[acdha]

> It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.

That's three major questions begged in a single sentence, followed by 3 more in the next. Perhaps if you tried to back up each of those claims, you'd have an easier time understanding.

“Poor business model” would be the first place to start since Dropbox has ton of users and they tend to be loyal: learning why would tell you whether you're making the right comparisons.

“Security” is a judgement call but it's certainly not true that this is accepted conventional wisdom. Sure, there's the occasional hyperbolic blog post which makes the rounds before someone looks into the details and debunks the conspiracy theories but Apple and Google certainly get those, too.

Continuing the trend, the pricing also does not support your claims:

Google:

1TB = $9.99/mo (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en)

Dropbox:

1TB = $9.99/mo (https://www.dropbox.com/plans)

Apple:

1TB = $9.99/mo (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238)

Even if the pricing wasn't the same for all three services, that's a relatively small amount of money to pay for a service which many people rely on heavily and you couldn't say anything meaningful about pricing without talking about the different features. If you valued a particular feature or related service (e.g. Google Photos, Dropbox's cross-platform support & integration with a wide range of mobile apps, etc.) many people will consider it worth paying a small amount more per month to get their favorite choice – we're talking numbers well under what many people spend at Starbucks in the same time-period, after all.

One point in particular you should think about is the reason why I've heard so many non-IT people favor Dropbox: it's easy to setup, syncs reliably (as opposed to iCloud's same-week synchronization), and they always have a full copy of their data on every computer. It's really easy to forget how much people value the idea that they will never be in the case where a network error or billing screwup prevents them from accessing their files. That doesn't have to be a common event for people to want to avoid it.

[danatkinson]

Poor business model: I refer to their freemium offering which is poor compared to competitors.

Security: If you think that's a judgement call, fine, if you think that the dropbox hack is a judgment issue.

Pricing: For Joe Bloggs, 100GB is generally enough. Google handily offers that for $2. With Dropbox, there's a cliff - a few gig for free or a terabyte for $10/m. Why no middle ground? Both Apple and Google offer scaled plans, why doesn't Dropbox?

[acdha]

> Poor business model: I refer to their freemium offering which is poor compared to competitors.

Okay, that's a start, do you think you can explain some of the analysis backing the opinion which you assumed everyone else shared?

> Security: If you think that's a judgement call, fine, if you think that the dropbox hack is a judgment issue.

If we stopped using any company which has had a security problem, we wouldn't be using computers. That's why I said it was a judgement call: one incident years ago is not much of a trend line so different people might reasonably have different comfort levels.

> Pricing: For Joe Bloggs, 100GB is generally enough. Google handily offers that for $2. With Dropbox, there's a cliff - a few gig for free or a terabyte for $10/m. Why no middle ground? Both Apple and Google offer scaled plans, why doesn't Dropbox?

Oh, now there's a valid question about the business model: perhaps they should have a middle tier. That's what you should have said instead of claiming that Dropbox was more expensive or whatever “the storage for the price just doesn't add up” was supposed to mean.