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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

#331

Post by zhyder »

Aside from the issue of platform owners (Apple, Google, Microsoft) offering storage sync as an integrated feature, which others have pointed out, the other reason growth is limited is that filesystem storage and sync thereof has become less critical over time. Our apps increasingly do cloud-native walled-garden storage: docs in Google Docs / Notion / Confluence, mocks in Figma, etc. And code was cloud-native with version control much earlier.

I need sync for just photos on my phone (which Apple or Google are better for), and a small number of esigned PDFs and tax documents (for which any provider's free tier suffices).

Dropbox solved a problem of the 2010s.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#333

Post by dexwiz »

zhyder wrote: post #331

Aside from the issue of platform owners (Apple, Google, Microsoft) offering storage sync as an integrated feature, which others have pointed out, the other reason growth is limited is that filesystem storage and sync thereof has become less critical over time. Our apps increasingly do cloud-native walled-garden storage: docs in Google Docs / Notion / Confluence, mocks in Figma, etc. And code was cloud-native with ver…

Files became an implementation detail.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#334

Post by tjpnz »

zymhan wrote: post #245
amelius wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

TBF their profit is in decline.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#335

Post by saghm »

hcurtiss wrote: post #301
saghm wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the aftermath of World War I, birth rates in the United States and many European countries fell below replacement level. This prompted concern about population decline.[8] The recovery of the birth rate in most Western countries around 1940 that produced the "baby boom", with annual growth rates in the 1.0 – 1.5% range, and which peaked during the period 1962–1968 at 2.1% per year,[13] temporarily dispelled prio…

I'm not so sure that global population growth tells the right story vis-à-vis declining birth rates in western countries.

Well, they were directly asked what they meant and replied with a link to a giant Wikipedia article. If they had a more specific point to make, they're being weirdly cagey about it.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#339

Post by malux85 »

inetknght wrote: post #330
tonymet wrote: post #319

what are they building?

rsync for walled gardens

Rsync for my mum, rsync for my sister, rsync for my lawyer, my teacher, my plumber, rsync for people who just want a folder with an icon that says it's working.

Rsync for people who just want a folder and it automatically shows up on all of their computers and phones at once. Rsync for people who are never going to use rsync because an ancient command line application with a zillion flags on it is just about as user hostile as you can get.

Is there a bunch of tech geeks who can rsync themselves? Of course there are, and this product absolutely, categorically and unambiguously isnt for them. But guess what? There's 100,000,000 people who both want their folders synced and have no idea how to use rsync (and dont want to). Thats what they are building, and that's who its for, and thats why the have 2.5 billion in annual revenue. Because they famously ignored the "iTs jUsT rSYnC" crowd, and built a product that actually works for 100 million people

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