Ah, to fall victim to one of those rabbit holes that shed light onto things you’ve used for a while but don’t even think about. It’s always an enjoyable experience. At least, it’s when it doesn’t make itself known by ruining something critical. Fortunately nothing of the sort was the thing that made me thing about Dropbox recently.
Dropbox is installed on my PC, of course it is, but I just don’t think about it. After all, the whole point of Dropbox was that you didn’t think about it. You just installed the client and you’re set. Everything you put on that folder will be seamlessly synchronized to any other device where you’re logged in. Well, as seamless as the network connectivity of those devices allows it. For someone who still has memories of carrying his homework in a cute little yellow Maxell diskette, it felt just as much as the future as smartphones and streaming at un-shit qualities did. And the best thing was, it “Just Worked”. It brought no attention to itself. It was seamless.
Perhaps this is why former “Just Works” champion Steve Jobs famously said that Dropbox was ”a feature, not a product”. Nobody is going to accuse Steve of not knowing about products, but it must’ve still been weird to hear it at a time where the company was starting to rake in enough money to think that they wouldn’t need to raise yet more venture capital and hailed as disruptors who didn’t feel the need to pay attention to their competition.
Which in hindsight may have been a mistake because their competition was certainly paying attention to them.
That seamless nature was probably their achilles heel as Apple, Microsoft, and Google rolled out enterprise solution that did a lot more than just sync your files around, but they did in fact sync your files around. Suddenly you get that as well as business software integrations, an entire office suite, real-time collaboration, corporate email and the list goes on and on. Everything Dropbox did was indeed boiled down to a single feature from providers that offered so much more besides.
Despite their efforts, it seems like Dropbox remains stagnating and hasn’t captured the attention of prospective clients in quite the same way it used to do. Personally, it just became a thing in a sea of things that I need. Something that acts as a last-resort cold storage for a couple of important documents in the unlikely event that all of my other backups have gone pear-shaped. But a blast from the past in the form of me needing to plug in a thumb drive came to awaken it from its silence by way of launching a pop-up offering to copy all of its contents and sync them.
I clicked no, making sure to also get the checkmark telling it to never ask me that question again.
