Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/26/dropbox-ceo-drew-houston-ashraf-alkarmi.html

by aghuang • 2 months ago

375 405 2 months ago

cnbc.com

https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/dropbox-leadership-u...

https://twitter.com/drewhouston/status/2059275240065425474?s...

georgel2• 2 months ago

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

pikseladam• 2 months ago

i didn't expect to laugh when i enter news today :)

ignoramous• 2 months ago

Daniel Gackle thinks BrandonM's is most probably the most misunderstood comment in news.yc history.

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

  Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.

  I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

  When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

  The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

  * described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

sillysaurusx8• 2 months ago

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.

jeffbee2• 2 months ago

right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item

You have described Google Drive.

tyler712• 2 months ago

pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.

al_borland4• 2 months ago

It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.

Is this the video you're thinking of?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...

layer87• 2 months ago

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).

giancarlostoro3• 2 months ago

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.

ADent• 2 months ago

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

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

1970-01-014• 2 months ago

It was quite a stupid and expensive ride, but they were vindicated, especially on point 3:

Our business is in a stronger position than it's been in years
What’s energized me most since joining Dropbox is the connection people have with our brand
It gives me a lot of confidence in what’s ahead for Dropbox

All corporate fluff, no actual content.

urams2• 2 months ago

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?

arealaccount• 2 months ago

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..

CSMastermind• 2 months ago

Wow cool to see.

gigatree2• 2 months ago

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

jedberg2• 2 months ago

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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.

sillysaurusx8• 2 months ago

Most people I know e-mail files to themselves

It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)

Ologn• 2 months ago

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)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830

tptacek3• 2 months ago

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.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

defen• 2 months ago

If OP hadn't written his reply to 'dhouston 19 years ago I for sure would have flagged it as LLM-generated.

dogleash• 2 months ago

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.

seydor• 2 months ago

Or maybe he did

bachmeier3• 2 months ago

The upcoming Claude Brandon release will make Dropbox obsolete.

mv4• 2 months ago

Only took 19 years!

savrajsingh• 2 months ago

"...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"

TwoNineA• 2 months ago

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.

kenjackson2• 2 months ago

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...

nine_k• 2 months ago

In 1993 that was true. In 1998 it was starkly different, due to the advent of DOM, and JavaScript to manipulate it.

kmeisthax• 2 months ago

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.

davidmurphy• 2 months ago

or, run your own Hotline server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

Don't forget CVS

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• 2 months ago

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.

phlogisticfugu2• 2 months ago

it was a moment in time, but at a past company I implemented svn on top of Dropbox for the team to share code remotely. and it worked just fine

orochimaaru• 2 months ago

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.

CamperBob2• 2 months ago

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.

aborsy• 2 months ago

It has become true now though!

I have a subscription which I want to cancel but can’t because there are other users. Basic features require upgrading.

didip• 2 months ago

Finally realized what Steve Jobs said was true: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

largbae• 2 months ago

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.

pbalau• 2 months ago

Story time.

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.

browningstreet5• 2 months ago

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.

packetlost2• 2 months ago

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

sssilver• 2 months ago

What's the issue with iCloud?

amluto3• 2 months ago

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

jsmith99• 2 months ago

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

idatum• 2 months ago

But you can just use any cloud blob storage provider (including the big ones) along with the rclone utility. rclone supports many.

I even use rclone to sync photos to OneDrive I can then share with family/friends.

prepend2• 2 months ago

I find icloud best as long as everything is apple.

1970-01-014• 2 months ago

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

dghlsakjg2• 2 months ago

Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.

browningstreet5• 2 months ago

I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 months ago

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

stackghost2• 2 months 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.

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.

ajkjk5• 2 months ago

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.

ajkjk5• 2 months ago

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)

layer87• 2 months 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.

caconym_4• 2 months ago

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.

rincebrain• 2 months ago

How have you found syncthing's scaling?

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.

gonzalohm2• 2 months ago

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)

debo_• 2 months ago

With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated

Good pun!

browningstreet5• 2 months ago

:-)

eikenberry• 2 months ago

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it [..]

