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I think the Dropbox announcement is a sign that the enterprise has superceded consumer as the 1st priority for Dropbox executives. This makes sense, as essenti

I think the Dropbox announcement is a sign that the enterprise has superceded consumer as the 1st priority for Dropbox executives. This makes sense, as essentially they wanted a 10 billion+ valuation and the consumer market wasn't big enough to get to that valuation. The problem is their enterprise products don't look look much better than their competitors while their consumer product (sync a folder) was best in class... If dropbox hadn't raised so much money they could have stuck to their core vision. Instead they will have to compete into the crowded world of mediocre SAAS products that duct tape different solutions together badly. All because they wanted that sweet VC money so they could have a $100K chrome bear in their office and dropbox branded water in their fridges...

tschwimmer 7y ago
I think your first point about enterprise vs consumer is very true. I don't even think it's a recent change. What I disagree with is your opinion about VC money. If they didn't take VC money Dropbox in its current state wouldn't exist. The costs to support free accounts is staggering - there is a very real dollar cost associated with running a giant farm of storage servers. But free accounts are also crucial to Dropbox's business. It's very natural to run out of space and then decide to upgrade to a paid account. So you can see there's a bootstrapping problem. How do you support these free users while they add enough stuff to convert? This seems like a pretty good usecase for VC to me. I'd also push back a bit on sticking to 'their core vision.' I don't know how much more there is to do there: Dropbox is already best in class in sync and backup. I'm not saying there are no improvements, but they are decidedly more incremental than in the business collaboration space.
- xupybd 7y ago
  I used to pay for Dropbox but they removed support for my file system at work. So I no longer have a use case for Dropbox.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Curious why they would be operating at that level?
    - epberry 7y ago
      I would guess it was an encrypted Linux filesystem. We went through that. It was a pain to get it switched.
      - AndrewDavis 7y ago
        It's not just encrypted file systems that are no longer supported. Ext4 is the only supported filesystem. No xfs, btrfs, zfs etc.
        brianwawok 7y ago
        Luckily you can make a tiny ext4 mount for Dropbox and leave the rest of your drive alone.
        marchenko 7y ago
        It was quite aggravating when my shared Dropbox folder on a dual-boot Windows/Linux System lost support. It was the main reason I switched from GDrive to Dropbox (besides trying to gradually de-Google). Now I have 2 Dropbox folders on one machine.
    - xupybd 7y ago
      https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/m-p/290058#M42250 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien... The cost of maintaining support was too high I think. There are very few of us using unsupported file systems.
sidcool 7y ago
Absolutely. Because enterprises are where the real money is. Even Google, who has been pretty bad at enterprise, are getting warmed up to it.

tschwimmer 7y ago

I think your first point about enterprise vs consumer is very true. I don't even think it's a recent change. What I disagree with is your opinion about VC money. If they didn't take VC money Dropbox in its current state wouldn't exist. The costs to support free accounts is staggering - there is a very real dollar cost associated with running a giant farm of storage servers. But free accounts are also crucial to Dropbox's business. It's very natural to run out of space and then decide to upgrade to a paid account. So you can see there's a bootstrapping problem. How do you support these free users while they add enough stuff to convert? This seems like a pretty good usecase for VC to me. I'd also push back a bit on sticking to 'their core vision.' I don't know how much more there is to do there: Dropbox is already best in class in sync and backup. I'm not saying there are no improvements, but they are decidedly more incremental than in the business collaboration space.

xupybd 7y ago
I used to pay for Dropbox but they removed support for my file system at work. So I no longer have a use case for Dropbox.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Curious why they would be operating at that level?
  - epberry 7y ago
    I would guess it was an encrypted Linux filesystem. We went through that. It was a pain to get it switched.
    - AndrewDavis 7y ago
      It's not just encrypted file systems that are no longer supported. Ext4 is the only supported filesystem. No xfs, btrfs, zfs etc.
      - brianwawok 7y ago
        Luckily you can make a tiny ext4 mount for Dropbox and leave the rest of your drive alone.
      - marchenko 7y ago
        It was quite aggravating when my shared Dropbox folder on a dual-boot Windows/Linux System lost support. It was the main reason I switched from GDrive to Dropbox (besides trying to gradually de-Google). Now I have 2 Dropbox folders on one machine.
  - xupybd 7y ago
    https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/m-p/290058#M42250 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien... The cost of maintaining support was too high I think. There are very few of us using unsupported file systems.

sidcool 7y ago

Absolutely. Because enterprises are where the real money is. Even Google, who has been pretty bad at enterprise, are getting warmed up to it.