner/buddy-up and competition heats up, we’ll see a bunch of bundling, increasing consumer costs while locking out newcomers.
[+] [-] microtonal|6 years ago|reply
The primary reasons:
- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.
- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.
- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.
If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.
[+] [-] syntheticnature|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxdxbx|6 years ago|reply
I feel like Microsoft actually has the balance right. OneDrive still behaves just like a normal sync client. But to do certain kinds of real-time collaboration you can just point native, desktop Office apps to the cloud version of the file. But when you're offline you still have the same kinds of access you need.
Who ever asked for Dropbox OS?
[+] [-] FunnyLookinHat|6 years ago|reply
Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?
[+] [-] diziet|6 years ago|reply
Like:
What?: Would love to see metrics on:[+] [-] mromanuk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|6 years ago|reply
Trying to build the same functional goals, for people who not under a single organization's umbrella, to link together products that are not coming from a single vendor, and not designed to work together... feels like a stretch.
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herf|6 years ago|reply
What I don't like is that it's so hard to share a file, or to send an image in a chat -- all paths lead to dropbox links instead. When I get a Dropbox link on mobile chat now, I know it's going to take nearly a minute to see the content. Why?
[+] [-] rangibaby|6 years ago|reply
They added smart sync and 1TB extra to “plus” accounts, which is nice after their pathetic use of Finder integration + OS notifications to nag users to upgrade to the next paid tier (on a paid account!). It’s what they should have done in the first place.
[+] [-] sciurus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedisct1|6 years ago|reply
I'm a Dropbox Pro user, using it to store documents that have to be accessible from all my devices, as well as to share galleries with my clients.
None of these integrations with Slack and Zoom make sense. I don't need them, and now that a product I used to trust for its simplicity and reliability has become a horribly bloated beast, I don't trust it any more.
This is bad, Dropbox. Maybe sell this as a totally different product, but for people, including corporate users, that only want reliable file syncing, this is a big turn off.
[+] [-] timdiggerm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminwootton|6 years ago|reply
;)
[+] [-] F00Fbug|6 years ago|reply
When they dropped support for XFS, I was locked out and happily went looking for a replacement.
Syncthing ( https://syncthing.net/ ) does everything I need. Instead of some nameless cloud company hosting my stuff, my 'cloud copy' is a big USB hard drive on a Raspberry Pi.
I still have to keep Dropbox because of a couple of multi-org projects I'm involved with use it. I'm done putting my personal stuff on it, though.