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.

browningstreet5• 2 months ago

B2 isn't really great as an active file store, it's better as cold storage.

genxy4• 2 months ago

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?

jamwt• 2 months ago

It's a surprisingly tricky problem. I know all too well.

If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.

pianoben• 2 months ago

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 :) )

DANmode• 2 months ago

Spideroak,

pCloud,

Resilio Sync.

May be worth reviewing.

sidcool• 2 months ago

Is he the next Member of Technical staff at Anthropic?

TheOtherHobbes• 2 months ago

No, that's Pope Leo.

wwweston• 2 months ago

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.

postalcoder5• 2 months ago

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.

microtonal• 2 months ago

All I care about is packrat and good syncing.

For me that and end-to-end encryption (I know it's supported for teams now).

Instead they just added more annoyances over time. Every time I logged into the web interface, I would get stupid upselling advertisements (maybe don't badger your paying users with that nonsense)? I replaced the official client by Maestral years ago, because they switched to embedding a web 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• 2 months ago

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.

rcbdev• 2 months ago

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.

al_borland4• 2 months ago

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.

postalcoder5• 2 months ago

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.

MiddleEndian2• 2 months ago

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.

postalcoder5• 2 months ago

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.

skydhash2• 2 months ago

All I care about is packrat and good syncing.

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• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway219450• 2 months ago

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.

hylaride2• 2 months ago

Dropbox was an excellent service back in the day. Then they re-wrote their desktop apps (I think in python?) and it never synced cleanly after that.

I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.

jeffbee2• 2 months ago

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.

varun_ch• 2 months ago

TIL the creator of Python worked at Dropbox for 6 years.

DoctorDabadedoo• 2 months ago

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.

matsemann5• 2 months ago

It was python from the start ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892 ), but maybe the 2to3 migration, or just a general rewrite you're thinking of?

hylaride2• 2 months ago

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.

vednig• 2 months ago

I wish Drew all the best for his journey, he built the market for many generations to come.

ivraatiems• 2 months ago

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.

ecommerceguy• 2 months ago

call me crazy im still using a 100gb box account from when i bought an hp touchpad. that thing was so cool.

njt• 2 months ago

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.

aeyes• 2 months ago

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

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

Or did you share a folder?

mystifyingpoi• 2 months ago

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.

MaxL93• 2 months ago

It's maddening that they force you to tweak with the URLs just so you can feed people a link that works for them though

restruxt• 2 months ago

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.

afro88• 2 months ago

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

krashidov• 2 months ago

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.

arbirk• 2 months ago

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.

unpopularopp• 2 months ago

I wish they had a plan between free and 120€/year. I don't need 2TB storage but the free plan's 2GB is also nothing

zengid• 2 months ago

Drew was CEO for almost 20 years right? that's a heck of a run!

farcaster• 2 months ago

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.

jabedude2• 2 months ago

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?

toephu22• 2 months ago

Because there is PR speak, and then there is reality.

layer87• 2 months ago

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.

jabedude2• 2 months ago

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

kasperset• 2 months ago

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.

layer87• 2 months ago

The one useful feature it still lacks is E2EE for non-team accounts. Though you can emulate that with third-party tools.

jaredcwhite• 2 months ago

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".

toephu22• 2 months ago

As Steve Jobs famously told Drew Houston..."you have a feature, not a product."

Jobs was ultimately right in the end.

convenwis2• 2 months ago

He was right in a sense but $6b market cap is nothing to sneeze at.

layer87• 2 months ago

I wouldn’t have a Dropbox subscription if it was merely a feature attached to some product. I have it because it’s an independent service.

thm• 2 months ago

So, Web 2.0 is finally over now?

bhouston4• 2 months ago

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?

I honestly do not know where to go.

Ekaros• 2 months ago

How about a strange outdated idea. Stay where you are and start paying dividends? Well, somehow that is now unacceptable idea.

runako3• 2 months ago

DropBox has been retiring shares fairly consistently. This is generally used as an alternative to dividends, and is done primarily for tax efficiency.

giwook3• 2 months ago

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).

convenwis2• 2 months ago

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.

runako3• 2 months ago

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.

genxy4• 2 months ago

iCloud is just rebadged GCS.

bhouston4• 2 months ago

GCS and AWS are not competitors with iCloud, DropBox, Box, Drive, OneDrive since they are just raw APIs and storage and not a user facing product.

