Ask HN: Why did Dropbox fail to dominate the market?

Dropbox missed the storage. Why did Dropbox fail to become something like Backblaze? That itself is huge.

Dropbox remained in sync, did not innovate, until everyone caught up.

Why didn’t Dropbox address privacy problems, like offering m end to end encryption until other providers are offering one by one (either by default or as an option in their APIs)? Or something like Apple keychain?

Instead they brought NSA people on board and changed their terms of service for worse.

How about tens of important features that AWS offers, like KMS or Google’s version?

How about Photos back up and sync solutions like Google photos or Amazon? Yeah, now they have a half baked.

How about more flexible pricing as with any other provider?

I can go on and on.

It's too easy to copy and they have no large platform effect. Now, they're trying to expand into some sort of "office suite" software, but they're competing with Microsoft and Google, which invented the stuff.

I stopped using Dropbox when their client started telling me that my filesystem was not supported and suggested that I do something about it, so I did and uninstalled Dropbox. But I'm just one user, and I think their Linux user base is tiny.

They stopped supporting encrypted Linux filesystems and became like one of the services they wanted to replace 15 years ago from my perspective.

The "narrative" is that Dropbox vs. Box is similar to Slack vs. Teams: didn't really "go enterprise". I'm not privy to the real reasons, though.

One observation - They put a lot of money and marketing capital behind products like "Paper" which was their version of google docs. I used Paper because I was curious but in the end it was not as good as many free options out there. And literally no one else I've ever worked with uses it.

So idk as a Dropbox user it seems like they should've focused on what they do best (file sync/storage), expand market share that way, vs. diversify into half baked ancillary products. This was a few years ago when they had a stronger foothold and file storage wasn't completely commoditized. Hindsight is of course always 20/20 however.

That's a name I haven't heard in a while!

Brutal competition, vs...

Just keeping the file on the disk and not sharing it

USB Thumb Drives

Emailing a file (lawyers and accountants say you should password protect a sensitive file and email)

Numerous ways to upload a file to a web site

Bittorrent

Box (comes with an enterprise sales force that leans in)

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others

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The last two lines are the direct competition. Dropbox had some first mover advantage which could have become a durable lead thanks to network effects. They were boxed in from all sides though. Notably some competitors already had huge user bases and a dropbox-like product was a good complement for their other offerings.

File sync was hard before cloud software got big. At this point, its easy to build. They are similar to netflix, where their original streaming technology edge is almost gone, but in Netflixes case, the content itself continues to differentiate.

Also, who says they failed? Its a great company to work for with high pay. Maybe they dont have an explosive market cap, but they went public to a big valuation. Seems like a success

The software wasn't quite up to scratch.

It was OK if you only had one computer, and so DropBox was a pure backup system.

It wasn't always good if you had two computers and used DropBox as a syncronisation system. (I had cases where instead of adding new files to the second computer, it took those new files away from the first computer.)

I ended up making my own internet-facing file server.

File sync is now a commodity included with existing MS/Google/Apple accounts.

customer service terrible?