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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

#451

Post by asdff »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #269
asdff wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is in the exponential growth model. Most small businesses in your town for example. Margins might afford an upper middle class lifestyle for the owner and that is a good enough business model for this company to last decades, even pass down through the family.

On the micro level, I agree. On the macro level, I don't know how viable those businesses will be when the wider economy is no longer growing exponentially (and frankly that may well be the least of all concerns).

Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine. They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local and they serve a need that has kept them in business for decades already, even with how many eras now of outsourcing and globalization and online shopping and all these other touted death blows that have been weathered all the same by these businesses.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#452

Post by postalcoder »

al_borland wrote: post #429
postalcoder wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been side-eyeing a transition to Apple's password manager and it's helpful to know that you have done so with little pain. I may try it soon.

I didn’t want to go into too much detail if you were thinking a different route, but since you’re thinking of going with Apple, here are some of the rough edges I remember in the transition. I exported 1Password to a CSV and imported it into Apple Passwords. I had spend some time cleaning up 1PW first, archiving dead accounts, but the export had everything in a flat file, so I had to go through everything in my archi…

Thank you so much for this!

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#453

Post by hulitu »

dexwiz wrote: post #333
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.

That's why one cannot "use" a mobile device wirhout references to the mothers of Google and Apple "engineers".

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#454

Post by swyx »

dhouston wrote: post #186
swyx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.

Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not givin…

hey drew! fwiw it was actually NOT criticism of dropbox specifically - ive worked at and also run a company where this is the case - but for our smaller scale it is because we have support overwhelm and havent sufficiently figured out our own processes to triage everything well. not casting a stone here. you definitely have way more bad actor problems that mean you cant have nice things.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#455

Post by insanitybit »

runtime_terror wrote: post #440
insanitybit wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using `age` or `rage` is deadly easy. Also, e2e is most effective when it happens out of band - if the idea is "I don't trust Dropbox, so I want client side encryption" then you shouldn't trust them to do the e2e anyways. I realize it can be more complex, but managing it yourself gives you the maximal benefits of e2e.

I agree if you care about security it's better to DIY, it's just not simpler than say putting a file in Proton Drive

It's not just "better", it's the only approach that addresses the real threat model. So you can go with something simpler like checking a box but then you aren't getting the same feature.

FWIW this is the reason, to my understanding, that Dropbox has always been reluctant to support this feature - because if you actually want E2E you probably want it out of band.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#456

Post by throwaway894345 »

asdff wrote: post #451
throwaway894345 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the micro level, I agree. On the macro level, I don't know how viable those businesses will be when the wider economy is no longer growing exponentially (and frankly that may well be the least of all concerns).

Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine. They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local and they serve a need that has kept them in business for decades already, even with how many eras now of outsourcing and globalization and online shopping and all these other touted death blows that have been weathered all the same by t…

> Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine.

This is a non sequitur. If the economy contracts and 99% of these businesses go under, 1% may well remain (“they exist…”) but that does not mean that all is well (“they will be fine”).

> They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local

The local economy in most of America is highly coupled with larger corporations. Either the large corporations are the major employers or the large corporations are the major customers for the area’s employers. Even if it’s not that, everything is tightly coupled to the banking system, as we learned in 2008.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#458

Post by inetknght »

tonymet wrote: post #356
inetknght wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, it would be. Except that it's for walled gardens which means it's incompatible with rsync.

they were smart enough to meter it

> they were smart enough to meter it

greedy* enough, sure

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#459

Post by DANmode »

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…

Spideroak,

pCloud,

Resilio Sync.

May be worth reviewing.

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