The new Dropbox • Hacker News Board

Re: The new Dropbox

#161

Post by giancarlostoro » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

passthejoe wrote: post #155

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…

For me, the "killer" feature of Google Docs/Sheets is the ability of multiple users to be in the document at the same time, all making changes, and all those changes being seen by all in real time. I don't think that shared Dropbox files can replicate this same functionality, so maybe apps on their side is the way to bridge the gap.

This is also possible with Sharepoint from Microsoft, but you can open them all up in the desktop versions of those apps which I prefer.

Re: The new Dropbox

#162

Post by Majromax » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #149

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”? When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow. Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice. You keep doing things well, but yo…

> You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you.

... so you're saying the first-mover begins coasting and fails to invest in its product, while the plucky upstart puts in novel research and development.

That might be common, but it hardly seems inevitable. If anything the 'old guard' should have a relative advantage from better know-how, including knowledge of what pitfalls to avoid.

The true underlying issue might be the false assumption that market position is durable, rather than purchased with a depreciating investment in tooling, process, and technology.

Re: The new Dropbox

#163

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

turdnagel wrote: post #71

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…

I'm considering the same thing and switching to iCloud Drive as my family is heavily invested into the Apple ecosystem. The next versions of iOS and macOS will support shared folders, which was the one thing holding me back. Also really annoyed about the price change. It seems to me like they know most people don't use the full 1 TB, or anywhere near it, so it's practically meaningless to extend to 2 TB. You really h…

Finally! I’ve been waiting for iCloud Drive folder sharing so I can dump Dropbox.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/11/share-icloud-drive-folders-ip...

Re: The new Dropbox

#164

Post by FullyFunctional » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

randlet wrote: post #49

eyeball wrote: post #26

I just want my files backed up and sync’d across device. iCloud changes look promising. May be time to ditch Dropbox. If only Apple would have a good app on Linux and let me run Mac OS time machine into iCloud.

I've been happy with pCloud which has Win/Linux/Mac/Android/iOS clients.

I pay for both and pCloud is cheap but inferior (for me) in two ways:

1. pCloud doesn't support file permissions or symlinks, thus you can't use it as a real filesystem (eg, building and testing software out of it).

2. pCould is a "cloud fs" (the files aren't on a host filesystem), whereas Dropbox is syncing a host filesystem. The difference is very visible in performance.

If the first issue was fixed (I've asked them many times, to no avail), I could live with the second.

Re: The new Dropbox

#165

Post by blowski » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #149

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”? When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow. Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice. You keep doing things well, but yo…

I agree - grow or die. “Do one thing well” might work well for open source Unix CLI tools, but not for companies with shareholders expecting dividends. I wish it wasn’t that way, but that is how it is.

Re: The new Dropbox

#166

Post by m_fayer » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

FullyFunctional wrote: post #137

sethhochberg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limit on number of syncing devices has me exploring other options - I'm an oldschool Dropbox user, I got most of my storage space with referrals years ago, and I consume about 6GB on the free plan. I don't need 2TB. I don't really even want 2TB, and I'm certainly not going to pay over $100 a year for 2TB. I'd pay some smaller amount of money for the ability to sync additional devices without storage that I'll nev…

You (and I) were definitely part of the problem, but limiting the number of devices was brilliant on their part as it forced me (and many others) to think hard about my options. Unlike you however, I came to the conclusion that 1) Dropbox are far superior to the competition for me (eg., I regularily build and test out of a Dropbox folder), 2) I actually get enormous value of it. $120 (they raised the price) is worth…

> ...as long as their core syncing tech. remains functional, I just want them succeed.

I feel likewise. But I'm afraid their core tech will slowly fall into neglect as they cast about for new revenue streams - and in this particular case that core tech does too important a job for me to tolerate even moderate neglect.

Re: The new Dropbox

#167

Post by iscrewyou » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

> And don’t worry—you can still organize all your work from the Dropbox folder in Windows File Explorer and macOS Finder.

DON’T mess this up, Dropbox. Don’t.

Re: The new Dropbox

#168

Post by geekamongus » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #92

Whenever I see moves like this, I think to myself how little of a real positive impact SharePoint had in the Enterprise world. And that was linking Office products, in large organizations that already used the products, and already collaborated for their jobs, while including the ability to write code against it all. Trying to build the same functional goals, for people who not under a single organization's umbrella,…

MS continues to bungle their whole strategy. After being in Google-centric organizations for a decade, I moved to a Microsoft-centric company 18 months ago, and it's been a challenge.

I am continually dismayed at how difficult it is to choose the best way to do a simple task. Sharepoint? OneDrive? Online Word vs. Offline Word?

Choose the wrong one? Too bad! You now have to spend 20 minutes figuring out what went wrong and why the doc you sent around to your coworkers is suddenly in this weird purgatory state of part-online, part-offline, and you aren't sure which one to edit anymore.

Re: The new Dropbox

#169

Post by iscrewyou » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #103

Dwolb wrote: post #61

SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user’s workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers. We’re going to see this more frequently…

Agreed. The beauty of Dropbox used to be their utter invisibility. They just seamlessly synced my files in the background. If they're now going to insist on being "in my face," I'll take my business elsewhere. And whichever Dropbox vice president tried to make his bones with this project can pound sand.

Yeah. That was the attraction. It was invisible and got the job done. Recently, the notifications about their new products inside Dropbox is simply spammy.

Re: The new Dropbox

#170

Post by azinman2 » Wed, Jun 12, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #157

ajross wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? Investor demands for growth. Dropbox already did one thing well. But they took money on the promise that they'd do more things and make more money than they could with that one thing they did well.

I wish more companies would take the Craigstlist model. There are very few posts they charge for and it's enough to keep the company totally doing. Even when Backpage was around to compete with them, they still were able to do that one thing well and keep going. The constant demand for growth is not a good thing. You can only sell so many eyePhones or Intel CPUs before people just would rather keep old things working…

Stock market doesn’t work that way. You are legally required to grow, forever until the end of time (or your business). I think it’s one of the most toxic forces that leads to pollution, over-consolidation, etc.