Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

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I think the key to this story is that Dropbox has been a good product for individuals, but Dropbox for Business has been and remains absolutely terrible.

We trialled it for several months at work, and it failed in all sorts of ways. Not enough admin control, confusing to add employees, and -- worst of all -- sync failures where some employees sharing the same set of folders would just randomly not sync a bunch of the files.

This led to things like Alice telling Bob to look in the shared folder for a file, Bob telling Alice it wasn't there, Alice telling Bob yes it was, Bob telling Alice no really it isn't, Alice coming over to Bob's PC to see that hey it really isn't there, and then finally just emailing the file to Bob.

I myself got to deal with their business support a few times, regarding a bug that corrupts some PDF documents shared via Dropbox if they contain Japanese text. The "within 12 hours" response the website promised never happened -- it took days/weeks. They don't have any mechanism for me, as the customer, to follow or get updates pertaining to our support ticket for this issue (and it was kind of a show-stopper, since I work for a Japanese company). Finally, the fact that they have this type of a bug at all -- can't display international text? what decade is this? -- and that it goes un-fixed for 8+ months, didn't give us confidence in Dropbox.

If our experience is typical, I don't think Dropbox is going to do nearly as well in the business space as they've done in the consumer market.

> a bug that corrupts some PDF documents shared via Dropbox if they contain Japanese text

That's really disturbing. Is Dropbox not just moving bytes around? Why are "PDF" or "Japanese" even relevant?

Sorry, I should have been more clear -- that sounds worse than it is (although it is still bad). The original file data in the Dropbox is not corrupted; it is only the PDF presented in the web browser (to the user with whom you shared the data) that is corrupted.

What happens is, when you share a PDF file via link, instead of presenting the actual PDF file in the browser (which would work fine) Dropbox instead presents its own PDF viewer inside the web browser and shows the file.

This "PDF view" has problems with many PDF documents containing Japanese text, and either doesn't render the Japanese, or renders bogus data instead.

Depending on the contents of the document, this can result in it looking like gibberish, but it can also result in a document that looks correct to the recipient but is actually totally wrong.

For instance, one real-world case was a document with a long list of work items for a project. The items happened to be in English, and in Japanese many of them said 'CANCELED' （中止）in the right-hand column.

The Dropbox PDF viewer failed to render only the Japanese in the right hand column, so to the recipient it looked like e.g. a list of 100 work items, when in fact the point of the document was to communicate that 60 of the 100 items had been cancelled.

In this case, there was no hint at all to the recipient that there was anything amiss.

It's a bad bug, and dramatically reduced the utility of Dropbox for our company. But, to be clear, the original data stored in Dropbox was not corrupted.

I agree totally. I almost fell over laughing recently when I saw a new headline about Dropbox and business customers.

It might have changed, but the one thing that summed up how useless it is for business is that you can't effectively run it on a server.

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