| This is a daily column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder and owner of How-To Geek. If you prefer, you can read this column in a web browser instead.
The case against Dropbox looks stronger with each passing day But after years of investment and exploration, syncing files is still the only thing Dropbox does well. Steve Jobs knew this: he famously told Houston (while trying to acquire it) that his company was “a feature and not a product.” As Dropbox rocketed to 400 million users, Jobs' viewpoint was easy to dismiss. But as its rivals caught up, and Dropbox began casting about for its next act, Jobs has come to look more prescient. Dropbox's consumer products are losing their luster, and their business products lag well behind their competitors.
Dropbox does file syncing really well. Put your files into the Dropbox folder, and they are available on any device, always updated, all the time. It’s great. But now the competition has caught up — Microsoft is offering not only unlimited drive space on OneDrive, but the full Microsoft Office suite… for the same price as Dropbox. The rest of the competition, like Google and Apple’s iCloud, are also the same price as Dropbox, but they offer additional features like integration with Google services and in Apple’s case, full phone backups combined with sync of your iPhone photos that can be shared with your family. Here at How-To Geek, we’ve used Dropbox forever as a place to stick our files to keep them backed up, synced, and shared. But increasingly, we don’t actually use Dropbox to share files. We use Slack for our internal discussion, and when we’re talking about something and want to share a file with each other, we simply drag and drop (or just paste) the file right into Slack, which keeps the files around forever in an easily searchable interface. And it works on every platform. And most importantly, we’re already using it every day for work. We’ll always keep our files in a cloud-backed repository just to make sure they are backed up at all times, and available everywhere. But at this point we’re only paying for Dropbox because it’ll be a pain to transfer our massive library of files over to OneDrive and upload them all again. So, what’s the point of all this? If you’re just starting out, we’d recommend getting an Office 365 subscription instead of Dropbox. You’ll get all the space, and you basically get Microsoft Office for free. If you don’t need Office, and you’re an iPhone user, it might make more sense to pay for iCloud Drive so you can keep your phone backed up. If you’re an Android user and you don’t need Office, it might make more sense to pay for Google Drive instead. Just don’t waste your money on Dropbox. | 
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