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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#391

I was lucky enough to work at Dropbox for a bit. Awesome engineering culture and such good people. Got to even grab a beer and rip karaoke with Drew. Thanks for creating such an awesome working environment Drew. I cannot say thank you enough for those memories or that experience. By far the best CEO and leader I've seen.

[flagged]

Found the shareholder.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#392

I always thought it was a shame that Dropbox never had a tier between its free tier which is not usable and its first paid tier. I would've gladly paid around $3, $5 for a few tens of Gigs of storage, but the almost $10 per month is too much. Then Apple iCloud came and filled that gap beautifully. So I give them my money. I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.

Exactly my thoughts too. I abandoned Dropbox because there was no upgrade path from free to low-paid-tier. $10 a month is not cheap. Heck, I pay less than that for Amazon prime and that offers a lot more value. I don’t need 2TB of cloud storage - I need something like 100GB.

And as a result, I never even considered it for my organisation when the time came to do enterprise cloud file sharing. That’s how it goes.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#393
I just checked my email and saw that my earliest use of Dropbox was with its 3rd alpha for Linux in August 2008. That is an awfully long time to be using a service. I remember how exciting it was when they released an Android client for my HTC Incredible to run

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#394
post #50

Dropbox was an excellent service back in the day. Then they re-wrote their desktop apps (I think in python?) and it never synced cleanly after that. I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.

The biggest lesson I learned working at Dropbox was how toxic python is. If you have an unmanageable python code base, and hire Guido himself to help you fix it, he'll dig you into an even deeper hole and then quit. Which honestly was an extension of my experience at Google. When I left Google for Dropbox, python at Google was also in crisis. These two companies cemented my "python: not even once" stance.

I would say that in general dynamic type languages are problematic in a large codebase without strict safeguards (Any everywhere, untested paths, lack of test coverage, large methods with different return scopes, etc.).

I've worked a long time in C++ land in large codebases and the issues there are different, but to undig a project from the spaguetti land is like pulling teeth.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OneDrive is awful. Why are my files I created on my local device not on my device

Click “keep files on my device”. I had to uncheck this box since I let my OneDrive (business) account bloat up to 2TB.

I download an attachment from a colleague. I edit it and save it. I try to send the updated file back via outlook... And it says the file is not available.

This is one of the most basic operations that people do! Why does it not work?

Why would I need to go back in and tell it to keep it locally for when it was local in the first place!?

It's absolutely inane shit like this that drives me up a wall with Microsoft. Do these people use their own products?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Many people worked for FTX, loved SBF and would have said he was a great leader too. People will love anyone who is good to them.

I've must have missed where Dropbox's CEO committed securities fraud.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#397
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I'm surprised they've been able to keep the stock price and the revenue flat given they competitive environment they've been in for many years. They've been going head to head with the cloud infrastructure hyperscalers and mobile platform owners despite just being a file storage SaaS. It's weird to me that people ever expected more of Dropbox given who they were up against.

Yes, this is one of the most ineffective parts of public trading. It's impossible to say what the leadership here would have done without such _wild_ changes in the surrounding environment. While I understand the argument that in the end it doesn't matter, companies should find the way to succeed regardless, I think it causes a lot of good leadership to be lost, or a lot of bad decisions leading to local minima.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#398

I was lucky enough to work at Dropbox for a bit. Awesome engineering culture and such good people. Got to even grab a beer and rip karaoke with Drew. Thanks for creating such an awesome working environment Drew. I cannot say thank you enough for those memories or that experience. By far the best CEO and leader I've seen.

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[deleted]

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#400
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…

Seems like a cautionary tale of not ruthlessly reinventing yourself as market conditions change.
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