Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 466 posts

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#211

Post by brandon272 »

When Dropbox first came out I loved the simplicity of it for years. That rock solid little icon in my system tray that never bothered me, just reliably synced my files. It was excellent.

At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it.

The change was almost hard to describe, but I think it's encapsulated well if you compare the Dropbox homepage from, say, 2013 to 2019.

2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropb...

2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropb...

I realize that companies that want to become large behemoths naturally seem to have to go down this path - just saying I miss the simplicity of it in its earlier form!

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#212

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

yesitcan wrote: post #210
dhouston wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not givin…

Is this guy really replying with AI?

Seems minorly AI ("Fair criticism.", emdash), but as someone who works adjacent to this space, the rest reads like something I'd write.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#213

Post by micromacrofoot »

brandon272 wrote: post #211

When Dropbox first came out I loved the simplicity of it for years. That rock solid little icon in my system tray that never bothered me, just reliably synced my files. It was excellent. At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it. The change was almost hard t…

the curse of early success is getting a billion dollars to invest in your company only to discover that it's really hard to pay back a billion dollars

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#214

Post by nikkwong »

yesitcan wrote: post #210
dhouston wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not givin…

Is this guy really replying with AI?

Not every use of the em dash is Ai. I’ve long used it and always am accused of using Ai in responses — though I never do.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#215

Post by msh »

watermelon0 wrote: post #55
sssilver wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with iCloud?

It doesn't have a great cross platform support (no Linux client, and there are many complaints for the Windows client). Personally, I dislike that you cannot restore an older version of a file on laptop/phone, and must instead use their web app, for which you need to disable ADP, which defeats its purpose.

I know it’s not a official client but rclone have great iCloud support (but only if you don’t enable advanced data protection).

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#216

Post by bhouston »

fist wrote: post #191
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…

Whoa, Dropbox yearly income is about $500 million per year. $2.5 billion income on a $6 billion market cap would be a much better deal. Box is about $115 million income.

I meant "gross income", which is revenue. Not "net income", which is profit.

I was unclear and I apologize.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#217

Post by s_dev »

joshmn wrote: post #128

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…

>I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me

This is wild phrasing.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#218

Post by bhouston »

genxy wrote: post #148
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.

GCS and AWS are not competitors with iCloud, DropBox, Box, Drive, OneDrive since they are just raw APIs and storage and not a user facing product.

It is similar to saying that most websites are just cloud-hosted SQL rebranded.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#219

Post by giancarlostoro »

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'm really not sure what Dropbox could even do other than have gone full swing towards a serious pivot or a new expansion into a new domain, but if they were going to do that they should have done that some years ago, if their current CEO stepping down alarms some of their existing customers, it might not end well.

Dropbox is one of those companies that did something right, and its kind of sad seeing them in this weird limbo state. I hope they don't wind up crashing down hard before they can finally figure something new out. I think their time to shift from being a "single service / product" style company is long overdue. They don't need to shutdown anything they currently have, but it would be in their best interest to either acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering. I really do wonder why they had not done so sooner.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#220

Post by Twirrim »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #117
ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you have no interest in your own data without telling me you have no interest in your own data.

How is a local copy not the best way to store data?

A local copy is inherently fragile. It's easily destroyed by accident, flood, fire etc. This is especially true when using a single storage device like an SD Card, vs the way that these storage services operate, leveraging things like erasure encoding.

Local backups are important, they're cheap, and often fast. They just shouldn't be the only kind of backup you do for data that is important to you.

Post reply on HN