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.
I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature.
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.
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.
> 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).
That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).
Unfortunately that downloads the file directly, rather than displaying it in browser, so it's not a very nice way of linking screenshots to someone. The other use case is an html file that contains references to images within the same folder, like <img src="foo.png">. You'd want it to display in the browser, not download the html page as a file.
Ah, I see. But that usage is exactly why they don’t permit it anymore, it’s been abused too much. People were hosting whole sites on Dropbox, that’s not what it’s for.
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.
I remember even Ubuntu had their own storage offering, which had they kept it going, I might have subscribed to to this day. Shame, would have been an easy way for Ubuntu to fund itself.
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?
Their roadmap doesn't exist beyond their one-hit-wonder. CEOs are stepping down because there is no future for the company unless you count acquisition by Amazon or Google or Apple, which will result in the entire company being walked to the grave.
This is really a non-answer. If your point is "Dropbox is a struggling company and therefore all criticism of it ever is fully validated no matter the timeline" then any criticism of any company ever will be validated eventually which is absurd.
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..
It used to be a site for technical founders. I made actual, useful professional connections.
These days, it's mostly just posting addicts having a wank at each other, and arguing using that distinct "I am not technically making a personal argument" style.
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.
> It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations
Yeah I used to learn so much across quite a few forums. Most of those communities are dead, dying, filled with bots or filled with people making shit up/just posting lousy jokes now. A lot of folks have jumped to Discord, which frankly, isn't for me, so feeling a bit lost on where to surf these days
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.)
Google will often convert it to a gdrive thing instead. So you're not sending the file, just a link to the file uploaded somewhere. I'm not sure what heuristic it uses, but sometimes when mailing photos like half of them are included in the mail and half automagically uploaded to gdrive instead.
Yeah but it's the silent conversion that irks me. My email is no longer self contained or archivable. When I find it again in the future, the files might be gone.
Funnily enough, Windows 98 is the first OS I remember with a sharing menu (“Send To”, which is memorable to me because the official Russian localization of it was suggestive of an obscenity). It seemed so pointless back then.
Tangential to the theme, here is the HN post about the (AFAIK) first public success of deep learning techniques with SuperVision's AlexNet. You can read what their prognosis on the future success of deep learning was (hint: same prognosis as Dropbox)
Important to note here that Dan has been for years asking people to understand this comment in the context of the time and circumstances it was written. It's not a dunk on Dropbox. It's not the "less space than a Nomad" iPod comment on Slashdot. It was helpful and constructive criticism for Houston's YC application --- very specifically the application itself.
The "viral" point was a good one, and which they solved quite cleverly: as a student I got 10 GB for free, but additional 10 GB for each recruited person. Everyone at campus was on a recruiting spree for a while, to bulk up free storage.
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.
> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.
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.
The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.
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.
There is probably something here about human psychology where we underestimate the switching costs of things we have already, and are wired to look at things through the lens of the world we have now.
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.
Which just goes to show how trigger happy people are about labeling things as LLM generated. People forget that LLMs were trained on writing on the internet, so it's going to sound how the average person writes!
It's already 19 years old? But it's still so fun seeing the same joke in every thread. Again and again. Any time someone can be even hypothetically accused of underestimating complexity of a sleek replacement for a hack system, or the topic can be tied to file sharing apps. It's a lot of fun to be reminded of that comment again and again from a clever bunch on a website with a good sense of humor.
"...building a net worth of more than $2 billion..." - congrats Drew and team! For all the critics, from day 1, the founders are billionaires / early employees at least in the 10s if not 100s of millions -- and so much value created for people syncing files around the world -- while hackers are still saying "...but rsync"
My tools are syncthing + samba: Mac Mini running Syncthing to sync the iCloud folder to my local linux server which is also running Syncthing. Linux folder synced is exposed as SMB share so I can access it from other systems.
If it makes them feel any better, I told people in the 90s that the WWW didn't make sense because we already have telnet, archie, gopher, veronica, and ftp. What can WWW give me when I already have those tools to connect with...
I said this either in late 93 or early 94. I was in a class when someone demo'ed Lynx to me, and I tore into it and the WWW. Looking at the timeline it seems that Mosaic came out right after Lynx, but my memory of it has Mosaic coming out way after Lynx. And it seemed like Navigator years after that, but the real history is super compressed. By the time I'd seen Mosaic, I was then pretty convinced of its utility.
In this case, Gopher was a ticking time bomb, as the University of Minnesota was looking to charge money for the server implementation. Tim Berners-Lee was adamant about keeping WWW open and got CERN to agree to release it as public domain. Dropbox has a similar advantage, at least for me: it's not tied to a particular OS vendor or office suite. I can run it on basically anything and have first-class access to all of my files.
I am just like you except for the netbsd source part, and I have my own private cloud/nas with virtualization. I also at one point just started using AWS S3 as my personal dropbox on chrome for sharing files with myself, since I backup encrypted snapshots there from my cloud anyway.
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.
I think it’s more of an ease of use issue. When I was in grad school, I used to cycle my work between dev on a MacBook and heavy processing work on a desktop. This was 2011/2012.
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.
Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs
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.
Maybe this is sarcasm and I just didn't catch it, but I think Dropbox made a mark, and a good one at that.
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.
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 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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
I find Google Drive desktop to be just fine on Windows. Gave up a long time Dropbox sub for it and I have been happy. Dropbox just got too bloaty and unfocused for me.
