They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on. Prior to their IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending time to migrate off of AWS versus continuing to build around their core offering. As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching, etc.) if order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive, Microsoft, etc.
I love Dropbox as a product and happily pay for it. It always works. No fuss. No conflicts, it just works.
Something to be said about tools you forget that you’re even paying for, they silently make your life better.
Lately, they’re getting slightly annoying though. Designers at Dropbox - it’s a fucking file syncing tool, not a life philosophy. Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido(retired)...ehhh engineers to do their thing.
The problem is the shareholders. Dropbox doesn’t need to grow. It can stay the same and continue to be helpful (and make money, provide a living to many employees). But the goddamn shareholders will ruin a perfectly good product. Public companies get hollowed out and the marrow sucked by the shareholders. I want a Drew Houston & Sons Co.; not Dropbox Incorporated.
I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux filesystems bizarrely - forcing me to reimage multiple machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour on non-ext4. I also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason I haven’t swapped to something else is my life is locked into it from the early days. I’d love to drop it at this point. I don’t even need that much space - just something cross platform.
> As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering
what I don't get is why they don't have a price plan in the 100-200GB range like google drive has for two or three bucks. I've set up like seven or eight of those for family members and relatives, it's a very good price point and size for the average user.
The free plan of dropbox pretty much is super small and the next thing is 5TB.
The theory is it would cannibalize their $10/mo plan. They have a lot of users who don’t have tons of files but value paid features. Google and Apple’s storage services are plainer offerings.
I'm on Google Drive mainly because they dpn't offer such a plan. Dropboxes client is better, but I'm not paying an extra $8/month for storage I don't need.
You are on Google Drive because you don’t need what Dropbox does. That’s not something they should worry about. They would need at least five of you for every $10/mo customer who downgraded to improve their situation, not factoring things like increased support cost and higher churn rates from lowest-price shoppers.
Unless Amazon decided that they want to give DropBox a huge discounted rate for the PR, it would simply cost too much to have stayed on the Amazon cloud.
