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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#361

Post by azinman2 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #309
azinman2 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean that doesn’t exist? https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

I was going to point out that you're missing (or intentionally ignoring) the very next piece in that debate series[1] linked at the bottom of your link, which takes the view that this requirement doesn't exist. But it's not a very good-quality piece, which is presumably a function of the article format (short-form debate aimed at unsophisticated readers). The flipside of that is that I don't think your original linke…

“Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

We aren’t talking about corporations, but rather publicly traded companies. As the previous article pointed out you do have an obligation to your shareholders, and that obligation is to somehow act in their best interest.

Certainly the stock market price goes down if you aren’t growing. And prices going down means you’re not doing right by your shareholders.

I’m happy to be wrong here (I hope it’s true) but whether law or not it seems to be an immutable force.

Re: The new Dropbox

#362

Post by brobdingnagians »

Shorel wrote: post #263
atonse wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really true? wow. I'm shocked that a company of Dropbox's size hasn't built native clients for each platform (or rearchitected the core to be based on something like Go or Rust that is fast and cross platform, and just building the UI parts in the native frameworks)

Does anyone still build native clients for anything? It seems no one bothers anymore, no matter the size of the company. Any native clients we have now were built years ago and now they are only maintained. I think nowadays even Audacity would be an Electron app.

I'm starting a company and writing native clients. There isn't any reason not to. There are lots of cross-platform GUI libraries that are fine for business applications, you get native speed, there are plenty of languages that are both safe and fast. You get full access to the full power of the OS if you need it. I think the current craze of non-native clients is because of web-developers who don't know how to do anything else, so they just mimic a website on desktop.

Re: The new Dropbox

#363

Post by T-hawk »

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”?

This relies on composability, integrating together several such components into a coherent whole.

Users don't understand composability or want to do it. They want the integration to already exist and just work.

Re: The new Dropbox

#364

Post by bitL »

liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Get your own NextCloud instance; you'd need to pay for some Linux VPS (<$5/month); installation takes 5 minutes and you have clients for all major desktop/mobile platforms.

Re: The new Dropbox

#366

Post by mrzool »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #355
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…

> If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?

Because Hacker News is not the real word. I bet most Dropbox customers will love this.

Re: The new Dropbox

#367

Post by brightball »

octorian wrote: post #264
brightball wrote: post #125

And the new desktop app is Windows and Mac only. Of course. My primary reason for using Dropbox initially when it first came out was because it was fully cross platform. The longer they go, the farther we get from that. The only Linux updates I’ve seen from them have been deprecating support for things.

And I wonder how long that'll last... I chose Dropbox because of the Linux support, as I actually use all 3 of the major platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux) regularly. If I have to leave Dropbox, I honestly don't know what I'd replace it with. It works well enough on all 3 of the platforms I use it on, that I really don't want to switch to some janky duct-taped alternative. Meanwhile, it seems like every other hot startup…

Maybe it’s time for ownCloud?

Re: The new Dropbox

#368

Post by dangus »

bitL wrote: post #364
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Get your own NextCloud instance; you'd need to pay for some Linux VPS (<$5/month); installation takes 5 minutes and you have clients for all major desktop/mobile platforms.

Ultimately, after that $5/month plus storage costs, you still have to handle security patching, DR, and everything an infrastructure engineer does all on your own.

Not to knock it, I think it's a great option. It's just not for everyone, not for the dentist next door or anything.

Re: The new Dropbox

#369

Post by jl6 »

josteink wrote: post #347
signal11 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud is great for Mac/iOS users. I never felt it worked well on Windows. It never felt right. So yes, Apple still has work to do if they want wider iCloud use. Maybe they don't want to? But Microsoft and Google are creeping up. Their file sync is almost there with Dropbox. OneDrive works on Mac and Windows, supports Files on Demand (similar to Dropbox Infinite - essentially placeholder files, very useful for small…

> Dropbox still does sync really well and has the best app, in my opinion -- including the only one that works on Linux That used to be true, but Dropbox decided they no longer wanted that market-advantage. I’ve uninstalled Dropbox from all my Linux machines because it no longer supports ZFS (or any other file-systems except ext4).

I still use it with btrfs with the aid of this fix: https://github.com/dark/dropbox-filesystem-fix

Re: The new Dropbox

#370

Post by rodgerd »

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…

> This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy...

I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run it through voice recognition, and turn it into a OneNote transcript to sit alongside your repo of project docs for the same meeting.

Sometimes well-integrated solutions are more than the sum of their parts, and that's the problem Dropbox is facing.

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