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.
I download an attachment from a colleague. I edit it and save it. I try to send the updated file back via outlook... And it says the file is not available.
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?
TM was a hack - iCloud is pretty good I reckon - for the millions of devices they have in the market there has been the only odd complaint from somebody on twitter making headlines with a Technorati type of following about user accounts mysterious being deleted or blocked (poor customer support) or some weird syncing issues when moving to a new device and the old device is still in use.
A local copy is inherently fragile. It's easily destroyed by accident, flood, fire etc. This is especially true when using a single storage device like an SD Card, vs the way that these storage services operate, leveraging things like erasure encoding.
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.
>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.
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.
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)
It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service.
(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)
The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition.
While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
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)
Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.
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.
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.
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.
It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.
I'm surprised by how many people mention Syncthing as an alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. It's not. Syncthing forces you to have a copy of your data on all your devices. With Dropbox or Google drive you can "stream" only the files you need. This is important when you want to share GB of data with devices that can't sync everything into local storage (like a phone)
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 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.
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.
How much are you willing to pay for this service? Ballpark. And what is your ratio of data at rest vs data you want shared? Are you ok with your permanent copy being local?
> I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space.
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 :) )
Really hope that all the positives in the leadership announcement are true.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Why not just use VeraCrypt containers with DropBox until this man of colour that you are scared of leaves their elected office? That way, your files are E2E encrypted via FOSS tooling.
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.
Funny you bring it up. I was a 1Password user for 18 years and just migrated off it last month when they announced the price hike. It has only been working 50% of the time, and the lack of a reliable auto-fill is a security risk… yet they are raising the price so all their Avenger backers can get a return on their investment. A bunch of movie stars investing in a password manager feels like a huge red flag to me.
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 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 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.
>On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters.
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.
I generally have not thought about how Dropbox spent its money until I visited the web interface, which has been redesigned for the tenth time over, and remembered that there’s still no way to see how much space your folders are taking up.
I guess I already know roughly how much space they're taking up since I just check how much space I'm using in my dropbox directory on one of my computers. From my perspective, Dropbox basically has no User Interface, but a fantastic User Experience.
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.
In 2016 they introduced document scanning, and I've used that a lot to digitize old papers, lecture notes, all kinds of things. It works well and has a good UI for tweaking corner locations and other things.
The biggest lesson I learned working at Dropbox was how toxic python is. If you have an unmanageable python code base, and hire Guido himself to help you fix it, he'll dig you into an even deeper hole and then quit. Which honestly was an extension of my experience at Google. When I left Google for Dropbox, python at Google was also in crisis. These two companies cemented my "python: not even once" stance.
I would say that in general dynamic type languages are problematic in a large codebase without strict safeguards (Any everywhere, untested paths, lack of test coverage, large methods with different return scopes, etc.).
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.
There was a "major" change in the agent roughly a decade ago. Dropbox went from being a simple folder sync tool to a much more bloated agent that never synced cleanly. I don't know if they just moved away from some modules that were written in C or something, but I gave up on it soon after.
I think Dropbox is great, but I got about 10GB of storage via affiliate links ten years ago and I've never upgraded or paid a cent since. I'm sure I'm a huge loss for them.
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.
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 observer that you need an account to get the files. So these folks (most of them were elderly), just gave up.
You don't need account, that's for sure, but multiple times I've seen a big upsell popup that suggests that account is required, while the tiny gray button "skip to files" is on the very bottom. I hate such patterns.
The dark pattern nags to unregistered users for shared files are the number one reason I permanently abandoned Dropbox for personal and business use. It was subtle at first, then it got pathetically bad.
When a company like Dropbox prioritizes user account growth over usability, that company debases itself and deserves to lose.
My elderly mother ended up with a Dropbox subscription because someone sent her a file on Dropbox, that she could technically access for free, but she got dark patterned into creating an account and subscribing. To a yearly plan no less
I am surprised they aren't leaning into the agent dev tool mania right now. File syncing is actually very in demand right now and everyone is not doing a great job figuring it out.
They focused on the wrong product imo. File sync as in syncing the files you are actively working on and temporary files like clipboard etc. is powerful. Syncing folders and doing backups is difficult and expensive. I am still looking for a good product that makes it easy to do all that.
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.
Why are the HN comments about how Dropbox's business is not doing well? I don't think there's any indication that Drew is stepping down because of that?
A change in long-standing leadership often signifies a change in strategy, whether warranted or not. It’s more likely to deteriorate than to improve the offering, especially given that Dropbox is largely a “finished” product.
That's relevant to the future prospects of the product, but most of the comments are bemoaning the current and previous state of Dropbox. Just seems unrelated to me
One of my favorite product, it just works in the background. I do not need any more features than what it has currently. None of the competitors have this ability to just blend in the background.
I hope they stay for a long time.
I've used and paid for Dropbox for well over a decade. Other than the rare hiccup every few years (usually due to switching machines/OSes or whatnot), it's been rock solid and a true workhorse. I know there are many other options, including iCloud Drive which I use sparingly, but Dropbox is a service I trust. I hope it continues in that manner and they don't destroy their reputation with a woebegone "pivot to AI".
Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck.
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?
Good correction, thanks. For completeness, that’s dividends on stocks, but not dividends on bonds, which are treated like interest.
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.
