>in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers
After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers. Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers, supporting anything other than the most mainstream configuration seems wasteful.
> Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers ...
You also need to account for network effects. Every startup I have been at in the last decade went like this:
The engineers are using Linux, so for everyone to collaborate, a solution that works on Linux too is needed. That is a list of one - Dropbox, and they got their business accounts, and professional accounts.
Now Dropbox is dropped, or on the way out in all those places. Their lack of multi-account support (and I don't mean the nonsense they do pseudo merging accounts) also made it a huge pain anyway.
> After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers.
This seems like an odd take in the comments section of an announcement of all new features that many people don't seem to care about. My ideal Dropbox would be able to sync with every filesystem under the sun since easy synchronization is their core product. Not integration with Slack or Trello or some weird workplace workflow.
In this case, I should have just as easily said “paying customers” because there were a decent amount of people already using Dropbox (and paying for it) that had other than ext4 filesystems. I know many people that got bitten by this also had encrypted home directories (Ubuntu ecryptfs), which was also not supported and fairly common.
I personally use Dropbox heavily because it is an easy way to sync shared folders between all of the people I work with (mix of Mac and Windows). However, it’s really difficult to also use it with the Linux servers I also need to sync data to/from. In the end, I created a developer account and use a script that is linked to that account to copy data to/from Dropbox on demand.
Would it be nice to have a supported solution for this? Yes
Do I expect a supported solution from Dropbox? No. There are too many variables and I don’t expect Dropbox to be able to handle everything. I’m just happy that they make a solution possible for me to manually use.
After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers. Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers, supporting anything other than the most mainstream configuration seems wasteful.