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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

#61

Post by urams »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #16
georgel wrote: post #2

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

It was quite a stupid and expensive ride, but they were vindicated, especially on point 3: >Our business is in a stronger position than it's been in years >What’s energized me most since joining Dropbox is the connection people have with our brand >It gives me a lot of confidence in what’s ahead for Dropbox All corporate fluff, no actual content.

Point 3 was not "'viral' or income generating" and DBX pioneered one of the most viral campaigns (give-get) and generates almost $1B a year in free cash flows? How is that vindication?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#62

Post by jsmith99 »

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

OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#63

Post by plasticsoprano »

microtonal wrote: post #54
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. For me that and end-to-end encryption (I know it's supported for teams now). Instead they just added more annoyances over time. Every time I logged into the web interface, I would get stupid upselling advertisements (maybe don't badger your paying users with that nonsense)? I replaced the official client by Maestral years ago, because they switched to embedding a web brow…

E2E is supported for specific types of folders available only to teams but the admin has to enable it and that folder has to be used. You can't apply it team wide to all users. It's a very poor implementation.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#64

Post by farcaster »

10 years ago they had such a nice feature of grabbing your pictures metadata and showing them on the globe (Immich does this too). And they just scrapped it for no reason. I guess they wanted to make dropbox into more of a collaborative google docs kind of thing. But that's not why I started paying for it.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#65

Post by aeyes »

njt wrote: post #33

I recently placed some PDF files for some nontechnical people on Dropbox. To avoid confusing them with the long complicated Dropbox URL, I even created a shortened link for them to use (think https://event.myorg.test ). Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts. I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observ…

But you don't need a Dropbox account to view any file for which you created a shareable link.

If you add raw=1 to the URL then it will directly show in the browser without the Dropbox viewer.

Or did you share a folder?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#66

Post by packetlost »

jsmith99 wrote: post #62
packetlost wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.

Considering I have one friend who just lost data due to a OneDrive bug less than a month ago, I'm going to say no. I have zero tolerance for data loss.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#67

Post by ADent »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #8
georgel wrote: post #2

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

It is a darn shame, if the major OS providers didn't roll their own cloud storage, Dropbox could have been the default go-to across the board, and any other competitors that would have risen.

They were seemingly everywhere and lots of apps and services offered Dropbox as an option. 200 million users in 2013.

Then they crippled the free plan and Apple and MS started pushing their services hard. And Dropbox seemed less ubiquitous after that.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#68

Post by supern0va »

brittlepeanut wrote: post #46
arealaccount wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

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.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#69

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #27
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…

You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.

Tell me you have no interest in your own data without telling me you have no interest in your own data.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#70

Post by postalcoder »

al_borland wrote: post #59
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…

There is a lot to be said for staying small and doing one thing really, really well. Any time a service I like tries to expand their business, usually to appease investors, that's when things start to go downhill and I start looking for alternatives.

> There is a lot to be said for staying small and doing one thing really, really well.

Man. 1Password is another example of this. They've chased growth and no longer seem to be able to build a browser extension that actually works. I've been seriously considering dropping 1PW because of it.

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