Correct. That's part of the tax efficiency, the whole point for some investors.
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.
If you look at all the tech companies doing buybacks, usually the shares created for employee RSUs matches or exceeds the shares retired from buybacks.
Not in all cases, but many
Which is why GAAP earnings matter and not free cash flow
Let's say we own a company with 10 shares, I own one share, you own 4, and 5 are owned by others. Each share is worth $100 (to make it simple).
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.
> If it’s gone forever, then… why? They just bought something and burnt it? Isnt that like a waste of resources?
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%.
Unfortunately this is the case when a company is beholden to investors. Investors aren't getting into the business of "making a steady stream of money without outsized growth" unless you are Warren Buffett.
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).
I don't necessarily think that these companies have much room for market cap growth but it is definitely interesting that right at this moment the value of local has gone way up due to Claude Code (plus Cowork and competitors). I suspect that will change in the next several months but I know people who are actively switching from Google Docs to Office because of these tools.
I think the analog is the actions around the storage.
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.
I remember when DBX IPOed and there were a large number of HNers who said proudly they were going to buy the stock and sit on it.. I was always concerned about where Dropbox (and Box.com) goes from here? Network storage always seemed more like a feature than a company, a different flavor of photo storage like Flickr. Didn't Google try and buy them initially?
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.
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"
It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.
I don't see the need to become bloated like slack and a one size fits all application. They do a great job with the product they have. Is there anything wrong with just being what you are? Why does the lack of a second act need to be a bad thing if your first product is great and still extremely valuable?
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.
Teams being free doesn't make teams good. Just like Google Drive and OneDrive being packaged in for cheap doesn't make them good. It is clear why they are lower value.
And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of enterprise execution.
(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.)
Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.
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.
Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service.
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.)
Another issue: Paper was tied to your Dropbox account.
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.
> They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft
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.
> 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.
Dropbox has deep integration ecosystems, runs your company's data, I think its a no-brainer for it to become the agentic memory for your company if done right with it syncing data across all company services.
> 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).
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?
They probably have to prove to me nobody can read my files besides me & the NSA (no “our 134 advertising partners …”)
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
The typical answer when people ask why Dropbox doesn't have a cheap low tier is that the more expensive plans are more likely to be underused, and therefore more profitable than a 100GB plan that users constantly max out.
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.
A business that can bring in a steady $2.5B a year doesn't seem like a bad business to me, so long as they can turn that into a profit. I think there ought to be a recognized place in the ecosystem for this sort of thing, and for me their independence from the gigacorps is a major feature.
I'm really not sure what Dropbox could even do other than have gone full swing towards a serious pivot or a new expansion into a new domain, but if they were going to do that they should have done that some years ago, if their current CEO stepping down alarms some of their existing customers, it might not end well.
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.
Problem is most consumers and businesses would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each. The former is cheaper and often is easier to cross-integrate - I'd rather just use AWS or GCP storage options than ever touch drop box
I mean yeah, who would rather spend time at their job helping other users figure out how to include the right add-in for Dropbox to work with their various apps vs how Office integrates with OneDrive or Google Mail, Sheets, et al. integrates with Drive? Thus adding another layer of software to manage updates, etc. At some point, there is an opportunity cost to using siloed products, especially for something that's become relatively commoditized like cloud storage.
> would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each
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.
Throw our hands up and go "wow, never saw that coming!"
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.
> acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering
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.
only a hyper capitalist would think $2.5B/year is "flat growth". maybe instead of paying out shareholders, short term gains. maybe invest in their workforce or company itself?
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.
> 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)
I mean sure, but marginally better/more profitable file storage isn’t any of that, and artificially juicing the share value doesn’t actually make any difference to the real economy it just makes some people who like gambling on made up numbers happier for a bit.
The point is that we should be directing our energy in a direction that’s net useful for human kind which should translate into growth. Dropbox is not one of those because there are many viable alternatives.
Exponential growth can’t last forever, and I do worry about what will happen when the gravy train stops. Maybe we can figure out interstellar travel before it does so the limiting factor becomes “the galaxy” rather than “our planet”.
> In the aftermath of World War I, birth rates in the United States and many European countries fell below replacement level. This prompted concern about population decline.[8] The recovery of the birth rate in most Western countries around 1940 that produced the "baby boom", with annual growth rates in the 1.0 – 1.5% range, and which peaked during the period 1962–1968 at 2.1% per year,[13] temporarily dispelled prior concerns about population decline, and the world was once again fearful of overpopulation. After 1968, the global population growth rate started a long decline. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has reported that in the year 2023 it had dropped to about 0.9%,[13] less than half of its peak between 1962 and 1968. Although still growing, the UN predicts that global population will level out around 2084,[81] and some sources predict the start of a decline before then.
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.
Well, they were directly asked what they meant and replied with a link to a giant Wikipedia article. If they had a more specific point to make, they're being weirdly cagey about it.
As long as everybody is nationalist (not to say racist) and keeps borders closed to protect the homeland, those differences matter. Realizing that one thing people get worked up about (immigration) is a solution to the other thing they get worked up about (not enough kids!!1) would be a great insight.
Yes, but no one is really complaining about "not enough kids." They are complaining about not enough kids of their preferred skin tone. So they see immigration as an exacerbation.
