Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Do they want things like this to supplement and thus complement their unencrypted puic default?
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 set local and not-local flags on files/folders is great.
I spent some time trying to use a few of their alternatives, plus their mobile client apps, and it's kinda just Dropbox still.
For business purposes I didn't want to use iCloud. But it seems like it's iCloud & Dropbox then.
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.
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 it.[2]
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.
Step-by-step instructions: https://rclone.org/iclouddrive/
I just tested, and it worked... rclone is such an amazing and incredible project.
https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-mor...
This is more than S3 charges, but S3 will nickel and dime you aggressively for using that storage depending on your use case.
But $22/month buys an entire Google Workspace seat, which includes 5TB, for an effective $5.50/TB/month, which is quite a good deal. On the other hand, it’s rather lacking in flexibility.
I find this all somewhat confusing. At least one of these offerings does not reflect the underlying cost of the product.
OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Personal are two different backends. I'm guessing that you're using the "Business" version?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/parable-python-goat-story-amb...
Why are my files I created on my local device not on my device
I had to uncheck this box since I let my OneDrive (business) account bloat up to 2TB.
Microsoft deliberately chose not to because keeping your files in the cloud is a barrier to easy switching.
This is one of the most basic operations that people do! Why does it not work?
Why would I need to go back in and tell it to keep it locally for when it was local in the first place!?
It's absolutely inane shit like this that drives me up a wall with Microsoft. Do these people use their own products?
Most laptops aren't having TB sized SSDs.
I even use rclone to sync photos to OneDrive I can then share with family/friends.
Local backups are important, they're cheap, and often fast. They just shouldn't be the only kind of backup you do for data that is important to you.
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 alternative would be competing to be the cost leader, and cost leadership strategies are unattractive for startups. Nobody is investing in early-stage companies building "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's hard to attract startup talent to "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's rarely fun for founders to build "a cheaper clone of XYZ".
Unfortunately I think there are limited avenues for successful differentiation in the file sync space. Self-hosted vs cloud, standalone vs OS-level integration, cross-platform vs not? Can't think of much else off the top of my head, and I think big players are able to throw shitloads of engineering talent at OS-level integration features (and that gets you iCloud, basically).
Beating dropbox at their own game wouldn't be impossible, but I think that's why there aren't many competitors in that space.
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.
(that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)
(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)
While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
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)
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.
I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.
I separate my files in Syncthing into different shared folders that sync to different sets of machines, and put stuff that doesn't need syncing at all on my NAS. On paper this might sound more complicated but in practice for me it's a much lower mental burden.
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.
Good pun!
Why not keep using B2? You didn't mention why you were leaving that platform when it seems like a decent solution to your problem.
If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.
There used to be many more - Sugarsync, AeroFS, Syncplicity, just to name a few - all bit the dust. Box.com found a niche serving business document flows; Gdrive, iCloud, OneDrive, all survived thanks to being features in a broader Big Tech suite. Everybody else? Outcompeted, plain and simple. Dropbox was just a cut above.
(I used to work at one of the companies named above, so although it's just one person's opinion, it's at least as informed as anyone else's here :) )
pCloud,
Resilio Sync.
May be worth reviewing.
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 years? I feel like the company could have had a skeleton crew keeping the lights on and I wouldn't have noticed a thing.
Now, in 2026, all I want is for my coding agent to be able to grep the files in dropbox. Feel like dropbox will sooner rely on selling merch than offer something useful like that, though.
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 browser, and the AFAIR the client was also trying to do upsells.
My wife were and I were customers for years. But we finally decided to terminate our subscription last year. Mostly because of the constant upgrade nagging + the orange guy taking office and Dropbox not providing E2E encryption on family accounts. So we switched to Proton Drive. It's worse in many ways, but at least it's E2E encrypted and doesn't shove upgrading ads in our faces all the time.
It's sad, Dropbox was really a great product.
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.
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.
I ended up moving to Apple passwords. I really wanted to keep my password manager platform agnostic, but if I’m being a realist, all my stuff is from Apple, they have a history of long-term support, and so far it’s worked great on all the sites 1Password struggled with. There are features I miss, and I did need to manually validate each imported entry and do some manual cleanup, but I was able to transition relatively quickly with a DB of over 400 accounts.
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 archive and delete it from Apple PW.
Custom fields and some other special fields aren’t supported in Apple PW, this is where I had to go through one-by-one and make sure I wasn’t missing anything and add those things to the notes area.
