The only other comment right now recounts a negative experience that is surely not common. I offer a balancing positive story of my recent experience.<p>Between 2012-2016 I was studying for my PhD. I kept all my files in Dropbox (as well as some other places, but Dropbox was the one place I trusted with everything at once). I was paying for a premium account at the time, and had dozens of GB of stuff stored in my account. I stopped paying for it in 2016.<p>Yesterday I wanted to show someone a protein model image [0] I made during my PhD. I logged into my old Dropbox account, and found all the content preserved there. I haven't paid them for two years, but they archived all my stuff and asked politely for me to reactivate the account in order to sync it again. But I can retrieve individual files if I don't pay. That's an extremely gracious and dependable service, compared to my experience of other companies.<p>Congratulations Dropbox on your IPO, and on creating a product used seamlessly by hundreds of millions that really makes people's digital lives easier.<p>Having experienced such high-trust service, I'm going to start paying them again.<p>0: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3d_model.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3...</a>
Sort of off topic: Linking to a dropbox file is a pretty terrible way of publishing what should have been a blog post instead. How can you tell whether this is legitimate or just some guy who set their display name to Arash?<p>The UX design (which they are usually praised for) is pretty subpar for this page in general. The "..." button seems to be broken(on firefox on linux) and there's a useless comment pane that isn't autohidden and has a grayed out "enable comments" button for no reason. (EDIT: It seems this only happened because I am on a 4k resolution monitor so I guess it's forgivable)
That's a letter from a generic marketing drone. It would have been much more interesting to hear from these people as human beings today. I guess they can't be real people in public any more.<p>Sincerely, though: congrats on the IPO. I always liked the main product. The Linux support is a differentiator I appreciate.
I think creating the right environment for work starts with the internal/mental environment first. And this starts with developing a new design theory.<p>Mindful design, as I define it, is a theory designed to preserve connection, respect/grow attention, responsible use emotion as an input, and be anti-addictive. It starts with human centered design (where innovation practices currently are, to my knowledge). From there, we add mindfulness, nonviolent communication, category theory, and computer science to hack our language so we can better communicate with each other.<p>I'm tired and know I'm leaving things out here, but this is where I started researching over a year ago. I'm now working on a programming language for humans to program themselves through with the written/spoken word being the only technology required for it to work. I'm looking for help from anyone interested.
I know I'm cruisin' for a bruisin' here karma-wise, but I just don't understand what they are trying to do with their company mission.<p>From my perspective, Dropbox actually facilitates an old, broken way of creating and sharing documents using desktop applications from the 1990s and earlier. Google, by combining drive with docs, allows users to completely escape desktop applications, which to me is really the next generation of computing. To make this more concrete, if a company adopts Google Drive, they can issue employees much cheaper computers (lowering capex) because they don't have to be able to run heavyweight OS and application software like Windows and MacOS. Dropbox isn't even an entrant into that space, and I don't really see how they could compete.<p>When I look at a company and find out they're using Dropbox, I always think to myself that they probably made that choice either because they've been using it for a long time, or because they didn't want to go to the effort to change their business processes to really embrace network computing. I imagine office workers running Word instead of Chrome, and that bothers me. Either way, I see Dropbox positioned as a stopgap to allow companies to <i>avoid</i> plowing ahead with new work paradigms while still enabling sharing of files without using things like USB keys.<p>I don't work for either company, never have. But I remain confused about Dropbox's mission. Short of being acquired by someone, I can't see the way forward for them. But, they just raised a ton of cash, so I'm as excited as anyone to see what they try.<p>EDIT: I want to briefly respond to the argument in this thread that it's a _good_ thing that Dropbox doesn't tie an office suite to sharing files. I simply disagree. I don't see how that is a real concrete negative to anyone unless it's for political reasons ("I don't want Google to be too powerful"). I _do_ however see how it's a problem for the vast majority of office workers who, using Dropbox, have to either keep using desktop applications or (shudder) create documents in something like Google Docs and then reupload them into Dropbox. So, at best Dropbox's independence strikes me as neutral, but for most people it seems clearly negative.
> Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us.<p>"Imagine all the people sharing all the world...I hope some day you'll join us. And the world will be as one."<p>- John Lennon<p>Drew, you picked worthy source material.
> Imagine if every minute at work were well spent—if we could focus and spend our time on the things that matter. Imagine how much more inspired we’d be. Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us.<p>Geez. You are a file hosting service. Stop pretending like you fixed the world's hunger or something.
Legitimate question: how is Dropbox not effectively dead in the water? Between GDrive use driven by close integration with Gmail/GSuite and iCloud having major user capture, I don't understand where Dropbox is necessary or wanted anymore. If someone sent me a link to a Dropbox file instead of uploading to GDrive, I would find that weird and might even call them out on it. This applies to most people I know across a variety of demographics. Is there some secret massive trove of Dropbox users I'm simply not aware of?<p>Speculation: momentum of people who were early on the cloud adoption curve who are implicitly/behaviorally entrenched by accrued data volume. That doesn't sound to me like the foundation of a solid business with growth potential (see: IBM). Those kinds of users are ultimately going to be fairly price sensitive given the substitutability of the product and therefore not marginally monetizable. They may already also perceive themselves as paying an 'inconvenience penalty' vs GDrive/iCloud.<p>Honestly, this looks like exactly what it might very well be: rich Silicon Valley investors dump a squeezed, has-been company into the frothy public market to tap into 'dumb' liquidity.<p>I should clarify I don't have anything against Dropbox itself. I do have a problem with pushing a dud into the public market at an irresponsible valuation to effectively defraud uninformed people and desperate institutional investors with low accountability who are facing a drought of good return opportunities (e.g. mutual fund and pension fund managers). You can hem and haw around it all you want ("oh they'll build new features", etc), but the growth expectation baked into their valuation is more or less predicated on extrapolating a pattern of success they are unlikely to be able to replicate. Cloud storage is commoditized and they're competing against monster platforms that are better positioned than them to capture new business and siphon their existing users (applies even in enterprise, arguably they lose against Box but certainly against Microsoft and now even Google). So they're being paid to try to tap into new verticals as very late contenders (e.g. Dropbox Paper)? There's no there there. It's wrong. In my opinion, it's fraud and only slightly less awful than the behavior surrounding the dotcom bust.
Dropbox just deleted 4GB of design files I needed for work. Their customer support is bewildered at why it can't be restored. Build a good product before you try to inspire me with stupid garbage. You're not a thought leader. Fire your spiritual guru. I'm so tired of tech founders thinking they are somehow philosophically relevant because they got lucky & made money.