In the early days of computing people would sell task managers, file managers, memory optimisers, software to burn data to a CD etc. As time went on, these ‘products’ just became features of the operating system. While it used to make sense for people to own a copy of Nero Disk Burner, over time this became expected functionality of the operating system. Consumers demands for base software change over time - Task managers used to be a product you bought for your OS, now they are just a feature of your OS.
So what do Dropbox offer, I would say it is “seamless file syncing”, which meets a broader consumer goal of “my changes are synchronised across my team and devices”. I think the issue is that as time goes on, this is becoming a standard consumer expectation of applications.
Applications like Google Docs and Figma have actually decided that it’s better if they handle the sync rather than Dropbox. Just like windows was better at task management, they are better at synchronising their own files. It means they can even offer things like collaborative editing!
Secondly, as time moves on, the base expectation for an OS might move to ‘all my files are synchronised’ - and if that’s the case, what is the role for Dropbox in a world where customers just expect that as standard? We used to have file managers as their own purchased products and then they became standard OS features. Why should a cloud file manager or sync service be fundamentally different in a cloud-first world? Online sync might be the new windows file explorer. Take iCloud for example - that’s just a feature fully baked into OSX.
So what does this mean for Dropbox? Well what it offers over time might just become what people expect other software or their operating system to do for them - And I think this is what Jobs was predicting. Why do I have to get something else to sync the files on my computer, surely this is an operating system responsibility?
So then the Dropbox space becomes - “cross operating system syncing of files that don’t have a native cloud sync process”. People still buy Nero Disk Burner... it’s just their market isn’t what it used to be.
They chase after an enterprise consumer but this would put them into direct competition with Microsoft, a fight that they cannot win.
Both iPhone and Android have support for cloud sync baked into their operating system as a core feature for their own service.
The issue with things like Carousel or Google Photos is that the sync is actually a fairly small part of the engineering effort - the hard part is making an amazing photo viewing and editing app which with mobile devices includes the end to end user flow from your mobile phone camera! Google photos and iPhoto make a little more sense as products when you consider that these are really about viewing the photos you took on your Apple/google device and providing native sync from their camera app. I’m not sure what Dropbox’s long term competitive advantage could be in the space from a corporate strategy perspective.
Still has. It's called "Camera Upload" now.
> Once people star buying storage from google/apple there would be no point to buy any of Dropbox offering.
I think secure erase, transfers, file requests, "Apps" and OS independence is worthy of the price they ask for. Also on-demand sync on other OSes and other small features increase their value in my eyes a lot.
A google docs file isn’t a file in the traditional sense, it just exists on the cloud and we can collaborate at the same time.
Similarly with Figma, that’s not really a file. It just exists and we can all edit it at the same time.
My todo list app used to sync with Dropbox, now it syncs for free without Dropbox.
Even Microsoft office documents on 365 sit in a weird space between ‘kind of a file and kind of not’ - the file is there, but when you are doing live collaborative editing that’s presumably not also updating the file on the disk in real time - there is some other sort of magic going on.
The important thing with the above examples is they can offer better sync because they don’t rely on Dropbox, rather than despite not using Dropbox.
If sync is an application feature, sync tends to be better than if sync isn’t an application feature and it’s left to Dropbox to do the sync.
Where this does ring true is Dropbox versus not OneDrive on it's own, but OneDrive as it comes bundled with O365. Many F500 type companies pretty much MUST have O365.
Then, if you have O365, you have OneDrive. And the question then isn't whether Dropbox is better. It's whether OneDrive is "good enough" to suffice, despite it being not as good as Dropbox. And the decision maker doesn't care if it's not good enough for some smallish subset of employees that need a Linux client, etc. They care whether it's good enough for most.
This is the problem. Putting Linux support aside, focusing too much on enterprise, while necesseary up to a point, kills both the product and personal productivity tools market.
Is wanting to decouple work and personal files completely while retaining independence on personal systems a cardinal sin?
IMHO, touting about benefits of a work/life balance is moot if I can't completely shut-off work stuff from my life while using my computer. Dropbox, Evernote and Trello allows me to do that. None of my work stuff is present in these mediums. Similarly none of my work stuff syncs to my personal computers directly. I use company laptop for that stuff.
Trello also went the same route. Trello Gold was a personal productivity powerhouse. Now it's unmaintained, intentionally crippled semi-premium version of Trello Business class.
Do I need to set-up a VPS, install {Next,Own}cloud to it and install all my tools as add-ons there to have a personal productivity space? In 2021? That shouldn't be necessary, that wasn't the promise.
Yet we are here. Every product is targeting the enterprise, where the freelancer or the personal productivity enthusiast is either confined to its corporate licenses or expensive (in terms of time) self-hosted solutions.
- Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure there will be many other tools which can talk with Dropbox but not with my server.
- Collaboration: I bet that not so many people would install another client and remember a username, password, URL triplet to just work with me (e.g. academic research, side project, etc.). They'll either force me to use other tool or things will just break down (just experienced a similar thing at work).
- Maintenance: OS, service, add-on updates, licenses, security, monitoring, etc. will be additional time consuming obligations.
- Pricing: If I use a VPS, excessive network traffic or resource usage will result in a price hike.
- Price/Performance: You cannot beat the competition at the price/performance ratio. I will pay more, spend more time and get less. Why bother?
- Environmental: In my case, self-hosting at home is impossible. I neither have the bandwidth, nor the space required to store another system and keep it quiet at the same time. Additional power bill and heat is not welcome, either.
These are just the issues coming from top of my head, and can be expanded further.
It is most likely Dropbox faces higher churn in their primary customer demography (Creatives and Professionals). Their offering lack many admin controls it is not yet ideal for enterprises where the churn is low. Further, OneDrive and G-Suite offers much better value by bundling the productivity suite.
Their Dropbox Transfer offering is a nice alternate revenue stream for them. I wonder what else they can come up with.
However, there are concentration points of this 2% which is beneficiary to both parties.
Dropbox can target this 2% better and users of this 2% can use Dropbox to collaborate and sync their other systems which have more popular OSes.
Nice thing about Syncthing is you can entirely configure what you are syncing and how. I literally press one button on my phone, it creates a backup, and that backup is sent to my server.
I would go as far to say that Android's killer app is Syncthing. Yes, I'm putting this on the same level as iMessage for iOS. It's that good. If I ever switch back to iPhone I will really miss it.
FYI, you might be satisfied by Insync.
I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops.
No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but needs your own infra to run.
Dropbox allows me to do a lot of things and they're currently irreplaceable for me. That's not because I can't replace them (would take half a day at most) but, their service worth the money they want.