Non-password data in 1PW doesn’t fit well into Apple PW, so I used a password protected Apple Notes file for that. Not ideal, but I didn’t use those things too much. For software registrations, I didn’t bother securing those too much and filed them away as txt files, most were really old anyway.
The CSV export made 2FA pretty obvious, so I could set that up with Apple. I want to say it made passkeys obvious too, but I only had 1 and knew what it was.
I cleaned out Apple Passwords before the import, so it only had app passwords for login-with-Apple. The way they do this leave much to be desired, to the point that I don’t want to use that feature anymore.
After the import I also found that it tried to be smart about handling multiple entries for the same site, or tried to intelligently name stuff based on the website. It got most of this right, but I still needed to clean some things up and do a little investigation to figure out what a few things were and fix them. Some of this was due to importing archived stuff. I did have to go back to 1Password to make sense of some of it.
All-in-all, I did it all over a long weekend. I kept 1PW around for a month to see if I’d need it and I never did.
Honestly that's what I love about it. I work on something on my desktop. Then when I go to my laptop, everything is there too. It's great. When I get another computer I can just enable Dropbox, walk away, and all my projects, notes, pictures, etc. will be there. I pay them some amount of money per month and it just works and I very rarely need to visit the website or even click on the icon in my toolbar.
Sometimes I read notes on my phone and it's kind of annoying that I can't search through text using their app, but I generally consider that to be a problem with Android rather than Dropbox.
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.
I need sync for just photos on my phone (which Apple or Google are better for), and a small number of esigned PDFs and tax documents (for which any provider's free tier suffices).
Dropbox solved a problem of the 2010s.
In a computer only world there are myriads of other solutions, elegant or not.
Most work computers were permanently plugged into network shared folders, and would have over the VPN access for on the road salesmen etc.
Home users mostly didn't care about cloud storage or shareable folders, those who did could get away with ftp (basically supported everywhere, like straight in explorer windows)
Dropbox flourished because most people got a second device, always connected, but with no decent file management. Many of us used Dropbox not even for sync but just to properly handle files.
I still can't wrap my head around how people find their files in the non-filesystem world. Whenever I need to work with files I take out my laptop.
They didn’t have the concept of files
The average computer user in 2000 was far more computer literate than the average one in 2010, and things have gone downhill ever since.
Especially in a filesystem I know where I placed something, but not always the title, so even if the search function was ok, which it mostly isn't, having to know the wording used for the title is really inconvenient.
I don't know about Android but on iOS I feel like we've had a simple and ubiquitous user-facing file system for a while. I use it all the time.
I suppose it might not be top of mind for most users because it wasn't there for so long.
With root you have access to the entire linux-style system directory
I also found Dropbox just started take on more and more bloat in what seems an obvious attempt to compete with Box and others.
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/simplified-desktop-applica...
Here's a screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/7g2xRJP.png
It's just a non-intrusive little menu that lives on your system tray. No ads, nags, bloat or unwanted new "features" shoved onto you. It resembles their original software much more than it does the latest slop they've been pushing.
The context menu shortcuts in File Explorer for Copy Link, Share, and View on Dropbox still work. Sync works. Most of the other cruft is gone. It's great. It was so refreshing when it got installed. I would have left Dropbox by now without it.
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.
Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation.
I think it is the market, not the leadership.
It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).
Not sure where to go since the big guys won't acquire you given that they have alternatives. Maybe a business software acquirer like Salesforce or Dell? Or an AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub?
I honestly do not know where to go.
In any case, dividends are taxable in the current year, and unrealized stock gains are not.
In case the difference doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider that if you die without selling the stocks, your heirs inherit them at the prevailing price, and no one ever pays tax on the gain they made between when you bought them and when you died.
Rich people who need neither dividend cash or stock sales to pay living expenses prefer not to get dividends so they can pay very little tax.
This enormous loophole for the rich brought to you by your US representatives.
Even if you set your dividends to automatically reinvest via a DRIP program, you still pay taxes on dividends in the year in which they are issued. This reduces the effect of compounding.
> plus the stock
The key point in a buyback is that each share of stock becomes worth more because the company is divided into fewer units. So each share is worth more than it would be had the case instead been used to pay dividends.
Or do they then turnaround and give them to employees?
If its gone forever, then… why? They just bought something and burnt it? Isnt that like a waste of resources?
