251–260 of 466 posts
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It's done to increase EPS per share and return cash to ongoing shareholders in a more tax friendly way, yes.
People say this, but the cash is returned only if you sell. A dividend is cash in pocket plus the stock.
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…
> 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). A huge unforced error though is that the starting price for individual plans is $20/year versus $10/month for Dropbox and Box. At a certain point you have to recognize that the rules of the game have changed. Once a customer has their fo…
unless they really want to wait for iOneGDrive to enshittify
Edit: as it stands, sounds like uploading already encrypted files to AWS is the option for privacy hawks who still want cloud - such a small market but think it should grow
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[flagged]
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844197
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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”.
A few years ago Dropbox just stopped working for the basic thing it is supposed to do -- let me access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. Since then I have not stopped using/paying, but i have stopped counting on it and I have stopped adding new files to it, sharing files with it, etc. The constant marketing for "dropbox for business" (which is priced badly and is not something I've ever felt…
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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…
> at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time. Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive cap…
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Dropbox is a $6B product, just no second act
It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.
(Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)
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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…
> at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time. Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive cap…
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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
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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.