I can't help but agree here. "Declining birth rate in the western world" just comes across as a dog-whistle to me. I guess I kind of only alluded to this myself with my response that they were being "weirdly cagey", and I wish I had been more direct like you were willing to, so thank you for this
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).
It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking. Organic customer churn and attrition means that you're just a few years away from irrelevance. If DBX wants to stay a stable tech company, it should figure out a way to go private.
Yeah but in a market where the current suppliers are satisfying demand, I feel like the churn just means your customers will go across the metaphorical street to the other guy, and you likewise have the opportunity to bring in someone from a competitor. So you still, of course, need to invest in marketing and retention, but as a means to maintain stability, not to grow forever. The cloud storage market feels pretty mature, so customers are going to be constantly shopping around for the best deal, or the best support contract, or whatever.
> It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking.
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.
A bank account (or a spread of bank accounts across different banks to stay under the FDIC insurance limit per-account) is way, way, way safer than a flat market cap publicly traded company -- and with the same or perhaps better rate of return. Stocks are "supposed" to give better rates of return than "flat", in exchange for the higher risk.
Perhaps think of the stock as a value stock, not a growth/momentum stock.
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.
> AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub?
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.
> all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions
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.
If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy):
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?
I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid.
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.
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 giving a shit.
No indicator of AI writing is going to last forever. We really shouldn't over index on the oldest indicator (which is liable to decay first). People are starting to say "delve" more in verbal conversations. This treadmill will keep moving. Unfortunately we have little choice but to keep up with it.
(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.)
> 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
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.
Hi Josh -- Drew here -- our escalations team should be reaching out shortly. (Losing phone, 2FA keys, etc. can be tricky but they should be able to work with you and hopefully verify enough to get you unblocked.)
Well done, Drew!! And congrats on building an amazing company. Hope you'll get some rest before embarking in whatever is next.
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.
It's the digital equivalent of your house burning down, your devices are inside it, and you never bothered to bring the 2FA codes you definitely wrote down to the bank.
Oh man, sorry to hear that. I had a secondary Dropbox account I used for a few small but important documents. At some point I somehow lost the 2FA factor, and I don't know how as I've managed to keep the 2FA for every other one of my services across multiple app/os/phone installs.
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.
Drew is clearly a very competent engineer who built an amazing product and company. He was the right person to build it from zero all the way to an IPO, but wasn't the right person to keep scaling it. Dropbox's product vision in the last 10 years was lacking to say the least. Their latest innovative product "Dash" is another flop, like Dropbox Password, Paper, and many others.
As tired as I am of the lack of improvement in Dropbox and the most of my nag-mails being warnings about my inactive Dropbox storage reaching "dangerous lows", I can't help be frustrated at how much the equivalent virtual drives from Apple and Microsoft suck, even today.
Dropbox was always a feature in search of a product.
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.
Drew was the original inspiration for me to get into startups. He was a few years ahead of me at MIT and did MIT's Battlecode competition as well. He introduced me to Hacker News, Paul Graham's writing, YC, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. What he built with Dropbox was the first proof point of the YC model. I'm tremendously appreciative of what he's done for the next generation of enterepreneurs.
A few years ago Dropbox just stopped working for the basic thing it is supposed to do -- let me access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. Since then I have not stopped using/paying, but i have stopped counting on it and I have stopped adding new files to it, sharing files with it, etc.
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.
It’s funny that you think Dropbox is supposed to let you access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. I still think of Dropbox as a file synchronization tool, so taking up tons of local drive space is an expected behavior. It goes to show that people think of Dropbox in different ways.
I had the opportunity to live with Drew back in 2006 when he, I, and another pair of YC founders Adam and Matt were living together and hacking away at our own startups in Cambridge. I remember Drew being a hard worker, humble, and a genuinely nice guy. It's probably self indulgent to claim that we all inspired him to eventually shift gears to Dropbox and apply to YC - but what a path it's been for him! I've always felt inspired by his meteoric innovation in cloud storage - Dropbox paved the way for all our modern cloud storage systems. We've fallen out of touch over the years, but I wish him well on whatever comes next.
Kudos to @DHouston and co. for starting and keeping the company going.
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, ..." ;-) ;-)
I really hope the next person in charge gives up on business deals and aims for more personal updates. I store all my photos on Dropbox. The fact that they don’t a have a good way to manage it is still painful
I too store all my photos on Dropbox. I used Hazel on macOS to move them into YYYY/YYYY-MM folders. I now use a bash script to do similar. This organization system has been rock solid for me for over a decade. I honestly don't want more than that. I dislike the obfuscation so many photo storage solutions use. I want my files and my folders.
When Dropbox first came out I loved the simplicity of it for years. That rock solid little icon in my system tray that never bothered me, just reliably synced my files. It was excellent.
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.
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!
I've used for dropbox for the last 13+ years, was an early customer, and absolutely love the core product.
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.
I always thought it was a shame that Dropbox never had a tier between its free tier which is not usable and its first paid tier. I would've gladly paid around $3, $5 for a few tens of Gigs of storage, but the almost $10 per month is too much. Then Apple iCloud came and filled that gap beautifully. So I give them my money.
I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.
Exactly my thoughts too. I abandoned Dropbox because there was no upgrade path from free to low-paid-tier. $10 a month is not cheap. Heck, I pay less than that for Amazon prime and that offers a lot more value. I don’t need 2TB of cloud storage - I need something like 100GB.
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.
