Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.
Like. Build a decent product. The lack of any major competition doesn't mean they should stop improving and branch out into costly absurdity, at least try to keep up with Maestral with 100x the headcount.
> Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.
How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?
Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.
> The lack of any major competition
Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.
(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
The problem was them going public. Honestly looking at the fact that it's a 20 year old company that's really good at one thing, take it private if you can, slim the company down and offer more competitive prices. The other user is right on that. Accept that you're Jetbrains instead of fancy big tech giant.
If they offered a competitive 100 Gig tier or a cheaper 1 TB tier I'd instantly switch my entire family back from Google Drive because at a technical level Dropbox is just simply better. Insync + GDrive is much worse than the block based sync. If they just focused on this they have a good business. The headcount expansion and desperate horizontal creep into other services just makes miserable products.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the random upload slowdowns.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the software.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the cost, and is looking for alternatives, but the marginally-better software keeps them there for now (gdrive and onedrive have a fair number more issues).
Yes, I think it matters. But they exploded their headcount and now they have to compete in areas they aren't anywhere near as good in (document management, etc) to make the higher profit they need to keep going, and raise the cost for everyone who doesn't use it.
Basically they went B2B and have been coasting in a gradual decline on their consumer side. A tale as old as time.
> Like. Build a decent product.
Man, wouldn’t it be so cool if tech companies actually were competitive instead of trying to establish parasitic marketshare or dying with no in-between?
Anyone knows about a good Dropbox alternative? That supports Linux
I'm actively looking. NextCloud is on my list of maybes, as is S3 or S3-compatible services like OVH. I'm using Fastmail files as a stopgap via WebDav, but it's slow, doesn't give offline files, and I'll need to rig my own backup solution.
Everything I've looked at lacks a native client for at least one of my devices or has privacy concerns. Proton would be my first choice if they offered a Linux client.
The other route I need to explore is rclone - it claims to connect to everything. It would need to poll / cronjob to update rather than instant updates like the mainstream options. The downside is uncertainty - if Proton or whatever changes their private API or encryption scheme then things will cease to sync.
Not free but https://tresorit.com is great. E2E encryption and has a Linux client too.
The main downside of Tresorit is that it does not support syncing symlinks. It also does not have LAN sync like Dropbox does. Tresorit does have E2E encryption, which is great. Only the enterprise version of Dropbox has E2E encryption.
That is unfortunate for both symlinks and for a lack of LAN sync. Not having the ability to deal with anything I throw at it does add risk that the sync isn't true, but outside of the OS I don't use symlinks. LAN sync would save data transfers over slower links but with E2E is this isn't too surprising that it's centralised.
Thanks for sharing, I didn't find this option when I looked. This might be a winner for my uses.
Your own computer/NAS with tailscale for day to day usage of accessing your files from any computer from any other computer. Immich to replace the camera upload feature.
Taildrop needs improvement with files over a gig and between other users though.
I haven't used it personally but I read about it before I decided to DIY, but MEGA has Linux client.
Google Drive with Insync client (paid), I’m using it with no issues for years on Linux.
I doubt that Dropbox is able to compete on price against companies like Google, who can bundle all of their Google services in the same package as Google Drive while being able to reduce hosting costs through sheer scale.