Google can offer Drive directly with Docs and Sheets and it's built into the core of your Android phone now.

When it launched it was novel and showed people how easy and useful cloud syncing could be but they don't have any opportunity to tie it into a larger suite of services like the larger players can and people don't generally like too many services that don't talk to eachother. I agree, I think Dropbox is just orphaned with no where to go. All I want is a place to store files that I can access from all my devices without hassle + a backup, which incidentally is what DropBox used to offer before they went rogue on the features list.ĩ0% of DropBox has become a bag on the side. I don't need stars, personalization, predicted usage, extra window panes with notifications and changes. I don't want a non-integrated DropBox explorer window whenever I access my files that I have to click through. I don't want to click off a 'DropBox can help you save word documents' every time I open Word. Instead I get all kinds of 'look at how much I can help you' crap when I don't want it. I liked having a small unintrusive storage module, but that is no longer offered. My problem is not that they charge, but that the service is consistently getting worse.

I suppose it can go on for as long as the investors keep piling in. We've all been benefiting from 'free' stuff funded by investors for the last 20 years. That's where the money is - and when you go public, you are all about the 'quarterly goals.' You don't go public without knowing that Wall Street owns you. I don't blame Dropbox going the way they have - they are less about the individual customers and more focused on teams and corporations. For nearly a decade, I stayed loyal to the service, but like Prokopov, I too felt the bloat was getting too much. Their revenues and userbase grew at an astonishing speed. The company was one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley, because of customers appreciated their simplicity and ease of use. It was nothing like anything I had experienced before. When I fell in love with Dropbox, it had not even launched. His sentiments reflect my feelings about Dropbox, as well. And if you are just signing up, add another five steps.

Like me, he too had thought that 'in the beginning, Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up.' He visually shows that as an existing customer, you need to jump through a dozen hoops to get Dropbox going on a new machine. Veteran journalist Om Malik, writing on his blog: I was reading Nikita Prokopov's blog this morning and came across his very visual damnation of what is wrong with Dropbox.

Dropbox on mac looks off