I was told a story about the Dropbox sales team a while back that swore me off using them. They contacted the company I worked at, that didn't have a business contract with Dropbox, offering a great deal and a meeting was quickly arranged. The meeting (which I only heard about secondhand from a good friend) quickly turned into a strong-arm operation.

Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were using Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files were no longer available and it would be in our best interest to sign up for a business account or we might legally be in breach of some terms of service. Some detective work later it was determined that people had been signed in to Dropbox from company machines, but there were no accounts opened with a company email and nothing business related was being synced. All Dropbox binaries and network connections have been blocked since.

The best answer to this tactic is, “Nice Dropbox you have there. Shame if OneDrive were to happen to it.”

The O365 integration with OneDrive is so seamless relative to other options, employees won’t even complain after an initial learning curve. In fact, many will start subscribing to O365 on iOS etc. and start having access to the same content synced across Windows, MacOS, iOS, Xbox, etc.

At this point, with employees adapted and the “M365” data visibility and DLP tools switched on, the enterprise can switch off Dropbox or other file depots so even personal accounts won’t work.

It takes a year or so to play out, but that’s how you lose 20,000 customers at a time.

This is an interesting take, and i agree with you. I myself have used dropbox for personal stuff, and onedrive with several of my previous employers for years now. For any person or business that i know who is all-in on microsoft products/services, i recommend to just adopt leveraging oneDrive, and life for them gets easier. (I didn't say better in other ways...but certainly easier.)

In fact, oneDrive is good enough that i signed up my family for the o365 family plan, because the cost is hard to beat (and because my family doesn't care if their machine is windows or linux)... But, when i went to start mixing in my files (vs my partner's and rest of family's files)...I learned that onedrive does __NOT RUN NATIVELY ON LINUX__ ...and linux is my personal daily driver. Hence, while my family, and all of our collective and shared files (including family photos) live on a paid oneDrive account, my stuff (files that really only pertain to me like dev. projects, etc.) live in dropbox, because dropbox runs decent enough on my linux machine. I can not wait for the day when dropbox is NOT the only decent option for linux machines. (Caveat: I am a big fan of nextcloud, but they're not there just yet...hopefully soon though!)

I have been happy with this OneDrive client on Ubuntu for the last year: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/