The stock market, still to this day is a very very strange thing…
It’s easy to see if you imagine there are only three shares and one of them is torn up. The other two now own the entire company.
It’s a way of giving money to shareholders without the value being realized in the sense of being immediately taxable.
Not in all cases, but many
Which is why GAAP earnings matter and not free cash flow
The company has $100 "to spare" - they could pay a dividend (give me $10, you $40, $50 for "the others") - but they'd be taxed on the income they made to be able to pay this, and you and I would be taxed receiving the dividend. We'd net out maybe $8, maybe $7 per share.
Or they could buy my share for $100, and retire it. I get the $100 (and pay capital gains tax unless it was in an IRA or otherwise not an issue). You now own 4 shares of a 9 share company, which is worth the same, but your percentage is a big bigger now.
Getting rid of the double taxation of dividends would likely slow down or end most buybacks; the main advantage is that they let the shareholders decide if/when they take the tax hit.
You might have an easier time with some numbers.
A corporation called Hluska trades at a market cap of $100. Hluska has issued 100 shares. Now, let’s say that Hluska burns ten shares and the market cap stays the same. Now it trades at a market cap of $100 but it has 90 shares outstanding.
Stock holders will only lose stock if they sell stock. In that case, they will be taxed at a capital gains rate which is generally lower than the tax rate on income from dividends. So it’s a way to return capital to shareholders who want out in a tax effective way.
If it doesn’t work, it’s a waste of resources. Let’s go back to our example, that idiot Hluska was trading at $100 with 100 shares outstanding, burned 10 and now trades at a market cap of $80. In that case, yeah, it’s a waste of resources because each individual stock is worth less money post burn. But that doesn’t really happen very often. A better capitalized company than Hluska with its soaring $100 market cap should be able to withstand a burn event without crushing market cap by 20%.
Most investors are focused on multiplying their investment many times over, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in net income a year is not big enough.
And this is one reason why the world is burning (literally and figuratively).
DropBox & Box have both moved in this direction, but perhaps not aggressively enough? I'm thinking in particular about e-signing, where DocuSign has a market cap roughly equal to the sum of DropBox & Box. Both have e-sign products; I am fairly certain that I have never encountered either in the wild despite routinely being sent other e-sign links.
AI is perhaps another emerging opportunity. Instead of uploading documents to a dumb pipe, let me have the pipe do things to them. Dumb, simple example would be I can put PDFs in a folder and after a one-time setup, I can share an API link that lets my users extract specified data from those PDFs via secure JSON API. Or simple CMS instead of WordPress. Or analyze documents flowing through a folder for x, y, z anomalies and alert me.
It is similar to saying that most websites are just cloud-hosted SQL rebranded.
you can build object storage on FoundationDB + other awesome bespoke stuff.
So I wouldn't say it's the market per se. It's just that network storage has become commoditized. Storage tied to Google, Microsoft or Apple is always going to have a market advantage.
They never tried to expand the TAM. Storage/servers were not rented out while others HuggingFace/Github/Digital Ocean/Cloudflare etc. sold them to expand their TAM.
Box is about $115 million income.
I was unclear and I apologize.
"Gross income is that same revenue minus the direct costs of producing the goods or services (such as materials and direct labor)."
Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Passwords, Dropbox Paper, Carousel etc.
As Steve Jobs warned Drew Houston, Dropbox was "a feature, not a product"
I would also if anything put Zoom in with Dropbox, they have a product that is by far the most enjoyable to use in that space, but any other offshoot is not worth it.
(Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)
The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.
Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)
From Dropbox's perspective, this sounds great. Accounts become more useful and valuable. The addressable market of a Dropbox account grows! Plus, everyone has a Dropbox account already, right?
Unfortunately, it turns out that business customers generally don't deploy Dropbox wall-to-wall. It's expensive. Not all employees need file sync.
A Dropbox account ends up being an obstacle to adoption.
And a distraction: a common account creates an irresistible urge to spend a lot of time finding ways to tie this new product into the old one.
I can definitely believe that that was an objection customers had, though. I just suspect that what it really meant was another way of expressing that there wasn't PMF - if the PMF were there, they'd have willingly paid, just like they do now for Notion or Slab or what have you.
And yeah, there was definitely some energy going into trying to tie the products together more (putting Paper docs in your Dropbox folders) - and when that finally shipped it sadly made the Paper experience worse, not better.
Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.
Slack, Zoom, and Notion all argue against that. Yes, they have to compete against Google and Microsoft's integrated solutions, but they're good enough that they have held their own. Of course they would be bigger if Google and Microsoft didn't have such products.
Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.
A huge unforced error though is that the starting price for individual plans is $20/year versus $10/month for Dropbox and Box. At a certain point you have to recognize that the rules of the game have changed. Once a customer has their foot in the door with a cheaper plan that also offers better integration, why would they move to Dropbox or Box?
unless they really want to wait for iOneGDrive to enshittify
Edit: as it stands, sounds like uploading already encrypted files to AWS is the option for privacy hawks who still want cloud - such a small market but think it should grow
But I'm also curious about whether they've studied the long-term growth impact like you mentioned. I first needed to pay for cloud storage as a broke college student. I'd used Dropbox's free tier in high school and only needed a bit more space, and I certainly didn't have $120/year to spend on it. I ended up switching to Google Drive's $2/month plan and never looked back at Dropbox. If Dropbox had offered a comparable plan, I would have stayed and ended up upgrading to the $10/month plan when I got my first job. Looking at how much data I'm using right now, I would have become exactly the type of underutilizing user they want.
Dropbox is one of those companies that did something right, and its kind of sad seeing them in this weird limbo state. I hope they don't wind up crashing down hard before they can finally figure something new out. I think their time to shift from being a "single service / product" style company is long overdue. They don't need to shutdown anything they currently have, but it would be in their best interest to either acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering. I really do wonder why they had not done so sooner.
See Microsoft/Office 365. Aggressive bundling means one license gets you literally everything. Sure, it's all mediocre but it checks boxes and is largely "good enough." No reason to go out and buy slack, zoom, box.com/dropbox, 3rd party email gateways, 3rd party EDR, DLP, an MDM, etc. Microsoft will sell you whatever "checks boxes" product you need under one license and cheaper than buying separately.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/1iwfgzn/with_the...
In reality, the bundling should have been addressed in the courts via antitrust a long time ago before we got to this point. OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint Storage, InTune, PowerAutomate, etc should all be separate, standalone products. They are heavily subsidized for market capture.
The EU tried, and now Microsoft has to keep an M365 tier without Teams, but it's only $8/user/month cheaper, conveniently cheaper than slack still and pre-integrated. Its malicious compliance.
I think they've been doing that, but it's tough to do it successfully. Often the best thing is to return money to the shareholders so they can look for higher returns elsewhere. I think the fact that they're still in business is kind of a miracle considering the competition.
just a thought for you people.
Think about it. If you're paying all your bills, all your wages, and you have a strong product that people enjoy, and you're able to compete in the market - maybe not gaining any ground, but at least not losing any either - why change?
Of course I moderately understand the market pressures at work, but at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.
Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive capacity (for example, enough solar/wind/nuclear/renewable power to completely eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels)
In other words, the last time everyone got worked up over this, the trend reversed itself too hard within a few decades, and then reversed itself again. Meanwhile, over half a century after the "decline" started, we have over twice as many people as we had when it started, and the earliest projections for when growth will stop is another half century from now. I think there are a lot bigger problems we'll need to reckon with before then, and if we manage to remain stable by then, it seems like we have good precedent for reversing it fairly quickly.
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.
Dont we frequently complain that the primary driver behind ensittification of products is the need for perpetual growth at any cost.
I understand the need for growth but if the market is saturated and profits are stable, then may be thats a signal that they need to innovate or branch out into other/adjacent tech without making it worse for their existing customers. But leaders take the shortcut.
For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?
Yeah, with blinders on, it's hard to see that. Otherwise, the playground was wide open. If whales start eating your revenue, then you go after them.
The thesis is that they should survive and thrive as an investment asset through the AI bust, but performance during the AI bubble is poor. If you are a longer term investor then B2B SaaS valuations appear cheap right now, but you need to be able to weather the storm of missing out on the AI infused bubble.
As evidence the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index is at all-time lows for EV/revenue multiples. While some of the companies will see growth rates impacted by AI, that only explains a little bit of the drop in multiples versus the past.
So Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
Wouldn't that run into the same problem the consumer end has? MS bundles 2TB of OneDrive storage for every user with a M365 license, and Workspace does more or less the same. You can already connect pretty much anything to them as is for pseudo-RAG/enterprise search.
