Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows. Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.
I think everyone outside knows where it's headed, and it's either enterprise-ware (clearly that's what they're aiming for, as they literally rebranded the whole thing to "Dropbox Business", it's right there on the home page) or slow death probably ending in an ignoble acquisition. Too much investment involved for them to just keep delivering the same service that made them a household name, taking a small and steady profit.
> Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.
They're not all-but saying that, they are saying that, if you're a non-business user.
Your insurance company pays part of your premiums to another insurance company to cover them in the case of truly catastrophic events. It's called an underwriter. It's why State Farm didn't go under after Hurricane Andrew, despite the fact that State Farm had a wide majority of policies in the affected areas. They weren't just writing checks, they were cashing them too.
Instead of signing up for 3 different Clouds to make sure my data is safe, maybe my Cloud provider should be doing that for me. But that does nothing to address another concern (lock-in) and could very well make it worse, unless the "underwriter" also facilitates data transfer between clouds.
They should talk to Mozilla. An OS-agnostic, ad-free, FAANG-independent cloud-hub integrated in the browser...? YES-fucking-PLEASE.
If I remember correctly, it's using Amazon in the backend. So how exactly is it that it is independent of all the other major providers?
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450280565/Dropbox-gears-...
Others are its own.
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
FWIW you can turn off all the notifications in the preference panel.
Which notifications option do I uncheck to stop from getting the popup asking me to upgrade to dropbox plus that I got this morning?
TBH the whole point of Basic is to be a trial sku so I don't know if you can turn those off. We do want you to become a paying customer :D
Glad to hear, though I really wish you guys had stayed as a storage company. You're not going to replace all the apps that I use Dropbox to bridge too, yet your apps seem to do their best to keep me in your ecosystem. Please stop that.
Those are what you pick if you want lock-in and bundled features. Dropbox and others are what you (used to) pick if you want to work cross-platform with a heavy focus on sharing real files, not tools. I think that's why the bundled tools strike so many as a bad idea: if we wanted that, there are more sensible options for it already. I get that they're kinda stuck trying it if they want/need huge growth, but it seems destined to fail, to me.
I've recommended or installed DropBox on over 200 SMBs over the last (close to a decade - I don't know how long specifically).
There are things you do great. There are some things you used to do great (or OK) but stopped. There are some not-great things. Compared to Google Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Microsoft One Drive (Which I have to use for some clients) and Box.com (which I have to use for some clients), I would prefer it if DropBox would simply solve for my technical and business needs (and I don't think, as an engineer, that they are that hard - I mean some of them you already did and removed).
I would love to talk. Please let me know if/how/when that could happen. If you are not interested, that is fine too. I am on the road for the next week-or-so, but just give me the sign, and I'd love to talk to you about your excellent core product.
EDIT: Oh! Ha - My email address is in my profile.
I just wish the need for constant growth wasn't the reality of tech companies in 2020.
Currently, I am wrestling with the fact that I just bought a new computer and the initial sync took 2 days for ~100GB stored (because there appeared to be per-file overhead and I have a lot of small files). I would not call this performant.
When this finally completed, I discovered that actually I had not downloaded all my files, because even though I turned Smart Sync off, Smart Sync is still invisibly turned on. I learned this when I went to prep for a meeting and my IDE hung for 8 minutes when one of my project folders had to Smart Sync in the background. Again, I have Smart Sync turned off.
What I learned was that in order to turn Smart Sync off, you should ignore the Smart Sync settings, and instead sign into Dropbox.com, click Settings, (again, ignore the setting on that page that says Smart Sync is turned off), and turn off "Dropbox System Extension", which is actually the setting that controls Smart Sync. Then reboot, sign into Dropbox again, and let it go through a sync cycle.
As far as I can tell this feature mostly benefits boomers who think cloud is magical infinite storage, at the expense of people who actually have enough storage and want to use Dropbox for what it was actually good at.
I think it’s not about the price you or I pay. It’s about living up to investors’ expectations. They don’t need to be “just profitable”, they need a massive cash cow and ride it out.
Storage is a commodity now, so no way to achieve it with that. They need more value-add, and apparently a “hub for your digital life” is what they decided it needs to be.
In the marketplace or as a public company with a crazy market cap?
Even their rebranding to "Dropbox Business" everywhere basically says "individuals and solo/small business people, please do consider leaving, we aren't doing what we started out doing and aren't for you anymore".
Looking at the home page, though, it's very clear where the focus is. The only link I can even find to the Plus option is in the footer and it's not even clear it's not a business plan (truly, why would any of the plans on a site that brands itself entirely as "Dropbox Business" not be business plans?
Someone who didn't know otherwise would assuredly bounce off the site having ascertained there are no personal plans. That has to have been a deliberate choice. I guess it could be some kind of grievous mistake to have somehow entirely failed to account for someone interested in an individual plan visiting "dropbox.com" to find it, except it fits with the rest of the publicly-visible moves coming out of Dropbox.
Please respect the honest opinion from the users and try to work with them and show empathy. I am not seeing that.
I use Dropbox only because it's easy to edit/add files from the file system (and I don't like Microsoft or Google enough to give their services a chance).
This update went unnoticed by me, which is a good thing in my mind. I rarely use the web interface.
This line from the linked post is a great summary of exactly how I think Dropbox's product direction has taken a turn for the worse.
This is no sleight against the author (who seems to be doing great work; I enjoyed this read!) or the engineering team. Just like, the general direction of the company. This line also stands out:
> it had been a while since we delivered new value to our personal users.
I can't speak for all paying users, but the value I derive from Dropbox is how it syncs fast and "just works". I do _not_ find new value in popups and notification badges about features that other companies have already perfected (much like I don't need to go anywhere else for file syncing).
I realize I'm not representative of the userbase as a whole, I'm just frustrated.