In these days of concerns over digital sovereignty, I cannot help but wonder if they would be best served by moving to a privacy-protective European state, e.g., Germany or Switzerland (not EU but tends to align with EU regs, e.g., GDPR) and doubling down as a privacy protection service (to the extent permitted by law).
They had a terrific product that worked well in ~2013, but they haven't innovated since then (TBH, not sure what "innovation" means in the file-sync space.) Although Y-o-Y revenue is mostly flat, I'm a little surprised that they still brought in $630M the last quarter, and that they still have 2,000 employees. Looking at what Dropbox does, I would have guesstimated they were a 250-person company.
All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.
I was lucky enough to work at Dropbox for a bit. Awesome engineering culture and such good people. Got to even grab a beer and rip karaoke with Drew. Thanks for creating such an awesome working environment Drew. I cannot say thank you enough for those memories or that experience. By far the best CEO and leader I've seen.
Rsync for my mum, rsync for my sister, rsync for my lawyer, my teacher, my plumber, rsync for people who just want a folder with an icon that says it's working.
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
The agent, sync engine, file storage (and custom hardware for it), ACL system, file previews, etc, are all highly complex projects in their own rights that Dropbox actively works on and maintains.
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 version control much earlier.
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).
It's mobile devices not having user-facing files as first-class citizens. The mobile era started just as Dropbox started to solve a computer era problem. Bad timing.
I'd argue Dropbox became as big as they are thanks to mobile taking off.
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.
So it's not just me. I'm glad, I feel weird that I have to save links to every Google doc and every internal confluence page because there's no proper search across these.
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.
Is this still the case? I have a "Files" app on my iPhone that shows me files and folders stored on my device, I can save/load files from most apps (that have a concept of files) and it's even integrated with iCloud so when I save a file to my phone's Downloads, I can access it from my Mac (and vice-versa).
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.
Android literally has the Linux file system, although without root only the "home" directory is accessible. But within there is a Downloads folder, Documents folder, and all the other folders you'd expect from a home directory
With root you have access to the entire linux-style system directory
Yep, the product was so much better when it was minimal and focused on doing one specific thing well. I really miss what it used to be... I hate the current Dropbox and Google Drive and OneDrive are also terrible alternatives.
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.
Thanks, I didn't even know this existed. It reminds me of how Reddit made the entire experience hostile unless you know to use old.reddit.com instead of the default URL.
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.
It would be a shame to see Dropbox decline. They're the last big player to maintain a Linux sync client that just works reliably. I've tried to host Nextcloud and tried Syncthing as well, but Dropbox has always worked for when I just want the problem solved without worrying about something going down.
I have been one of the very early users. Maybe from the first weeks (if not days). It used to be such a good app and service. So good that I used to ask my friends why they didn't already use it. That was a few many years ago; at best. Since then, Dropbox has steadily been going downhill and with intent, at least for a consumer. Quite a few folks are ditching its paid plan (including me), just using its free tier (to tiny tasks like notes sync etc) and moving the bulk of their data storage elsewhere (like I did - reluctantly to object storage providers via many FOSS CLI tools; would have loved to keep paying for the old Dropbox). Hostile pricing was not the only concern; hostile UX, an insanely bloated app, and breaking features (because sure, those are not bugs) galore.
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).
I walked into the Mint one night because I liked to grab a bad cocktail and some good karaoke.. some guy got on stage and belted out a beautiful version of Rocket Man. I looked closed and it was Drew.
Used to be a (paid) dropbox customer for many years because frankly nothing beat dropbox on stability and performance for a long time.
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.
Definitely. Not to mention that their major investor, Sequoia, has been war profiteering and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has been publicly islamophobic and a huge supporter of the genocide and occupation in Palestine.
I always really liked Dropbox, but after a while it just made more sense to consolidate and start using Proton Drive. Do I miss Dropbox? Sure, but I don't miss the extra payment.
I just checked my email and saw that my earliest use of Dropbox was with its 3rd alpha for Linux in August 2008. That is an awfully long time to be using a service. I remember how exciting it was when they released an Android client for my HTC Incredible to run
georgel | a day ago
pikseladam | a day ago
ignoramous | a day ago
from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...simoncion | 11 hours ago
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.
sillysaurusx | a day ago
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.
jeffbee | a day ago
You have described Google Drive.
sillysaurusx | a day ago
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.
georgel | 23 hours ago
tyler71 | 23 hours ago
sillysaurusx | 23 hours ago
tyler71 | 21 hours ago
sillysaurusx | 18 hours ago
al_borland | 23 hours ago
Is this the video you're thinking of?
https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...
sillysaurusx | 23 hours ago
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!
layer8 | 23 hours ago
That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).
sillysaurusx | 23 hours ago
layer8 | 23 hours ago
giancarlostoro | a day ago
ADent | 23 hours ago
Then they crippled the free plan and Apple and MS started pushing their services hard. And Dropbox seemed less ubiquitous after that.
giancarlostoro | 23 hours ago
1970-01-01 | a day ago
>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.
urams | 23 hours ago
1970-01-01 | 22 hours ago
urams | 20 hours ago
arealaccount | a day ago
Or maybe I just click those headlines at a higher rate..
brittlepeanut | a day ago
These days, it's mostly just posting addicts having a wank at each other, and arguing using that distinct "I am not technically making a personal argument" style.
supern0va | 23 hours ago
It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations, particularly for general tech.
