You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
The Mac M1 mess has highlighted just how detached the Dropbox Product Team appear to be from their customers, but also how paying customers can't assume Dropbox are doing the basics like updating clients to work with modern hardware and OSs (I hear the 64bit version for Windows is long delayed too).
Dropbox need to restore faith in their user base quickly, and the best and easiest way to do this is to open up your roadmaps and development backlogs so we can see what you're spending your time and our money on. That way we can see if the future direction of Dropbox aligns with our needs, and if we're putting our trust and data into a service that is heading the right way.
Some examples:
Microsoft https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=
Slack https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/the-slack-platform-roadmap-34067b054177
Google Workspace https://workspace.google.com/whatsnew/calendar/ and https://support.google.com/a/table/7539891?hl=en&ref_topic=6397987
Github https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1
I would be happy to beta test Dropbox support, but please soon, else I will switch my stack over to iCloud.
Remember Nokia? In 2007 they had one billion customers. They were asleep at the wheel already, but drowning in profits. What could ever happen to them? They were invincible.
Perhaps Forbes should do a similar cover with Dropbox's CEO.
I mean.. Dropbox has just integrated with SharePoint! The sky's the limit now.
Transparency is anathema to Dropbox. They'd rather wait until something is in beta, let you know it's coming (whether you want it or not) and then tell you it's because of "customer feedback" - when it usually isn't.
I'm also started to feel that I'm not valued as a customer by Dropbox. Maybe they're too busy to make their enterprise customers happy, but like the Nokia example, they're not seeing that 3rd party clients are coming closer in terms of features, cross-platform feature parity and whatnot.
From my point of view, the following are true, and would like to hear Dropbox's official response on this.
- Linux users are bottom class citizens, and we just keep them on life support.
- Transparency doesn't matter to us, we do what we feel correct, and never communicate about it.
- We don't care users' need, only enterprises' ones are important, so if you don't like us, the door is over there.
TL;DR: I feel that Dropbox doesn't care about me as a paying user, that's all.
Thanks, LaurieC I am 100% with you on this. I have made significant bets for my business on the assumptions that Dropbox and Paper are headed in a certain direction, and the lack of clarity about, has a direct impact on my business and our productivity. So, as a paying customer, I would appreciate having this level of transparency from one key provider of my IT platform.
- Graham
Community Manager
Status changed:NewtoClosed - GrahamStatus changed:ClosedtoClosed
