Not OP, and I'm not sure specifically about which dark patterns you're referring to, but I can take a stab:
It's because Dropbox doesn't have a good business model (anymore).
Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. are happy enough to give storage away for free, or almost, and their solutions come pre-installed. For the average user, it'd be an uphill battle to get people to install Dropbox even if it were comparable price-wise to OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive - and it's not, because Dropbox actually needs to make money off cloud storage and these companies don't. It'd need to be leagues better than those other products (think Firefox overtaking IE, for a time) - and it's not. I think its sync is quite good, but I don't know if it's so much better than the alternatives that it'd persuade significant numbers to switch. And, as others in this thread have pointed out, its desktop client kind of sucks.
Moreover, "files" themselves are becoming an antiquated concept. They're definitely not dead yet, but they're almost a power user thing at this point. Documents are stored on the cloud, embedded inside the specific web app (Google Docs, Notion, Figma...) you used to create it. It sucks, but that's the direction we're heading. File sync is becoming less-and-less essential, to fewer-and-fewer users.
Dropbox is a public company: they can't just shrug their shoulders, tend to their core user base, and iterate on their product. That's not going to produce the kind of growth they need to keep investors happy; you need a good business model to produce that kind of growth organically. Hence you need to produce it inorganically: dark patterns.
brcmthrowaway|1 year ago
wk_end|1 year ago
It's because Dropbox doesn't have a good business model (anymore).
Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. are happy enough to give storage away for free, or almost, and their solutions come pre-installed. For the average user, it'd be an uphill battle to get people to install Dropbox even if it were comparable price-wise to OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive - and it's not, because Dropbox actually needs to make money off cloud storage and these companies don't. It'd need to be leagues better than those other products (think Firefox overtaking IE, for a time) - and it's not. I think its sync is quite good, but I don't know if it's so much better than the alternatives that it'd persuade significant numbers to switch. And, as others in this thread have pointed out, its desktop client kind of sucks.
Moreover, "files" themselves are becoming an antiquated concept. They're definitely not dead yet, but they're almost a power user thing at this point. Documents are stored on the cloud, embedded inside the specific web app (Google Docs, Notion, Figma...) you used to create it. It sucks, but that's the direction we're heading. File sync is becoming less-and-less essential, to fewer-and-fewer users.
Dropbox is a public company: they can't just shrug their shoulders, tend to their core user base, and iterate on their product. That's not going to produce the kind of growth they need to keep investors happy; you need a good business model to produce that kind of growth organically. Hence you need to produce it inorganically: dark patterns.
zinodaur|1 year ago