It is similar to saying that most websites are just cloud-hosted SQL rebranded.

dzonga2• 2 months ago

iCloud actually runs on FoundationDB - probably one of most underrated DB engines out there.

you can build object storage on FoundationDB + other awesome bespoke stuff.

phyzome• 2 months ago

Why is it bad that a company continues to provide services for customers and income for employees?

iririririr• 2 months ago

they commited the worst crime of all time! not using Ai to backup your files!

jmyeet• 2 months ago

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.

my2c• 2 months ago

I think it is the market, not the leadership.

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.

fist2• 2 months ago

Whoa, Dropbox yearly income is about $500 million per year. $2.5 billion income on a $6 billion market cap would be a much better deal.

Box is about $115 million income.

bhouston4• 2 months ago

I meant "gross income", which is revenue. Not "net income", which is profit.

I was unclear and I apologize.

light_triad2• 2 months ago

It was both the market and the leadership.

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"

nashadelic2• 2 months ago

Dropbox is a $6B product, just no second act

WoodenChair• 2 months ago

“ It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions…”

Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.

nashadelic2• 2 months ago

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.

bachmeier3• 2 months ago

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?

Barbing• 2 months ago

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

SL61• 2 months ago

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.

phlakaton• 2 months ago

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.

giancarlostoro3• 2 months ago

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.

stringfood• 2 months ago

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

bachmeier3• 2 months ago

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.

babypuncher• 2 months ago

Are they profitable? Is there any reason they can't be happy just turning a regular profit? This "growth at all costs" mindset feels toxic.

mrhottakes2• 2 months ago

That mindset is the organizing principle for most of the modern world. Let's see how that works out!

xyst• 2 months ago

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?

just a thought for you people.

guhcampos• 2 months ago

Is that bad though?

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• 2 months ago

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)

throwaway8943453• 2 months ago

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”.

RigelKentaurus2• 2 months ago

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.

blks2• 2 months ago

In the current economic system, if capital is not growing, it’s reducing.

amelius• 2 months ago

I cannot find the relevant comment right now, but I think HN always knew that the concept behind Dropbox wasn't going to fly ...

zymhan• 2 months ago

Surely you're not referring to this prediction that was so bad, it's now a meme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

mandeepj• 2 months ago

I honestly do not know where to go.

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• 2 months ago

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.

sfjailbird• 2 months ago

the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

So Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

jcheng• 2 months ago

Poor Drew, if only he’d taken Steve’s advice! /s

thewebguyd3• 2 months ago

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.

poglet• 2 months ago

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.

joshmn2• 2 months ago

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?

swyx2• 2 months ago

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

SV_BubbleTime2• 2 months ago

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.

Fuck. Big. Tech.

dhouston2• 2 months ago

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.

dhouston2• 2 months ago

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.)

ra0x3• 2 months ago

Thanks for helping!

justmarc• 2 months ago

Awesome move to help a simple user in need. hats off.

simonebrunozzi2• 2 months ago

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.

tibbydudeza2• 2 months ago

This must be one hell of an edge case - glad to see you are "free" :).

joshmn2• 2 months ago

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.

bmurphy1976• 2 months ago

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.

I hope you have a better outcome than I did.

s_dev• 2 months ago

I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me

This is wild phrasing.

jfyi• 2 months ago

I actually don't think you are commenting about the casualness, but the usage of the term "stole". Correct me if I'm wrong.

I can say I view my own time in jail very transactionally and I have run into many people that don't understand that. They expect a sob story about how you were innocent, or how you turned your life around.

I don't think I'd ever say my life was "stolen" from me, but it definitely feels that way in the moment. Having a bunch of armed people come and throw you in a cage certainly leaves you with a new perspective to process.

tinyhouse• 2 months ago

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.

kmfrk• 2 months ago

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.

baggachipz• 2 months ago

Remember when Dropbox was a folder that just syncs? [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox

cmiles8• 2 months ago

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.

sskates• 2 months 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.

resters• 2 months ago

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.

kccqzy• 2 months ago

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.

solfox• 2 months ago

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.

aanet• 2 months ago

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, ..." ;-) ;-)

Trivial indeed /s

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

valdagger• 2 months ago

Fuckin finally

HaloZero• 2 months ago

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

mcgrath_sh• 2 months ago

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.

brandon272• 2 months ago

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.

