Dropbox reinvents itself as a collaborative workspace – no, not the WeWork kind (phew)

Dropbox now longer wants to be just a cloud storage service but the provider of “a calmer and more focused working environment” its CEO announced this morning. The cloud biz has formally launched what it calls “Dropbox Spaces,” an “evolution of the shared folder” which basically pulls a range of workspace services - messaging …

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Whatever. We've moved to Nextcloud which does syning across more than 3 devices with unlimited storage.

Oh, and the US government doesn't get to read everything.

[AMBxx]

Nextcloud looks interesting - always reassuring from a privacy perspective to see German government customers.

If it had an in-built email server, I'd probably jump.

[RudderLessIT]

A good idea

But the horse has already bolted on this - about 2 years ago.

[Temmokan]

Yes, and when Dropbox once again declares it won't support certain file systems in certain OSes, I would once again look for alternatives?

No, I prefer to stay way clear off Dropbox after their November 2018 notice of dropping support for non-ext4 Linux filesystems.

[Pascal Monett]

"Dropbox’s storage service is consistently better than its rivals"

Oh really ?

I use Dropbox for non-critical, non-PII storage only. Anything important goes on Sync if I need it there because Sync has encryption and, if you trust their blurb, only I have the key and that means that I am indeed the only one to be able to access that data.

So you'll excuse me if I believe that Sync has the better storage service.

[mj.jam]

A bit late to the party

Doesn't Microsoft Teams offer chat, video and files? Even Cisco Webex Teams has this, (and integration to Box, Google Drive, Trello, ...) they even call them spaces as well.

[NATTtrash]

Re: A bit late to the party

You got a point: not only MS, but many other do (see comments earlier). The only thing noteworthy here is that these (US) companies are good at shouting/ making a lot of noise. Which makes them looks amazing, but actually nothing life changing is done. That's called marketing, not progress. After all, "bundled existing stuff together", which this is, is something less lazy people can easily do themselves. It's a bit like what happened to coffee*: a product that has been around for ages, repackage it in smaller volume, separate containers, charge more for it, and shout that it's "so much different/ better".

And yes, people go for it in doves, focussing on the package and not content, gladly paying x00% more, and molesting you, in order to convince you that they "can really taste the difference!"

* chose coffee, not e.g. mobile phone, to be more generic. However, as all know here, other products in stead of "coffee" also work very well...

[phuzz]

Re: A bit late to the party

I guess Dropbox have the name recognition. I'm sure there's people out there who've only heard of Dropbox when it comes to file syncing.

Between different customers, I've got things spread across Dropbox (two different ones), Google Drive (or whatever it's called this week), Microsoft Teams, and some straight-forward Samba/SMB based shares. So I generally have no idea where a particular file lives or should be saved.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting

I didn't know about this until Simone Giertz mentioned it in her latest video.

That said, there is for me and for my business no way I would ever use a US based facility, and AFAIK it may have a bit of competition from the likes of Google Docs anyway.

[Fred Dibnah]

Oh do fuck off with the ‘collaborative workplace’ bollocks. Dropbox is just somewhere to backup some of my shit.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Haven't you heard? It's this month's buzzword bingo hot tip.

They're just trying to mimic MS Teams.

Pretty sure you'll still be able to dump your files there like you do now. No ones making you use the Spaces functionality.

[Comedy of Errors]

It used to be for me too, but then they quietly introduced a 3 device limit on free accounts at which point I dumped it. I reckoned even if I started paying they would keep degrading the pure file storage side as they aren't interested in that any more.

[Reeder]

captcha hell - a quick segway :(

I used to use DropBox for my stuff - especially when sharing - but am I the only one that gets into captcha hell with the new Dropbox login?? I can never get the images to rotate just enough to satisfy the verification process. and the sound option is horrible!! WeTransfer is definitely an easier option!!

[Richocet]

Re: captcha hell - a quick segway :(

Have you ever considered you might be a bot?