One just cannot support old OS forever, especially for consumer products. The cost of maintenance is disproportionate to the number of remaining number of users.
I think the Q is whether they need to “support” anything.
They have not communicated the reason, which is bizzare.
it is up to them how they support their free product.
A lot of people pay, too.
Google Drive is going to get some new users…
… if only you don’t expect them to be less arrogant…
I agree with Peter. I still use Windows XP (zero motivation to upgrade), and would never upgrade just to accomodate DropBox. Instead I would just drop their product. They have a portable code base to support all those client/mobile platforms, XP should be easy.
If Microsoft provided a sensible and automated upgrade path to Win 7 I would do so, but if they are going to make me embark on a full reinstall of dozens of applications and endless reconfiguration work, I will invest that time in moving over to Mac/Linux instead.
The list of stuff you can only run on Windows is becoming smaller all the time, and if Microsoft do not make the upgrade path easy, they will simply find that people migrate to competitive products instead.
Unfortunately the architecture of Windows is still a mess (“registry”, WTF!) and the upgrade nightmares will continue.
I’m staying on XP until I can move to a Unix based desktop OS. This would not have been practical for me when Vista came out but it’s becoming more realistic all the time. Will be happy to have Microsoft out of my life entirely!
I too don’t understand why win7 cannot import settings, while win10 does, and will import settings from XP which goes much further back.
M$ could have killed off XP rapidly if win7 imported settings. Instead, most of my industrial customers are on XP. The rest (about 20%) are win7 and they won’t move for years because win7 is robust and does all one needs (there are virtually zero apps which need win8+). Speaking of banks, actually some still run OS/2 in mission critical apps…
I’ve just wasted 2 days moving from a Samsung S6 to the S7, and that process should be dead simple. It’s a bloody phone! 
(If both were rooted it would have taken half a day, but rooting prevents OS updates, and currently they push out about 100000 bug fixes every few days).
One can waste so much of one’s life on IT, just keeping along with others’ arrogant corporate agendas. That’s probably what really gets up my nose
I’m staying on XP until I can move to a Unix based desktop OS. This would not have been practical for me when Vista came out but it’s becoming more realistic all the time. Will be happy to have Microsoft out of my life entirely!
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s possible in a business/office scenario because people continually send you Orifice 20xx documents, and the open source versions I have tried don’t always open them properly. I run Orifice 2003 with import filters, which is really quite an old tool now, and that opens everything we have received thus far. I know that sending .docx is stupid (the file could contain confidential data etc) and plain text or PDFs should be used, but most people are lazy, and this drives the M$ upgrade business.
A lot of people working in fields where a narrow set of tools is OK, e.g. clever video editing, moved to unix ages ago.
Peter wrote:
I think the Q is whether they need to “support” anything.
By no longer supporting the application on Windows XP they can get rid of old technical “debt” and reduce maintenance cost.
I develop and maintain a mobile application that has evolved from a web portal to a native application then on to a hybrid application. I cannot justify maintaining the old native application which is used by 0,2% of the user community, and the associated cost. Same thing for maintaining functional parity between the web portal and the new “responsive” hybrid application. Once the usage of the web portal has dropped sufficiently, I will no longer maintain it.
Why do you use dropbox at all, when there are so many other “boxes” out there? A couple og weeks ago I got an email from dropbox saying they would delete my account due to inactivity if I don’t use it in the next 60 days
To me it looks like Dropbox is going down, and they are cutting costs wherever they can. Better get out of it.
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s possible in a business/office scenario because people continually send you Orifice 20xx documents
I was including Mac in my list of “Unix based” operating systems, for which MS Office is available and works perfectly. I use a Macbook when travelling, it does 90% of what I need and WinXP is just required back at work when I need to run more obscure stuff still only available on Windows.
I don’t buy the “technical debt” argument. Dropbox have a highly portable code base (see their blogs on the subject), and the abstraction/portability layer for XP should be very thin and simple to maintain for a few smart guys. By ditching it they are simply giving away circa 10% of their customer base, to competitors who will support it.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Peter wrote:
That would be a valid reason but does DB run over an encrypted link? I don’t think so, else why would the ancient Symbian clients e.g. Cutebox still work?
I suspect ancient Symbian clients will also stop working at about the same time.
If the Dropbox client doesn’t use TLS 1.2, I would stay very far away from it for anything you wouldn’t want to be public.
Nobody should use db links openly because if you get too many hits they kill your account. Been there…
It’s also useless for hosting images (for forum posts and such) because they invariably vanish when you “reorganise” a few months down the road.
It is just a very handy tool for file transfer etc. Fo example this morning I saved some flight data for tomorrow’s EGKA-EDNY, so can retrieve it anywhere.
But as LeSving says there are other options.
The lack of an explanation is weird.
Peter wrote:
The lack of an explanation is weird.
If it is to do with encryption, then they won’t go out and say: “We think the current encryption methods offered may be insecure, but as a courtesy to our Windows XP users we are going to give them a grace period of three months to upgrade or find another solution”, because it would raise some eyebrows with those who are interested in the privacy of their data. But it would of course be the good thing to do with all things related to security, because then the users can decide for themselves if they see this as a real risk.