The aggressive bundling from the big players have taken away most of the reasons to pay for Dropbox or box.com and other cloud storage providers.
This is exactly why I use Dropbox. I use a single Dropbox account for my family. It's setup with photo sync on our phones so we can automatically share photos together. It's also setup on the printer/scanner so scanned documents are accessible to everyone. We keep documents in it that we can all access when needed. We also access the data through our file browser on our computers.
I feel my use case is simple but it's impossible to do this with the big players due to integration.
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 observer that you need an account to get the files. So these folks (most of them were elderly), just gave up.
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?
When a company like Dropbox prioritizes user account growth over usability, that company debases itself and deserves to lose.
from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.
I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.
When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.
The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.
* described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
Relatedly, people tend to forget that people who are fully aware that a real person has written a foolish and/or shortsighted comment will direct criticism at said comment. I understand that there exist people who -to oversimplify- have as their creed "Thou shall not directly say anything negative about anyone ever."... but that's a minority of people. That "soft pedal" stuff doesn't work for a notable subset of people, and -for some- generates _way_ more anxiety and stress than a frank and earnest discussion about just how stupid the stupid thing you just did is. [0]
I get that some folks are Care Bears (affectionate, non-derogatory), but not only is that not the only way to be, folks who are like that freak out a not-insignificant subset of the population.
> When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software.
Perhaps. But it looks to me like an eighth or so of the top-level commenters on the OP are talking as if the thing under discussion is application software. Maybe folks consistently abbreviated "YCombinator Funding Application" as "App" and "application software" as "application" at the time, but -if so- that's not made clear to me by reading the commentary.
[0] I'd also object to any characterization that BrandonM's commentary is nitpicking in any regard. Unless you know someone pretty well, you have no idea what their background is, how careful they are, or how diligently they keep their appointments with the rubber duck. Anyone who has been in this business for five, ten+ years has seen people put a lot of work into something, but fail to understand or uncover one or more basic truths that invalidate all the work they've done. Basic sanity checks are useful.
Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).
In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files, since visiting an html page in a browser serves that file and relative links are preserved.
I guess it's a losing value proposition, but it sure would be nice.
It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.
You have described Google Drive.
Put <img src="foo.jpg"> 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.
Is this the video you're thinking of?
https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...
There was a recording of a presentation Drew gave later on about Dropbox, but it wasn't as good. This is definitely the original.
Thanks for the memories!
That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).
Then they crippled the free plan and Apple and MS started pushing their services hard. And Dropbox seemed less ubiquitous after that.
>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.
Or maybe I just click those headlines at a higher rate..
Drew launched a great new product, fine tuned it to be one of most loved and then made profitable company. Respect
I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.
And as a result, I never even considered it for my organisation when the time came to do enterprise cloud file sharing. That’s how it goes.
I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.
I've worked a long time in C++ land in large codebases and the issues there are different, but to undig a project from the spaguetti land is like pulling teeth.
At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it.
The change was almost hard to describe, but I think it's encapsulated well if you compare the Dropbox homepage from, say, 2013 to 2019.
2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropb...
2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropb...
I realize that companies that want to become large behemoths naturally seem to have to go down this path - just saying I miss the simplicity of it in its earlier form!
The constant marketing for "dropbox for business" (which is priced badly and is not something I've ever felt comfortable recommending to any business) was also quite irritating.
However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products.
Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company.
When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc.
Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums. Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos!
Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt.
Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.
And even despite enjoying their service, if Google Drive produced a Windows integration that actually worked well, I'd leave for it in a minute.
I'd never use OneDrive, but that's more out of spite at Microsoft shoving it at me than because it is bad in any way I know of clearly.
Open to recommendations...
All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.
It’s stable and profitable (which is more than can be said of most tech companies these days), but the stock is basically flat since it’s IPO a decade ago.
Jobs was ultimately right in the end.
They’ve dragged their feet on evolving and offer nothing new in almost a decade.
Guy has pipes.
Oh his software was pretty good too.
technically he's rich enough to never work again. but he's hungry, young & smart
& can really push the industry forward - by taking one of the f500 that's tech adjacent & be CTO
Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a hedge against the risks of Dropbox enshitification).
But I'd love to see Dropbox continue to provide worthy convenient service.
it's very good + super fast.
Just musing....
