>But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and innovation.
I dream of the day when people will link the "Why use Dropbox when you can just..." HackerNews comment unironically.
People like to do the "success!" victory laps quite early. There's more to success than a cool product and insiders getting to exit wealthy. I think this is still a yet-to-be-seen situation.
It seems like a failure of expectations. Dropbox created a market and delivered an extremely well executed product to meet it. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the expectation of growth that VC funded businesses have.
I'm not sure I agree. A magic folder that syncs across all your devices is going to be useful for the foreseeable future. Eventually maybe Dropbox dies without real innovation but I think that fundamental concept could last for decades.
> A magic folder that syncs across all your devices is going to be useful for the foreseeable future.
This is exactly why they must innovate. Their core tech is useful, but it is also replicable; so as soon as someone has magic folder PLUS more useful features bundled together (as some already do), Dropbox fails to be as worth having as a separate service for users that prefer the bundle. Which is why they have issues at present.
> People like to do the "success!" victory laps quite early. There's more to success than a cool product and insiders getting to exit wealthy. I think this is still a yet-to-be-seen situation.
Dropbox is profitable and has been around for a decade. That's more than most businesses can say. How long do they need to be around for your "blessing"? A century?
I'd add lack of flexibility as a huge downside for me. No way to sync external drives to Dropbox, even though their common 2TB plan is way bigger than most laptops' builtin storage. And no way to sync any files on your primary drive outside of the main ~/Dropbox folder. I always want to sync certain configuration settings so that if I use the same apps on multiple computers, or get a new computer, everything just works the same way. Syncing symlinks used to be a decent workaround for this even though it was never officially recommended, but they killed that ability and never replaced it with any other solutions.
Now I've switched to iCloud, where I can more easily back up my full machine, and which syncs my Documents folder by default which is where a lot of Mac apps have started putting some configuration files. It's also a better replacement for Google Photos which is shutting down its free storage soon.
It always felt like Dropbox was too eager to play "me too" with all the other cloud service offerings, and not only did they not particularly succeed at that, but they kind of gave up on their own core competency to do it.
- CPU runaway consumption on OSX.
- Annoying off-on drive storage paradigm.
- Annoying integration with other apps (eg. Excel).
- Little differentiation from competition.
- Poor integration with their other offerings (eg. Paper).
But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and innovation. There are 5 or 6 initiatives they could implement now that would turn the tide.