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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

#41

Post by ajkjk »

stackghost wrote: post #34
browningstreet wrote: post #10

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to s…

>With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Business Strategy 101 teaches that broadly speaking, there are 3 categories into which companies fall, which are cost leadership, differentiation, or segment focus. If, as you say, your only pain point is the cost of dropbox, then any potential alterna…

The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. It'll hurt the growth they have to show investors but not as much as letting you live will.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#42

Post by savrajsingh »

gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

"...building a net worth of more than $2 billion..." - congrats Drew and team! For all the critics, from day 1, the founders are billionaires / early employees at least in the 10s if not 100s of millions -- and so much value created for people syncing files around the world -- while hackers are still saying "...but rsync"

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#45

Post by amluto »

watermelon0 wrote: post #35
sillysaurusx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people I know e-mail files to themselves It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)

Sharing files between apps and file management in general on iOS is atrocious. I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.

At least there is a Files app these days, and many iOS apps interoperate a little bit with “Files”.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#46

Post by brittlepeanut »

arealaccount wrote: post #22
georgel wrote: post #2

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Man HN was a different place back then. People sharing ideas and getting constructive (even if comically wrong) feedback. It reads more like founders and hackers helping each other. The discussions lately are more like folks armchair analyzing or speculating companies that are already incumbent tech giants. Or maybe I just click those headlines at a higher rate..

[flagged]

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#47

Post by amluto »

packetlost wrote: post #13
browningstreet wrote: post #10

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to s…

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

Google Drive has gotten inexplicably cheap for Workspace users, too.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#48

Post by arbirk »

They focused on the wrong product imo. File sync as in syncing the files you are actively working on and temporary files like clipboard etc. is powerful. Syncing folders and doing backups is difficult and expensive. I am still looking for a good product that makes it easy to do all that.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#49

Post by TwoNineA »

gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

My tools are syncthing + samba: Mac Mini running Syncthing to sync the iCloud folder to my local linux server which is also running Syncthing. Linux folder synced is exposed as SMB share so I can access it from other systems.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#50

Post by jeffbee »

hylaride wrote: post #21

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.
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