Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 590 posts

Re: The new Dropbox

#111

Post by asdkhadsj »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #78
mbreese wrote: post #65

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 integ…

> 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 remai…

> In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind.

On a related but perhaps off topic note; Is that wrong?

I agree with everything you've said. Yet, I do wonder, is that business decision wrong? I've not spent much effort on the business side in my life, but from the outside I feel like I agree with their statement. Maybe not so much as in the "left behind" mantra, but more specifically I feel once a business reaches "success" (however you want to define that), your next objective should be maintaining/expanding the core product, and diversifying entirely.

It seems to me that being a one product company runs a risk of another company choking you out in various ways.

As an end user I of course love my products to say solely focused on the thing I want. I want Spotify to be my music app, nothing more. But I can sympathize with the decisions to diversify a companies offerings even if unrelated to the original core product.

Thoughts?

Re: The new Dropbox

#112

Post by lowercased »

chrismeller wrote: post #102
oauea wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you refuse to update your software you deserve to have a hard time.

That’s a bit harsh. While I understand not wanting to perform a new OS update (at least not immediately) or not being able to (they deprecate old hardware too) I do understand that it’s a matter of resources and that most people are going to be on a handful of your most recent releases, so it makes sense to spend your time on those. At the same time (most) people don’t actively seek to disable updates for things unti…

> it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.

Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.

There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?

But, yes, basically agreed.

relatedly, I've had dropbox on and off, but felt pushed in to paying for it, and resented that push (and ultimately never did). Had multiple client years ago all 'love' dropbox and wanted to work that way. They all loved that it was 'free', but... when I had to work with 5 of them, each sharing up to their 'free' limit with me, it put me over the free limit in to 'pay up' territory. Not a 'break the bank' amount, of course, but it bugged me that I needed to fork out.

Re: The new Dropbox

#113

Post by randlet »

onion2k wrote: post #83
FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #29

The blog has a loading icon? It took 10-15 seconds to render for me. 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)?

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)? 10 - 15 seconds to load a page is the result of poor code rather than 'because it's a client-side app'. Consequently you need to compare a poorly built client-side app with a poorly coded server-side app, or a poorly configured cache, for it to be a fair comparison. And, sad…

> loading 17.3Mb of gifs is the main problem.

The main problem is that for some inexplicable reason the text of the page isn't shown until those gifs are loaded.

Re: The new Dropbox

#114

Post by pkulak »

microtonal wrote: post #11

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 ye…

What did you switch to?

Re: The new Dropbox

#115

Post by asdkhadsj »

jacobcohen11 wrote: post #97
thinkharderdev wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people

I'd be curious if they simply couldn't compete, and they recognized that. Ie, their competition is heavily Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc which offer competing products as part of their suite. Yet, Google/etc doesn't really care about file sharing/storage. It's just one component in a much larger model.

I'd be curious if, due to cloud prices/etc, Dropbox didn't feel they could actually sustain a competitive price and become profitable. So they're trying to expand to other avenues and find something that works.

Re: The new Dropbox

#116

Post by andrewjrhill »

jacobcohen11 wrote: post #97
thinkharderdev wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people

It's a lack of focus on increasing sales throughput. They should have looked to resolve bottlenecks between when a lead first hits their website and when a sale is finalised.

There's always something along that process that is poor and holding back the rest of the process. An increase in throughput = increased sales.

Re: The new Dropbox

#117

Post by onion2k »

randlet wrote: post #113
onion2k wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)? 10 - 15 seconds to load a page is the result of poor code rather than 'because it's a client-side app'. Consequently you need to compare a poorly built client-side app with a poorly coded server-side app, or a poorly configured cache, for it to be a fair comparison. And, sad…

> loading 17.3Mb of gifs is the main problem. The main problem is that for some inexplicable reason the text of the page isn't shown until those gifs are loaded.

Yep. There's no excuse for that. It's actively bad front-end dev.

Re: The new Dropbox

#118

Post by randlet »

dcx wrote: post #81
randlet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pCloud works well for me (support for all major platforms). Google drive has no Linux support which is a deal killer for me.

pCloud looks pretty good - I happen to be shopping around for a Dropbox replacement too. But just a heads-up, when I checked around online I found these [1] [2] [3] comments. It sounds like they have a tool that runs internally to detect piracy and it sometimes picks up false positives, which might cause your account to be deleted? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/am2xbn/pcloud_allo... [2] https://www.re…

Yikes. That is troubling. Thanks for the heads up.

Re: The new Dropbox

#119

Post by dreamcompiler »

onion2k wrote: post #99
dreamcompiler wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. SSR is what the web was designed for after all. CSR is merely fashionable, not better.

99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. If you're loading a single page and then unloading it that's right. If you're interacting with a page it's often a lot faster to make a small request to fetch new data and just update the part of the DOM that needs to change rather than unloading everything, fetching the new page and all the associated resources that a…

Two things: Ajax is a good idea and I have no problem with it. CSR for updates is not an issue. My problem is with using it for whole pages that cannot render at all until a huge JS program has been run. When you're building a SPA, this is fine. But most web pages (like the original blog post here) shouldn't be SPAs.

Second, I didn't remember that clause from TBR's memo, so thanks for the reminder.

Re: The new Dropbox

#120

Post by chrismorgan »

CondensedBrain wrote: post #89
perlgeek wrote: post #70

I seem to recall that Dropbox once tried to become a platform, and failed miserably. Is this the second attempt? I'd prefer it if they just made file syncing easier.

Paper is one of the best writing experiences I've ever had, and the export option is solid, but that's about it. It's trying to operate in the space already taken by OneNote. The web-based tools in Office already output to real files you can get at through OneDrive. Even Google's office suite doesn't do that. That's probably where Dropbox sees itself headed: the corporate office suite space Microsoft currently domina…

Paper is good at managing collaborative editing, but I find it awful as a general editor: instead of working with what the browser provides, it tries to be clever and implement most things from scratch, and like almost everything that ever takes that approach, fails painfully, sitting firmly in the uncanny valley. (It definitely has various nice features that ameliorate this pain, but I still don’t like it at all.) Over the last year or so I have reported I think five or six distinct bugs (in three messages, I think), mostly ones that are really annoying for me, and I have not heard back from them, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have any of them been fixed. The one I hit the most regularly is selecting text at the start of a paragraph, and starting typing; for example if capitalising a list that someone else typed in lowercase. What you type goes onto a new line, rather than the same line. (I do not recall any of the other bugs I’ve reported off-hand; because I don’t actually use Paper all that much.)

And ugh, hanging punctuation is just a bad novelty that is of dubious value in prose, and strongly negative value in other forms of content. I believe it has no place in something like Paper—it feels to me like one of the developers came across the concept and thought “that sounds cool, can I make it work in Paper?” (and did a decent, though not brilliant, job of it, I admit) without stopping and thinking whether they should do it.

Oh, and Paper is so slow to load, just like Dropbox is these days. I only open either when I have to, they’re so slow to load and resource-heavy.

Post reply on HN