ricardobayes | 23 hours ago
jsbisviewtiful | 23 hours ago
Yeah I used to learn so much across quite a few forums. Most of those communities are dead, dying, filled with bots or filled with people making shit up/just posting lousy jokes now. A lot of folks have jumped to Discord, which frankly, isn't for me, so feeling a bit lost on where to surf these days
malfist | 23 hours ago
nathanmills | 23 hours ago
s_dev | 8 hours ago
nathanmills | 25 minutes ago
antinomicus | 23 hours ago
CSMastermind | 20 hours ago
gigatree | a day ago
jedberg | a day ago
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.
sillysaurusx | a day ago
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.)
genxy | a day ago
dghlsakjg | a day ago
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.
matsemann | 23 hours ago
Semaphor | 23 hours ago
TiredOfLife | 23 hours ago
matsemann | 22 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 22 hours ago
sillysaurusx | 23 hours ago
Still, copy-pasting a file should work. It's unclear what "copy" even does.
watermelon0 | a day ago
I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.
amluto | a day ago
mananaysiempre | 23 hours ago
cyanydeez | 22 hours ago
Ologn | a day ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830
tptacek | 23 hours ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
matsemann | 23 hours ago
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.
dingaling | 23 hours ago
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.
tptacek | 23 hours ago
jgon | 21 hours ago
tptacek | 20 hours ago
Paianni | 22 hours ago
mistersquid | 22 hours ago
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.
ToucanLoucan | 22 hours ago
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.
Aaargh20318 | 21 hours ago
You can find a laptop that is better in one aspect, but it will be worse in others.
0cf8612b2e1e | 21 hours ago
FergusArgyll | 23 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
Mistletoe | 23 hours ago
kristianc | 22 hours ago
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.
defen | 23 hours ago
jedberg | 23 hours ago
gigatree | 23 hours ago
dogleash | 23 hours ago
seydor | a day ago
bachmeier | a day ago
mv4 | a day ago
savrajsingh | a day ago
TwoNineA | a day ago
kenjackson | 23 hours ago
nine_k | 22 hours ago
kenjackson | 20 hours ago
kmeisthax | 3 hours ago
davidmurphy | 23 hours ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 23 hours ago
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
BorisMelnik | 23 hours ago
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.
phlogisticfugu | 18 hours ago
orochimaaru | 23 hours ago
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.
CamperBob2 | 22 hours ago
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.
aborsy | 22 hours ago
I have a subscription which I want to cancel but can’t because there are other users. Basic features require upgrading.
didip | 22 hours ago
largbae | 22 hours ago
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.
pbalau | 21 hours ago
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.
browningstreet | a day ago
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.
packetlost | a day ago
sssilver | a day ago
browningstreet | a day ago
For business purposes I didn't want to use iCloud. But it seems like it's iCloud & Dropbox then.
watermelon0 | 23 hours ago
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.
msh | 21 hours ago
seanhunter | 6 hours ago
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]
[1] https://rclone.org/
[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.
mmh0000 | 51 minutes ago
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
amluto | a day ago
dawnerd | 23 hours ago
amluto | 23 hours ago
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.
svara | 23 hours ago
bentt | 18 hours ago
jsmith99 | 23 hours ago
packetlost | 23 hours ago
ValentineC | 22 hours ago
OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Personal are two different backends. I'm guessing that you're using the "Business" version?
dpark | 18 hours ago
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/parable-python-goat-story-amb...
zipy124 | 21 hours ago
fireflash38 | 19 hours ago
Why are my files I created on my local device not on my device
trollbridge | 19 hours ago
I had to uncheck this box since I let my OneDrive (business) account bloat up to 2TB.
smilespray | 18 hours ago
Microsoft deliberately chose not to because keeping your files in the cloud is a barrier to easy switching.
fireflash38 | 7 hours ago
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?
pjmlp | 11 hours ago
Most laptops aren't having TB sized SSDs.
idatum | 23 hours ago
I even use rclone to sync photos to OneDrive I can then share with family/friends.
prepend | 25 minutes ago
1970-01-01 | a day ago
dghlsakjg | a day ago
dawnerd | 23 hours ago
matsemann | 23 hours ago
irishcoffee | 23 hours ago
browningstreet | a day ago
lostlogin | 23 hours ago
tibbydudeza | 21 hours ago
ThePowerOfFuet | 23 hours ago
1970-01-01 | 23 hours ago
Twirrim | 21 hours ago
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.
asdff | 20 hours ago
beoberha | 19 hours ago
stackghost | a day ago
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.
ajkjk | a day ago
stackghost | 23 hours ago
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.
ajkjk | 23 hours ago
(that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)
ajkjk | a day ago
(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)
layer8 | 23 hours ago
While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
ajkjk | 22 hours ago
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)
layer8 | 22 hours ago
computerdork | 13 hours ago
ajkjk | an hour ago
caconym_ | 23 hours ago
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.
rincebrain | 23 hours ago
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.
caconym_ | 23 hours ago
hiq | 20 hours ago
gonzalohm | 20 hours ago
caconym_ | 3 hours ago
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.
gonzalohm | 2 hours ago
caconym_ | 2 hours ago
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.
debo_ | 23 hours ago
Good pun!
browningstreet | 3 hours ago
eikenberry | 23 hours ago
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.
browningstreet | 3 hours ago
genxy | 23 hours ago
jamwt | 22 hours ago
If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.
pianoben | 20 hours ago
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 :) )
sidcool | a day ago
TheOtherHobbes | 23 hours ago
wwweston | a day ago
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.
postalcoder | a day ago
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.
microtonal | a day ago
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.
plasticsoprano | 23 hours ago
insanitybit | 16 hours ago
runtime_terror | 15 hours ago
insanitybit | 2 hours ago
runtime_terror | 2 hours ago
rcbdev | 15 hours ago
al_borland | 23 hours ago
postalcoder | 23 hours ago
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.
al_borland | 12 hours ago
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.
postalcoder | 5 hours ago
al_borland | 3 hours ago
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.