Now the native file sync is a really doomed space for individual customers (because I have never explored what's out there exclusively for enterprise). Dropbox is well Dropbox New. Anyone in their right minds, or if anyone has a device other than an Apple device, will not even think of relying on the (even after years of complaints) opaque and buggy iCloud. Google Drive, while most reliable technically, is a really bad bet as a filesystem file sync tool; besides, they are much more bloated than Dropbox, and their suite offerings are intertwined with it so deep. Smaller offerings like Tresorit (though most "native" among its peers) are too buggy and have questionable practices like that of pCloud, etc.
So while the entire personal/consumer filesystem file sync system has gone to the gutter now, Dropbox is still a bad solution among quite worse ones and that's really sad. From storing 100s of GBs at one point, I am back to just ~300 MB in Dropbox now. Just couldn't trust it anymore after it broke my workflows quite a few times and still keeps trying with that sudden pop-up of "Update Available" which is not really an app update (app updates silently in the bg; all hail Electron), that is actually a sly way to make you enable its folder on File Provider API feature. I am sure it is a good feature for many but for heaven's sake the very reason I started using (and still use Dropbox for) is because it syncs my complete files across systems. The lest you can do is not actively try to make me click on it. Besides I don't want any other bloody thing. Just give me that feature, and only that, and take my money and in a native app while we are at it. There are LLMs now, give us back a native app at least.
Seeing the focus on "AI" I am pretty sure very soon I'll have to take even that ~300 MB elsewhere.
PS. Their support is absolutely questionable. I've had a chance to contact them for some bugs. Goodness, it took literally weeks, and dozens of messages, to make them accept it's a bug and even then they didn't really accept they just stopped responding (so I assume they accepted it. Besides it was never fixed :D).
What killed them for me was: - idiotic pricing model. You either pay little for little storage or a lot for a lot. Like most people I needed more than a tiny bit and less than a shitton of storage and there was no offering for me - the idiotic decision to not support ARM Macs for a good year. That's what broke the camel's back and I decided to offload to other services only to realise it's not that important who you're with. It's a commodity product - which leads to the last point: Dropbox never found something innovative or interesting to set them apart. They tried a lot of random products, none appealed to me.
I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :(
Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :)
Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?
The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”.
Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human.
I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS.
Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human.
Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why.
Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human.
Fuck. Big. Tech.
Prior to 2013 or after? Maybe they merged ban lists with PayPal (who owns them).
All three of those events were separated by at least a year each long after PayPal bought Venmo.
which probably triggered a SAR
which companies are legally forbidden from disclosing https://www.finra.org/arbitration-mediation/rules-case-resou...
It was two hypens --
It was two hyphens --
(Hint: No, he's not replying with AI. Two hyphens are not an em dash. Even then there's no hint of it being an AI response. Also the person is actually the CEO of Dropbox, the very person this thread is all about. You only have to click his username to see his posting history to see he's not an AI bot posting endlessly, his last posts (prior to today) were in 2024.)
I really wish more people understood this, especially on HN.
Account recovery flows are flooded with people trying to break into other people's accounts. It's going to be nearly impossible to make a system that can allow someone to recovery their account without also accidentally allowing someone to social engineering their way into someone else's account.
Coincidentially, I know the new CEO, Ashraf Alkarmi; we met at AWS when he was launching Appstream, I believe back in 2013 if I'm not mistaken. It's funny to recognize a name. I am hopeful that he will do well as a CEO.
Anyway, I reached out to their support for help and they were utterly useless. I had a couple weeks of back and forth with them before giving up. I hope I never actually need those docs.
I hope you have a better outcome than I did.
This is wild phrasing.
I can say I view my own time in jail very transactionally and I have run into many people that don't understand that. They expect a sob story about how you were innocent, or how you turned your life around.
I don't think I'd ever say my life was "stolen" from me, but it definitely feels that way in the moment. Having a bunch of armed people come and throw you in a cage certainly leaves you with a new perspective to process.
Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.
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.)
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.
Still, copy-pasting a file should work. It's unclear what "copy" even does.
I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Of course, that doesn't make them money. But millions of users that then had all their files there and kept using it when no longer students (so paying), and recommended it to their places of work etc.
I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.
The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band techniques to sell it.
You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary.
iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.
Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.
You can find a laptop that is better in one aspect, but it will be worse in others.
Absolutely no-one is concerned today about what happens when you dip out of connectivity because fast mobile connectivity was not abundant in 2007 (the iPhone was only released that year), which obviates the "this will never replace a USB" criticism. Mobile made a whole new class of businesses possible.
