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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

#141

Post by dogleash »

jedberg wrote: post #6
gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

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.

It's already 19 years old? But it's still so fun seeing the same joke in every thread. Again and again. Any time someone can be even hypothetically accused of underestimating complexity of a sleek replacement for a hack system, or the topic can be tied to file sharing apps. It's a lot of fun to be reminded of that comment again and again from a clever bunch on a website with a good sense of humor.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#142

Post by layer8 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #130
layer8 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah, I see. But that usage is exactly why they don’t permit it anymore, it’s been abused too much. People were hosting whole sites on Dropbox, that’s not what it’s for.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#143

Post by Mistletoe »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #127
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&…

The first Bitcoin thread is great https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

The lesson I learn repeatedly on the internet is that most people don’t have a single clue what they are talking about.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#144

Post by runako »

bhouston wrote: post #124

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…

I think the analog is the actions around the storage.

DropBox & Box have both moved in this direction, but perhaps not aggressively enough? I'm thinking in particular about e-signing, where DocuSign has a market cap roughly equal to the sum of DropBox & Box. Both have e-sign products; I am fairly certain that I have never encountered either in the wild despite routinely being sent other e-sign links.

AI is perhaps another emerging opportunity. Instead of uploading documents to a dumb pipe, let me have the pipe do things to them. Dumb, simple example would be I can put PDFs in a folder and after a one-time setup, I can share an API link that lets my users extract specified data from those PDFs via secure JSON API. Or simple CMS instead of WordPress. Or analyze documents flowing through a folder for x, y, z anomalies and alert me.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#145

Post by kmfrk »

As tired as I am of the lack of improvement in Dropbox and the most of my nag-mails being warnings about my inactive Dropbox storage reaching "dangerous lows", I can't help be frustrated at how much the equivalent virtual drives from Apple and Microsoft suck, even today.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#146

Post by genxy »

browningstreet wrote: post #10

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to s…

How much are you willing to pay for this service? Ballpark. And what is your ratio of data at rest vs data you want shared? Are you ok with your permanent copy being local?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#147

Post by Paianni »

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…

TBF, iPod design was very neat and the nano's were very thin for the time.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#148

Post by genxy »

bhouston wrote: post #124

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 is just rebadged GCS.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#149

Post by ValentineC »

jsmith99 wrote: post #62
packetlost wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.

> OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox.

OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Personal are two different backends. I'm guessing that you're using the "Business" version?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#150

Post by CamperBob2 »

gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

The crazy part is, you pretty much can just do this yourself now, simply by pasting the famous HN comment into a good agentic AI.

While I understand and respect DanG's perspective as well as the original poster's, that comment is never not going to be funny and I'm unwilling to pretend otherwise. That said, everybody who revisits the Dropbox comment thread for a laugh really should take some time to read the rest of it. It represents a high-water mark in HN comment quality, as well as an interesting harbinger of future star power in the startup community. Some other people participating in that thread ultimately did good work and made a name for themselves, not just Drew.

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