311–320 of 466 posts
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iCloud is just rebadged GCS.
iCloud actually runs on FoundationDB - probably one of most underrated DB engines out there. you can build object storage on FoundationDB + other awesome bespoke stuff.
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DropBox has been retiring shares fairly consistently. This is generally used as an alternative to dividends, and is done primarily for tax efficiency.
Where do those shares then go? Are they just gone forever? Or do they then turnaround and give them to employees? If its gone forever, then… why? They just bought something and burnt it? Isnt that like a waste of resources? The stock market, still to this day is a very very strange thing…
The company has $100 "to spare" - they could pay a dividend (give me $10, you $40, $50 for "the others") - but they'd be taxed on the income they made to be able to pay this, and you and I would be taxed receiving the dividend. We'd net out maybe $8, maybe $7 per share.
Or they could buy my share for $100, and retire it. I get the $100 (and pay capital gains tax unless it was in an IRA or otherwise not an issue). You now own 4 shares of a 9 share company, which is worth the same, but your percentage is a big bigger now.
Getting rid of the double taxation of dividends would likely slow down or end most buybacks; the main advantage is that they let the shareholders decide if/when they take the tax hit.
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 was both the market and the leadership. Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Passwords, Dropbox Paper, Carousel etc. As Steve Jobs warned Drew Houston, Dropbox was "a feature, not a product"
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And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of 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…
Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper. The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.
Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)
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In the current economic system, if capital is not growing, it’s reducing.
Can you explain this further? For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?
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The shame has passed and I served my time. What I owe now is not doing it again—which I'm not.
To clarify I'm not commenting on what you've done but how you've phrased it. I really don't mind about pirating movies I don't even see it as wrong.
It's the same principle as someone in public when they're disfigured. You just became aware of something traumatic that happened to this person, and it is totally understandable to feel uncomfortable. But they are just existing in public. They have no obligation to present themselves in a way that avoids making you uncomfortable, and doing that everyday of their lives would be exhausting and wasteful.
In that example it is immediately obvious that it would be inappropriate to ask them to cover up. But it's the same principle, either way.
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Can you explain this further? For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?
inflation … ?
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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 is awful. Why are my files I created on my local device not on my device
I had to uncheck this box since I let my OneDrive (business) account bloat up to 2TB.