Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it.
> I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.
I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page.
These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.
In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones.
Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.
I‘m still at 52gb free Storage. But I just need 2. I’d even pay 2-3 bucks a month to get rid of the device limit. But I won’t pay for a terabyte I don’t need…
Yeah agree, public folders were great. I’m still a user of dropbox since early days but:
- I’m stupid and I kept a git repo in there, it became corrupt. Doesn’t surprise me but wondering what else is fragile in dropbox.
- Uploading pictures on mobile is really really slow. For some reason google photos on iOS is so much faster, like incomparably faster.
- Google photos also allows you to quickly get to all your pictures. Dropbox is… at best cumbersome, at worst really slow at fetching lots of pictures.
- make public folders a thing again for paying users. I’m sure this would create an awesome ecosystem of websites.
The speed of Google photos is actually breathtaking. The fact that you can instantly lag free scroll through tens of thousands of images and it all just loads instantly is quite impressive imo.
The problem with some of the competitors is they do not treat photos as its own thing separate from files. I think google did a great job understanding that photos are not just a folder of files but that they require their own dedicated software.
A lot of people had that realization early on. Google had Picasa and Apple had iPhoto, both of which were pretty good photo management software even before the mobile revolution.
I think that they removed public folders because some people started storing static files for their websites in it. As for why google photos are faster... I think it is because Photos resize images on device, while Dropbox uploads them in original size.
My belief is that they're trying to find a way to remain profitable. VCs expect returns, and with Dropbox's main feature now included by many other services like O365 and Drive, I would think that they're finding themselves forced to make such changes whether or not they want to.
If they were smart they would use their customer market as a loss lead. Years ago I'd use Dropbox for work because it was so easy to make a new folder and add some emails to it. Now a lot of people don't even have the client installed.
It used to be really great, you just have an "ender chest" folder that shows up on all your computers with a public folder that shows up on their web server. They screwed up the public folder pretty badly and I left after that.
Now we have syncthing anyway which is better anyway for a number of reasons and most people know git which works better on mobile devices.
> I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.
I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page.
These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.