Millions of people use the Dropbox cloud. Many of them know about the opportunity to suggest an idea for new functionality. But only a select few have been waiting for the implementation of the most desired feature for ten years. In this article we will look at how Dropbox has managed to ignore the needs of its users for such a long time.
Like any concept, utilitarianism is not without criticism. However, from the point of view of a software developer, it seems quite reasonable to first make changes to the product that are desired by the majority of users. And when companies create specialized portals and feedback forms in order to make the voice of the people heard, this cannot but please.
But not every fairy tale is destined to come true. Today we “celebrate” the 10th anniversary of the original post asking for what has since become the most requested feature, but which is still not implemented.
Table of contents
- How this all began
- An idea!
- Vox populi
- Timeline
Suggested options
- Storing data outside the Dropbox folder
- Selective Sync
- Official solution
- Why does Dropbox act like this?
- Conclusion
How this all began
2008 was a year marked by the Olympic Games in Beijing, the global financial crisis, and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It’s no surprise, then, that the business incubator into the open ocean of the real market.
I first encountered the brainchild of Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in January 2011 as a student. Someone from our stream thought it would be a good idea to share educational materials via Dropbox. I got an invite to the group's shared folder, and the guys with the superpower to actually remain awake during lectures started posting photos of their lecture notes there.
In July 2012 I bought a Dropbox account, and for good reason: I lost files containing music of my own production. More precisely, I deleted them with my own hands. Now I can’t even remember how it happened, but storing all important data in the cloud has become an immutable rule after that. Troubles with a hard drive and unruly hands are no longer scary.
500 petabytes of user data from Amazon to its own servers, launched a line of products for businesses, acquired several companies, and grew its revenue to portal to learn about user desires and provide them with the most requested features.
An idea!
I occasionally create small programs and utilities for my own needs, and I also develop the utility I use to build a reference site for my library. At times, there were thousands of small files in there that took an hour to sync with the cloud. In addition to being a waste of time and bandwidth, I had to keep my computer on until Dropbox finished its job.
At some point I got tired of it. A natural need for the following functionality arose:
Specify name patterns for files and folders that should not be sent to the cloud, while remaining locally on the computer. In essence, we’re talking about a file similar to the .
Vox populi
In the article portal, after which others vote on it. Then Dropbox employees decide what to do with the initiative, and assign it a status. In the end, if the company agrees that the change will be useful for the product and its users, then upon completion of implementation the status will be set to Delivered.
The discussed in this article — has been consistently ignored by the company for 10 years.
As of today, the hero of the occasion has 1,300+ votes, 600,000+ views and over 1,000 comments. The closest competitor — the rejected idea one, the statistics are as follows: 200+ votes, 70,000+ views and 150+ comments.
Before we speculate on how this happened, let's look a little into history.
Timeline
I'm not sure about the date of creation of the idea, but right now the site says December 18, 2014. However, the , the problem had already occurred to other people before. For example, in , and then in this functionality by themself (although the project has long been abandoned and was only under macOS). In other words, it immediately became clear that the feature was extremely in demand. Everyone was waiting for the Dropbox representatives to respond.
And on December 18, 2014, they in March of the following year.
Some people began to it. Increasingly, messages began to appear about abandoning Dropbox and switching to other cloud storage providers who offer this functionality. Over the years, the names of products such as (now Resilio Sync), and others have been mentioned.
But many still believed that users' opinions were important to Dropbox. Therefore, messages continued to appear with a of use cases. People were even agreeable to the feature being implemented but left Dropbox support, receiving a response that comments would be sent to the development team. I also had contact with support (already in 2022, in the eighth year of discussions) and received exactly the same response. Dropbox then remained that the pain of users was understandable, and the feature was being discussed internally.
And examples of this pain continued to appear. The most frequent issue was the synchronization of node_modules folders: thousands of small files are sent to the server for in which gigabytes of temporary data are uselessly transferred to Dropbox. There were also in LaTeX projects.
In January 2016, the number of votes for the idea the discussion and . However, in 2018, the company's employees decided to honestly declare that the implementation of the feature is of the problem appeared. After that, several an ironically worded announcement of the new version of the Dropbox Plus, sent to his email:
The all-new Plus plan is packed with top-requested features.
At the same time, the most requested feature, as you may have guessed, was missing from the release.
But, at the end of that year hope appeared! Dropbox has to Delivered.
Has it happened? Of course not. The provided to Investigating. On the eighth birthday of the idea, a weary user of the suggestion. But I hope a successful tech company like Dropbox, doesn't take seriously suggestions which essentially say "I don't know why this feature is needed, so no one needs it."
Selective Sync
Dropbox has been providing a feature called to ignore files and folders. Of course, they did it in a way that seemed like they had missed the whole long-term discussion.
According to Dropbox, users should run a command every time in the context menu or set a special flag through PowerShell that signals the client application to skip a file or folder. Problems:
- Non-obvious folder : 100 GB for $20 and 2 TB for $100;
: 2 TB for $96;
: 400 GB for €50 and 2 TB for €100.
Dropbox, meanwhile, only suggests 2 TB for $120. Not to mention that some of the above products have built-in functionality for ignoring files and folders.
There are a lot of requests for a more diverse range of plans, for example, . By the way, I already forgot, but it turns out there was a 1 TB option before. So the increase in the volume provided and the resulting price fit into the company's strategy to raise revenue.
To be fair, there were also requests for larger storage amounts, for example, .
In April 2023, the CEO of the company , the number of paid accounts exceeds 18 million. This means that several thousand dissenters aren't going to make any difference. So see you next year!
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