Steve Jobs may have been right when he said something to the effect of Dropbox isn't a product, it's a feature. If all you want is a folder that syncs, then don't we get that from every commercial operating system?
Whereas a feature as product means it’s more likely to stick around. They have nothing to do but build and maintain this feature. They have the luxury of working out the edgiest of edge cases.
But I guess the pointless file manager shows the downside of features as product. One the product is complete and largely bug free, marketing and engineers get itchy in their unique ways.
Edit: It looks like you have to pay for it and the music has to be in playlists. Not quite what I'd like.
What degredation have you noticed that makes you think it is being abandoned?
> With the launch of YouTube Music last year, we eventually plan to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music. In anticipation of this change, we are shutting down the Artist Hub.
Source:
https://9to5google.com/2019/04/03/google-play-music-shutdown...
(At work we use Google Drive, it it just sucks. File Stream is super buggy and the web UI lacks a lot of productivity features.)
Effectively Dropbox is no longer the universal solution guaranteed to work everywhere, which was the reason I chose them before. They deliberately killed off their unique selling point.
These days I run Nextcloud on iOS, Windows and Linux and it doesn't complain about ZFS.
That lost them a shit-ton of goodwill. Too little, too late.
They sell this and it is important for it to be seamless as well. (Unlike say current iteration of Google Drive which sells both of the above but is not seamless.)
Note that it is very easy to compete with them for any of the big players.
It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies.
It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition to DVDs, it killed sound cards (because no more advanced 3D sound rendering that sound blaster could do), CRTs (no more funky resolutions, no more overlay mode, and other fancy CRT features), and initiated the slow death of VGA (that also happened for other reasons but this contributed a lot).
Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card. I know I didn't, especially when working out what you're spending your money on - video cards were far more important. But those, too, have become less important as integrated graphics have improved.
Sure, if you mean a strict majority of people, but what about gamers? There's no reason "most" people need to buy a separate videocard but it is still a huge market. For a time, a good soundcard was with advanced features for 3D sound rendering was looking like it was going to be just as important to PC gaming as good videocards.
Yes, but why were they buying Sound Blaster cards instead of the much cheaper audio cards that were also on the market at the same time, but just didn’t have the same advanced feature set? The SoundBlaster, when it came out, was the “premium, workstation-tier” product of the audio-card world!
Are you suggesting the SoundBlaster’s rise was entirely down to 1. Brand recognition, or 2. even the top-of-market cards still being cheap enough that a strategy of “satisficing with the most expensive thing you can easily afford” would have led people to the SoundBlaster; and not at all to its differentiating feature-set from other audio cards?
Later on, I got a new computer and a much better speakers, and spent some time getting digital output to work. I used my motherboard for that, because at this stage, I wanted soundcard to be just a simple, stupid data sender. No DSP, no "advanced 3D sound rendering" -- the ideal sound card takes data from input (DVD) and sends them to speakers, acting as a dumb data pipe.
Same goes for "fancy CRT features" -- what is that exactly that CRTs can do that flat-screens can not? Other than duck hunt-style controllers, I don't think there is anything.
Overlay mode wasn't a CRT feature, and worked fine with flat panel displays with XP. The introduction of GPU compositing in Vista was what killed it, but it still continued to work in 7 if you turned compositing off. The death of funky resolutions was entirely a result of switching to hardware which has a native resolution, and not anything software side.
DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards. Yeah a small selection wanted 3d sound for a gaming edge, and that was available on low cost cards pretty soon.
Before that they a place, but all features were available through software. The mixer, sampler, channels.
pretty sure these happened at around the same time. Single data point:
my 486-era machine (92):
- bolt on sb16+cdrom as part of 'multimedia upgrade' (MPC II)
my pentium-I era machine (96):
- came with sb16+cdrom (MPC III)
my pentium-II era machine (98):
- came with integrated DVD-ROM + ac97 audio
none of these were particularly 'special' as far as 'what people were buying then'
If so, I’m surprised nobody’s hacked around that by now by just e.g. using the GPU in GPGPU mode as an pseudo-FPGA, dropping audio DSP logic onto it, and generating their “HD 3D” audio using that.
This is very much a "we're all dead in the end" observation. Any good enough product is gonna get killed by turning it into multiple instances of mutually incompatible features, in a war for market share that claims user's time and patience as collateral damage.
Sure... Kinda. How many people spend a lot of time on desktop these days? I see two large camps; windows + Android and... Well, Mac (e.g. iPad + iPhone). Those combos already work (MS client runs on android.) How many people run android + iPad/MacBook, windows + iPhone, or Linux? I imagine not too many, which is perhaps why DB is so focused on Enterprise.
So yeah for people that don't have much and just want to keep some data synced across some machines.. yup onedrive is great and there's no reason to use a third party service when you can just log into your windows with your live account and it's all synced. But if you've ever run into the problems with onedrive then it's a complete killer. You can't use a file syncing service that doesn't work perfectly all the time.