Dropbox was always a feature in search of a product.
It’s stable and profitable (which is more than can be said of most tech companies these days), but the stock is basically flat since it’s IPO a decade ago.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
161–170 of 466 posts
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#162Why are the HN comments about how Dropbox's business is not doing well? I don't think there's any indication that Drew is stepping down because of that?
A change in long-standing leadership often signifies a change in strategy, whether warranted or not. It’s more likely to deteriorate than to improve the offering, especially given that Dropbox is largely a “finished” product.
That's relevant to the future prospects of the product, but most of the comments are bemoaning the current and previous state of Dropbox. Just seems unrelated to me
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#163Dropbox'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 remember when DBX IPOed and there were a large number of HNers who said proudly they were going to buy the stock and sit on it.. I was always concerned about where Dropbox (and Box.com) goes from here? Network storage always seemed more like a feature than a company, a different flavor of photo storage like Flickr. Didn't Google try and buy them initially?
So I wouldn't say it's the market per se. It's just that network storage has become commoditized. Storage tied to Google, Microsoft or Apple is always going to have a market advantage.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#164Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs
If it makes them feel any better, I told people in the 90s that the WWW didn't make sense because we already have telnet, archie, gopher, veronica, and ftp. What can WWW give me when I already have those tools to connect with...
In 1993 that was true. In 1998 it was starkly different, due to the advent of DOM, and JavaScript to manipulate it.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to g…
The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition. While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way.
Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#166I recently placed some PDF files for some nontechnical people on Dropbox. To avoid confusing them with the long complicated Dropbox URL, I even created a shortened link for them to use (think https://event.myorg.test ). Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts. I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observ…
The dark pattern nags to unregistered users for shared files are the number one reason I permanently abandoned Dropbox for personal and business use. It was subtle at first, then it got pathetically bad.
When a company like Dropbox prioritizes user account growth over usability, that company debases itself and deserves to lose.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#167Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs
It has become true now though!
I have a subscription which I want to cancel but can’t because there are other users. Basic features require upgrading.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#168Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs
Finally realized what Steve Jobs said was true: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#169Drew was the original inspiration for me to get into startups. He was a few years ahead of me at MIT and did MIT's Battlecode competition as well. He introduced me to Hacker News, Paul Graham's writing, YC, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. What he built with Dropbox was the first proof point of the YC model. I'm tremendously appreciative of what he's done for the next generation of enterepreneurs.
Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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…
> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad. You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary. iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.
The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.
Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.