MiddleEndian | 23 hours ago
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.
postalcoder | 23 hours ago
MiddleEndian | 23 hours ago
skydhash | 23 hours ago
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.
hoherd | an hour ago
throwaway219450 | 6 hours ago
hylaride | a day ago
I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.
jeffbee | a day ago
varun_ch | 21 hours ago
DoctorDabadedoo | 7 hours ago
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.
matsemann | 23 hours ago
hylaride | 21 hours ago
vednig | a day ago
ivraatiems | a day ago
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.
ecommerceguy | a day ago
njt | a day ago
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.
aeyes | 23 hours ago
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?
mystifyingpoi | 23 hours ago
MaxL93 | 18 hours ago
restruxt | 22 hours ago
When a company like Dropbox prioritizes user account growth over usability, that company debases itself and deserves to lose.
afro88 | 11 hours ago
krashidov | a day ago
arbirk | a day ago
unpopularopp | a day ago
zengid | a day ago
farcaster | 23 hours ago
jabedude | 23 hours ago
toephu2 | 23 hours ago
layer8 | 23 hours ago
jabedude | 22 hours ago
kasperset | 23 hours ago
layer8 | 23 hours ago
jaredcwhite | 23 hours ago
toephu2 | 23 hours ago
Jobs was ultimately right in the end.
convenwis | 23 hours ago
layer8 | 23 hours ago
thm | 23 hours ago
bhouston | 23 hours ago
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.
Ekaros | 23 hours ago
runako | 22 hours ago
jjallen | 21 hours ago
wombatpm | 20 hours ago
robotresearcher | 20 hours ago
tacticalturtle | 14 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_dividend
robotresearcher | 14 hours ago
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.
runako | 15 hours ago
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.
AznHisoka | 21 hours ago
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…
robotresearcher | 20 hours ago
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.
adam_arthur | 20 hours ago
Not in all cases, but many
Which is why GAAP earnings matter and not free cash flow
bombcar | 19 hours ago
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.
hluska | 18 hours ago
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%.
giwook | 20 hours ago
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).
philipallstar | 20 hours ago
giwook | 5 hours ago
whimsicalism | 19 hours ago
giwook | 5 hours ago
convenwis | 23 hours ago
runako | 23 hours ago
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.
genxy | 22 hours ago
bhouston | 21 hours ago
It is similar to saying that most websites are just cloud-hosted SQL rebranded.
dzonga | 20 hours ago
you can build object storage on FoundationDB + other awesome bespoke stuff.
genxy | 19 hours ago
phyzome | 22 hours ago
iririririr | 21 hours ago
jmyeet | 22 hours ago
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.
my2c | 22 hours ago
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.
fist | 21 hours ago
Box is about $115 million income.
bhouston | 21 hours ago
I was unclear and I apologize.
fist | 20 hours ago
bhouston | 16 hours ago
"Gross income is that same revenue minus the direct costs of producing the goods or services (such as materials and direct labor)."
light_triad | 21 hours ago
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"
nashadelic | 21 hours ago
light_triad | 21 hours ago
ktallett | 20 hours ago
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.
bombcar | 19 hours ago
ktallett | 12 hours ago
price | 20 hours ago
(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.)
abhiyerra | 19 hours ago
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.
price | 19 hours ago
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.)
iamcalledrob | 6 hours ago
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.
afavour | 20 hours ago
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.
tmp10423288442 | 19 hours ago
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.
WoodenChair | 21 hours ago
Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.
nashadelic | 21 hours ago
bachmeier | 21 hours ago
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?
Barbing | 20 hours ago
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
philipallstar | 20 hours ago
SL61 | 19 hours ago
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.
phlakaton | 21 hours ago
giancarlostoro | 21 hours ago
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.
stringfood | 21 hours ago
hellisothers | 20 hours ago
dessimus | 20 hours ago
thewebguyd | 19 hours ago
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.
p2detar | 6 hours ago
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/1iwfgzn/with_the...
thewebguyd | 2 hours ago
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.
bachmeier | 19 hours ago
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.
babypuncher | 21 hours ago
mrhottakes | 3 hours ago
xyst | 21 hours ago
just a thought for you people.
guhcampos | 21 hours ago
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.
jagraff | 20 hours ago
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)
jon-wood | 20 hours ago
mplewis | 20 hours ago
whiplash451 | 20 hours ago
saghm | 20 hours ago
throwaway894345 | 20 hours ago
idiotsecant | 20 hours ago
mplewis | 20 hours ago
idiotsecant | 20 hours ago
saghm | 20 hours ago
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.
hcurtiss | 19 hours ago
saghm | 17 hours ago
teiferer | 12 hours ago
hackyhacky | 6 hours ago
saghm | 3 hours ago
asdff | 20 hours ago
throwaway894345 | 20 hours ago
mrhottakes | 3 hours ago
RigelKentaurus | 20 hours ago
brendoelfrendo | 19 hours ago
devsda | 14 hours ago
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.
blks | 19 hours ago
MikeTheGreat | 19 hours ago
For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?
