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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

cnbc.com

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#121

Post by caconym_ »

rincebrain wrote: post #87
caconym_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions. I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard t…

How have you found syncthing's scaling? I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree c…

It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#123

Post by tptacek »

dingaling wrote: post #114
tptacek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important to note here that Dan has been for years asking people to understand this comment in the context of the time and circumstances it was written. It's not a dunk on Dropbox. It's not the "less space than a Nomad" iPod comment on Slashdot. It was helpful and constructive criticism for Houston's YC application --- very specifically the application itself. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&…

> "less space than a Nomad" I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad. The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band…

It's a category error to compare the two comments at all.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#124

Post by bhouston »

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck.

Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation.

I think it is the market, not the leadership.

It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

Not sure where to go since the big guys won't acquire you given that they have alternatives. Maybe a business software acquirer like Salesforce or Dell? Or an AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub?

I honestly do not know where to go.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#125

Post by gigatree »

jedberg wrote: post #115
defen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If OP hadn't written his reply to 'dhouston 19 years ago I for sure would have flagged it as LLM-generated.

Which just goes to show how trigger happy people are about labeling things as LLM generated. People forget that LLMs were trained on writing on the internet, so it's going to sound how the average person writes!

IMO the only solution is to just upvote things if they’re interesting or useful and downvote them if they’re not

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#126

Post by layer8 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5
georgel wrote: post #2

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files,…

> What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).

That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#127

Post by FergusArgyll »

tptacek wrote: post #85
jedberg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.

Important to note here that Dan has been for years asking people to understand this comment in the context of the time and circumstances it was written. It's not a dunk on Dropbox. It's not the "less space than a Nomad" iPod comment on Slashdot. It was helpful and constructive criticism for Houston's YC application --- very specifically the application itself. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&…

The first Bitcoin thread is great

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#128

Post by joshmn »

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy):

I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :(

Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :)

Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#129

Post by layer8 »

kasperset wrote: post #74

One of my favorite product, it just works in the background. I do not need any more features than what it has currently. None of the competitors have this ability to just blend in the background. I hope they stay for a long time.

The one useful feature it still lacks is E2EE for non-team accounts. Though you can emulate that with third-party tools.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#130

Post by sillysaurusx »

layer8 wrote: post #126
sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files,…

> What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).

Unfortunately that downloads the file directly, rather than displaying it in browser, so it's not a very nice way of linking screenshots to someone. The other use case is an html file that contains references to images within the same folder, like . You'd want it to display in the browser, not download the html page as a file.
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