I still use it for NetSBD source
I use FTP mirrors for various source code
I use FTP for moving files to and from mobile phones
I have never used Dropbox. That company made some people wealthy no doubt but that doesn't help me
I also use USB sticks extensively, e.g., primarily for booting computers, but also for data storage
I have broken a couple when using them in non-NetBSD OS but never lost one
but I think there are many people out there that love a gui for storing files in the cloud. i know my parents/parents friends' all use it.
Dropbox helped here. They had a Linux client and a Mac client and kept both in sync.
Mine was somewhat of a niche use case. I think every one who cycled between Linux and Mac for their daily work back then thought - yeah I can definitely use those tools but an automatic sync would be nice.
What Dropbox didn’t have was a moat that comes with android or iOS. I use iCloud now since my need to move between different devices doesn’t exist anymore.
The crazy part is, you pretty much can just do this yourself now, simply by pasting the famous HN comment into a good agentic AI.
While I understand and respect DanG's perspective as well as the original poster's, that comment is never not going to be funny and I'm unwilling to pretend otherwise. That said, everybody who revisits the Dropbox comment thread for a laugh really should take some time to read the rest of it. It represents a high-water mark in HN comment quality, as well as an interesting harbinger of future star power in the startup community. Some other people participating in that thread ultimately did good work and made a name for themselves, not just Drew.
I have a subscription which I want to cancel but can’t because there are other users. Basic features require upgrading.
The tool strangely still has a certain something that I reach for from time to time. Cross-platform(cross-era even, I just used it to move something off an ancient Windows 10 install), painless sync, painless auth, painless sharing(or not), painless updates, simple billing that isn't so high I have to factor it into my plans, and the app doesn't try to ramp my price based on how many devices I access my data from. It's just a good piece of software at a good price.
Commercially they did just fine as well according to the article: $6B in market cap, $2B/yr rev and $2B personally for Drew. Maybe not the top of YC leaderboard, but well above average.
I want more services like this one, and will keep paying for my modest storage amount until they tell me to go.
Around 2005, I was hired by a company that was building software for USB drives, to build a porn site.
Turns out, they wanted me to build a poc for an authentication solution: some USB drives would have a fingerprint reader and they wanted to build this auth system based on that.
So I built that, but "perplexingly", they didn't get any finance or enough prospect customers, so the project got shelved.
Then, I was handed another project they had on the back burner, a sort of firewall for devices, meant to prevent exfiltration of company documents on unapproved USB drives.
I built the single user version, eg you had to be admin to allow devices and the product sold quite well, even winning some prizes iirc.
We started getting requests to have a centralized admin interface and a way to allow/disallow copying some file types. I started working on the centralized admin and the company hired a very talented engineer to build the file filtering thing. This last thing was based on a windows API that allowed for virtual file systems. Things were ticking along nicely and the company even hired a business manager to try to come up with other products we can build with our existing tech.
One afternoon, over a bunch of cold beers, to link with the hell on earth that happens right now in London, me and this person came up with a cunning plan! What if you sell an 1GB USB drive with an extra 1GB of space?
The plan was simple: plug in the device, you get a drive that's the regular USB drive, but also another drive, backed by the virtual file system thing and a version of my http auth thing, and you would read/write from a server on the Internet.
Big boss liked the idea and I started researching how to get servers and the like, while a third engineer was tasked to build the desktop app needed.
It all came crashing down, days later, when this engineer declared that is not possible to have a windows app minimize to sys tray and the project got cancelled. I left the company not long after that .
This was the story on how a small German-Romanian company could have beat Dropbox.
Somehow, in my mind, Dropbox is always associated with the classic HN comment [1] about "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, ..." ;-) ;-)
Trivial indeed /s
greedy* enough, sure
Rsync for people who just want a folder and it automatically shows up on all of their computers and phones at once. Rsync for people who are never going to use rsync because an ancient command line application with a zillion flags on it is just about as user hostile as you can get.
Is there a bunch of tech geeks who can rsync themselves? Of course there are, and this product absolutely, categorically and unambiguously isnt for them. But guess what? There's 100,000,000 people who both want their folders synced and have no idea how to use rsync (and dont want to). Thats what they are building, and that's who its for, and thats why the have 2.5 billion in annual revenue. Because they famously ignored the "iTs jUsT rSYnC" crowd, and built a product that actually works for 100 million people