[stingraycharles]

I would like to add that one of the reasons I’m a paying subscriber of Dropbox is because it’s independent of all the major other providers. Shared storage is a commodity provided by Microsoft and Google, and it’s important there is at least one major other provider.

Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows. Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.

[Zippogriff]

> Herein lies the problem, of course, as Dropbox is having trouble justifying their value-add when storage is becoming a commodity, and is obviously searching for a new angle. From what I’ve seen before, this is usually a precursor for more trouble down the road, but who knows.

I think everyone outside knows where it's headed, and it's either enterprise-ware (clearly that's what they're aiming for, as they literally rebranded the whole thing to "Dropbox Business", it's right there on the home page) or slow death probably ending in an ignoble acquisition. Too much investment involved for them to just keep delivering the same service that made them a household name, taking a small and steady profit.

> Regardless, it makes me feel that I’m not the target audience anymore.

They're not all-but saying that, they are saying that, if you're a non-business user.

[hinkley]

I wonder if we need to start treating failover systems more literally like insurance.

Your insurance company pays part of your premiums to another insurance company to cover them in the case of truly catastrophic events. It's called an underwriter. It's why State Farm didn't go under after Hurricane Andrew, despite the fact that State Farm had a wide majority of policies in the affected areas. They weren't just writing checks, they were cashing them too.

Instead of signing up for 3 different Clouds to make sure my data is safe, maybe my Cloud provider should be doing that for me. But that does nothing to address another concern (lock-in) and could very well make it worse, unless the "underwriter" also facilitates data transfer between clouds.

[yencabulator]

They'll just build their own regions and AZs, instead. You'd only get that sort of service from someone who didn't build their own cloud.

[toyg]

> Shared storage is a commodity provided by Microsoft and Google, and it’s important there is at least one major other provider.

They should talk to Mozilla. An OS-agnostic, ad-free, FAANG-independent cloud-hub integrated in the browser...? YES-fucking-PLEASE.

[coherentpony]

> I would like to add that one of the reasons I’m a paying subscriber of Dropbox is because it’s independent of all the major other providers.

If I remember correctly, it's using Amazon in the backend. So how exactly is it that it is independent of all the other major providers?

[TeMPOraL]

In terms of relationship. So that e.g. if you comment with too many emojis on a YouTube lifestream, you only lose access to your e-mails, but not your files.

[acrefoot]

That strong dependence changed with Magic Pocket:

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

[sushid]

It’s not.

[babesh]

Wrong. European data center due to GDPR. Ever wonder who the cloud provider of that is?

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450280565/Dropbox-gears-...

Others are its own.