BoorishBears | 19 hours ago
jacobgkau | 19 hours ago
dchevell | 19 hours ago
reverius42 | 19 hours ago
reverius42 | 19 hours ago
blks | 6 hours ago
amelius | 20 hours ago
zymhan | 20 hours ago
tjpnz | 17 hours ago
mandeepj | 20 hours ago
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.
lancewiggs | 20 hours ago
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.
sfjailbird | 20 hours ago
So Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
jcheng | 19 hours ago
thewebguyd | 20 hours ago
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.
poglet | 19 hours ago
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.
joshmn | 23 hours ago
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?
swyx | 23 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | 22 hours ago
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.
maxbond | 22 hours ago
Prior to 2013 or after? Maybe they merged ban lists with PayPal (who owns them).
dcposch | 21 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | 4 hours ago
All three of those events were separated by at least a year each long after PayPal bought Venmo.
phlogisticfugu | 18 hours ago
which probably triggered a SAR
which companies are legally forbidden from disclosing https://www.finra.org/arbitration-mediation/rules-case-resou...
dhouston | 21 hours ago
yesitcan | 21 hours ago
OsrsNeedsf2P | 21 hours ago
Sohcahtoa82 | 20 hours ago
It was two hypens --
nikkwong | 21 hours ago
maxbond | 21 hours ago
Sohcahtoa82 | 20 hours ago
It was two hyphens --
alexfoo | 19 hours ago
(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.)
Sohcahtoa82 | 20 hours ago
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.
dhouston | 22 hours ago
ra0x3 | 21 hours ago
justmarc | 20 hours ago
simonebrunozzi | 10 hours ago
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.
tibbydudeza | 21 hours ago
joshmn | 20 hours ago
bmurphy1976 | 21 hours ago
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.
s_dev | 21 hours ago
This is wild phrasing.
tinyhouse | 23 hours ago
kmfrk | 23 hours ago
baggachipz | 22 hours ago
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox
cmiles8 | 22 hours ago
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.
sskates | 22 hours ago
resters | 21 hours ago
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.
kccqzy | 20 hours ago
solfox | 21 hours ago
aanet | 21 hours ago
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
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
valdagger | 21 hours ago
HaloZero | 21 hours ago
mcgrath_sh | 21 hours ago
brandon272 | 21 hours ago
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!
micromacrofoot | 21 hours ago
VirusNewbie | 21 hours ago
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.
rkunal | 21 hours ago
Drew launched a great new product, fine tuned it to be one of most loved and then made profitable company. Respect
racl101 | 20 hours ago
I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.
Daneel_ | 7 hours ago
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.
PeterWhittaker | 20 hours ago
Just musing....
varenc | 20 hours ago
RigelKentaurus | 20 hours ago
All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.
dzonga | 20 hours ago
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
jlarks32 | 20 hours ago
Obscurity4340 | 10 hours ago
Do they want things like this to supplement and thus complement their unencrypted puic default?
Jumptadel | 19 hours ago
tonymet | 19 hours ago
inetknght | 18 hours ago
tonymet | 17 hours ago
inetknght | 17 hours ago
tonymet | 14 hours ago
malux85 | 17 hours ago
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
legostormtroopr | 16 hours ago
plun9 | 17 hours ago
insanitybit | 16 hours ago
tonymet | 14 hours ago
insanitybit | 2 hours ago
zhyder | 17 hours ago
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.
dexwiz | 17 hours ago
pishpash | 16 hours ago
makeitdouble | 15 hours ago
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.
farfatched | 14 hours ago
pjmlp | 11 hours ago
carlmr | 11 hours ago
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.
hdgvhicv | 8 hours ago
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.
carlmr | 6 hours ago
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.
sbarre | 6 hours ago
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.
306bobby | 4 hours ago
With root you have access to the entire linux-style system directory
runtime_terror | 15 hours ago
I also found Dropbox just started take on more and more bloat in what seems an obvious attempt to compete with Box and others.
diogenescynic | 13 hours ago
rkagerer | 12 hours ago
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.
sandyarmstrong | 6 hours ago
diogenescynic | 3 hours ago
softwaredoug | 6 hours ago
prepend | 27 minutes ago
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.
onesingleblast | 17 hours ago
tsunamifury | 17 hours ago
They’ve dragged their feet on evolving and offer nothing new in almost a decade.
Liftyee | 16 hours ago
Open to recommendations...
crossroadsguy | 16 hours ago
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).
Itoldmyselfso | 11 hours ago
tuananh | 15 hours ago
it's very good + super fast.
klik99 | 14 hours ago
sporkland | 12 hours ago
Guy has pipes.
Oh his software was pretty good too.
hieKVj2ECC | 11 hours ago
ulfw | 10 hours ago
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.
DuzAwe | 10 hours ago
simonebrunozzi | 10 hours ago
pbiggar | 6 hours ago
olliebrkr | 9 hours ago
sylens | 7 hours ago
alexnewman | 7 hours ago
isodev | 6 hours ago