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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

#71

Post by ajkjk »

stackghost wrote: post #57
ajkjk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. Yep, this is why cost leadership strategies tend to be unattractive to startups. Finding ways to be meticulously frugal just isn't exciting to most people, I would think.

Well my point is that it's not a question of how exciting it is. It is that it is essentially unworkable as a business strategy, unless you have a technique for being more frugal or efficient than it is possible for your competitor to be. And they have scale on their side, so it is doubtful.

(that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#72

Post by caconym_ »

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…

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions.

I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#76

Post by malfist »

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]

Says an account 13 minutes old.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#78

Post by georgel »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #18
jeffbee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item You have described Google Drive.

Not quite; it's not a direct link to the item. Put into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.

It was such a nice feature too, but very easily and quickly abused.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#79

Post by [deleted] »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #32
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.)

It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file. You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste. There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail. It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#80

Post by svara »

amluto wrote: post #47
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

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

The desktop client used to be just terrible. Has that changed? The Dropbox client does have its issues but it's really amazing at... Syncing files. I use it pretty creatively with large numbers of files and large volumes and it just works reliably.
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