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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

#441

Post by caconym_ »

gonzalohm wrote: post #439
caconym_ wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actively don't want this feature and its appearance in Dropbox is one of the major factors that drove me to look for an alternative. Needing to constantly stay abreast of feature churn to make sure I understand how and where my files are stored is not for me, nor is reliance on the weird hacks they use to implement it "transparently" across different platforms. I separate my files in Syncthing into different shared…

That makes sense. But Dropbox was never designed like that. It has always been a client-server service. Syncthing is P2P so it's not a replacement.

I run Syncthing in a hub-and-spoke topology where the hub is a headless VM with a volume hosted on my NAS. This is half for my sanity wrt remembering what's peered with what, and half because it works much more consistently across network boundaries.

The way I use it, it's a 1:1 replacement for the way I used Dropbox: a directory of files that are continuously synced across different machines, with a durable central copy that gets regular snapshotted backups. I understand that Dropbox has more features now, but that's pretty much all it was when I started using it; and the fact that Syncthing supports other use cases than mine doesn't mean it isn't a perfect fit for mine. Out of all my experience self-hosting ~replacements for consumer cloud services, it's probably been the most successful by far.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#442

Post by ajkjk »

computerdork wrote: post #363
ajkjk wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way. Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)

Hmm, tend to disagree, but this is just an educated guess of mine. Seems like business have more specific needs that individuals, and would guess that Dropbox has many small features targeted for just companies (richer api's, more stability, more customization). Yeah, at least in my opinion, the larger the business, the more features they need.

Well they do. The problem is that if a competitor arises on the individual market they can pretty efficiently copy anything that makes them competitive.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#443

Post by hoherd »

skydhash wrote: post #120
postalcoder wrote: post #19

I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service. On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen y…

> All I care about is packrat and good syncing. That’s also what I care about, but the atrocious client (and the m1 thing) and the constant nagging in the web interface was too much. I cancelled and now use a mixture of icloud, airdrop, and rsync/sftp with remote servers.

Have you tried syncthing? A few years ago I replaced Dropbox with that on all my computers and it's been great. It works a lot like old school Dropbox, except without the cloud-hosted storage parts. It does p2p sync of directories between computers.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#444

Post by mmh0000 »

seanhunter wrote: post #403
watermelon0 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have a great cross platform support (no Linux client, and there are many complaints for the Windows client). Personally, I dislike that you cannot restore an older version of a file on laptop/phone, and must instead use their web app, for which you need to disable ADP, which defeats its purpose.

While there isn't a proper Linux client, if you find yourself on a Linux box and need to sync to or from iCloud, rclone[1] works great. Just putting this out there in the hope that it might help someone. It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed…

That's neat! I had no idea rclone supported iCloud now. Looks like they added support about a year ago[1].

Step-by-step instructions: https://rclone.org/iclouddrive/

I just tested, and it worked... rclone is such an amazing and incredible project.

[1] https://rclone.org/changelog/#v1-69-0-2025-01-12

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#445

Post by prepend »

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…

I think important things for me (durable file storage) seems more and more niche for the general population.

I think it’s a real need that people are overlooking.

I’ve been working to teach my kids how important it is to store important records like taxes, ids, home records, etc in a durable store and just get shrugs and “why would I ever need last year’s taxes?”

I think dropbox’s problem is just and prefer it over having to but storage in microsoft, apple, and google’s walled gardens.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#446

Post by prepend »

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

I find icloud best as long as everything is apple.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#447

Post by nathanmills »

s_dev wrote: post #389
nathanmills wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that means 13 minutes ago must've been the first time they've ever used the site

Account age is a legit parameter when evaluating the worthiness comments especially how easy it is for bots to make comments now.

They seem pretty human to me.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#448

Post by supern0va »

ricardobayes wrote: post #96
supern0va wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, it somehow has significantly better conversations than most places online. Maybe on par with reddit 10-15 years ago. It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations, particularly for general tech.

Yes, although unfortunately the only problem with it, there's no way to contribute to older topics in a meaningful way. Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.

>Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.

Sometimes I wonder if the format actually helps. I suspect that when you know you can pretend you didn't see a reply to your comment, you feel less likely to need to defend yourself when you realize you might be wrong. You can just close the tab and, since there was no notification, just move on without the ego hit.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#449

Post by skydhash »

hoherd wrote: post #443
skydhash wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I care about is packrat and good syncing. That’s also what I care about, but the atrocious client (and the m1 thing) and the constant nagging in the web interface was too much. I cancelled and now use a mixture of icloud, airdrop, and rsync/sftp with remote servers.

Have you tried syncthing? A few years ago I replaced Dropbox with that on all my computers and it's been great. It works a lot like old school Dropbox, except without the cloud-hosted storage parts. It does p2p sync of directories between computers.

I have, but for my workflow, I found that I don’t need realtime sync that much. I either work locally or the source of truth is online. What I really needed was backup (restic and various online storage) and file transfer (rsync and unison works great).
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