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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

#241

Post by amelius »

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 cannot find the relevant comment right now, but I think HN always knew that the concept behind Dropbox wasn't going to fly ...

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#242

Post by joshmn »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #187
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…

This must be one hell of an edge case - glad to see you are "free" :).

It's the digital equivalent of your house burning down, your devices are inside it, and you never bothered to bring the 2FA codes you definitely wrote down to the bank.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#243

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

dhouston wrote: post #186
swyx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.

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…

> 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

I really wish more people understood this, especially on HN.

Account recovery flows are flooded with people trying to break into other people's accounts. It's going to be nearly impossible to make a system that can allow someone to recovery their account without also accidentally allowing someone to social engineering their way into someone else's account.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#244

Post by hiq »

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…

On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#245

Post by zymhan »

amelius wrote: post #241
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 cannot find the relevant comment right now, but I think HN always knew that the concept behind Dropbox wasn't going to fly ...

Surely you're not referring to this prediction that was so bad, it's now a meme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#246

Post by kenjackson »

nine_k wrote: post #164
kenjackson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said this either in late 93 or early 94. I was in a class when someone demo'ed Lynx to me, and I tore into it and the WWW. Looking at the timeline it seems that Mosaic came out right after Lynx, but my memory of it has Mosaic coming out way after Lynx. And it seemed like Navigator years after that, but the real history is super compressed. By the time I'd seen Mosaic, I was then pretty convinced of its utility.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#247

Post by hellisothers »

stringfood wrote: post #224
giancarlostoro wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wei…

Problem is most consumers and businesses would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each. The former is cheaper and often is easier to cross-integrate - I'd rather just use AWS or GCP storage options than ever touch drop box

Yea, Dropbox was a pretty good DSLR camera, problem was everybody has a mobile phone now…

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#248

Post by idiotsecant »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #235
guhcampos wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that bad though? Think about it. If you're paying all your bills, all your wages, and you have a strong product that people enjoy, and you're able to compete in the market - maybe not gaining any ground, but at least not losing any either - why change? Of course I moderately understand the market pressures at work, but at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead…

Exponential growth can’t last forever, and I do worry about what will happen when the gravy train stops. Maybe we can figure out interstellar travel before it does so the limiting factor becomes “the galaxy” rather than “our planet”.

I think impending demographic collapse might give us a peek at that sooner than you'd think

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#249

Post by PeterWhittaker »

In these days of concerns over digital sovereignty, I cannot help but wonder if they would be best served by moving to a privacy-protective European state, e.g., Germany or Switzerland (not EU but tends to align with EU regs, e.g., GDPR) and doubling down as a privacy protection service (to the extent permitted by law).

Just musing....

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