When Dropbox first came out I loved the simplicity of it for years. That rock solid little icon in my system tray that never bothered me, just reliably synced my files. It was excellent.

At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it.

The change was almost hard to describe, but I think it's encapsulated well if you compare the Dropbox homepage from, say, 2013 to 2019.

2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropb...

2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropb...

I realize that companies that want to become large behemoths naturally seem to have to go down this path - just saying I miss the simplicity of it in its earlier form!

the curse of early success is getting a billion dollars to invest in your company only to discover that it's really hard to pay back a billion dollars