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• 2 months ago

the curse of early success is getting a billion dollars to invest in your company only to discover that it's really hard to pay back a billion dollars

VirusNewbie• 2 months ago

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.

rkunal• 2 months ago

Ashraf seems like a great leader. I am not too excited about the focus on AI. Lets see where it goes.

Drew launched a great new product, fine tuned it to be one of most loved and then made profitable company. Respect

racl101• 2 months ago

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.

Daneel_• 2 months ago

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.

PeterWhittaker• 2 months ago

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).

Just musing....

varenc• 2 months ago

end of an era! Dropbox has now fully ship-of-theseus'd itself from my perspective. (which is impressive honestly given the time frame)

RigelKentaurus2• 2 months ago

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.

dzonga2• 2 months ago

my take dhouston should go be a CTO somewhere.

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• 2 months ago

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.

Obscurity4340• 2 months ago

What is Dropbox's attitude towards things like Cryptamator?

Do they want things like this to supplement and thus complement their unencrypted puic default?

Jumptadel• 2 months ago

This guy’s LinkedIn hid his undergrad and put up a 3 year Harvard Extension School management degree tells you all you need to know.

tonymet5• 2 months ago

what are they building?

inetknght3• 2 months ago

rsync for walled gardens

tonymet5• 2 months ago

that's actually a cool feature

malux85• 2 months ago

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

legostormtroopr• 2 months ago

Sounds like you "have a few qualms with this app" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

plun9• 2 months ago

Nothing

insanitybit5• 2 months ago

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.

tonymet5• 2 months ago

wasn't that all completed in 2006?

zhyder• 2 months ago

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).

Dropbox solved a problem of the 2010s.

dexwiz• 2 months ago

Files became an implementation detail.

pishpash• 2 months ago

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.

hulitu• 2 months ago

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

runtime_terror3• 2 months ago

I'm sure there's also some number of users (like myself) that don't like the idea of a large company having access to their unencrypted files.

I also found Dropbox just started take on more and more bloat in what seems an obvious attempt to compete with Box and others.

diogenescynic2• 2 months ago

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.

softwaredoug• 2 months ago

Seems like a cautionary tale of not ruthlessly reinventing yourself as market conditions change.

prepend2• 2 months ago

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.

onesingleblast• 2 months ago

Your Python client eats all my CPU. My CPU usage goes down from 75% to 5% when I close it.

tsunamifury• 2 months ago

How is this company still alive?

They’ve dragged their feet on evolving and offer nothing new in almost a decade.

Liftyee• 2 months ago

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.

Open to recommendations...

crossroadsguy• 2 months ago

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).

Itoldmyselfso• 2 months ago

What bugs have you found with Tresorit? Has worked great for my company so far.

tuananh• 2 months ago

if you're looking to get your data out of dropbox, rclone is godsend.

it's very good + super fast.

klik99• 2 months ago

He finally realized that you could just rsync

sporkland• 2 months ago

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.

Guy has pipes.

Oh his software was pretty good too.

hieKVj2ECC• 2 months ago

just here to say I love Dropbox since I ran Ubuntu long ago and Windows and Android. I am still on it and cant thank them enough

ulfw• 2 months ago

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.

DuzAwe• 2 months ago

I turned my back on Dropbox when they add a war criminal on the board. Dove headfirst into open source alts. Never really looked back.

simonebrunozzi2• 2 months ago

Are you talking about Condoleezza Rice ?

pbiggar• 2 months ago

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.

olliebrkr• 2 months ago

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.

sylens• 2 months ago

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

alexnewman• 2 months ago

Man people who owned stock and sold calls when it went up killed it.

isodev• 2 months ago

Oh I didn't know Dropox still exists.

khernandezrt• 2 months ago

Never heard of a single bad thing about Dropbox. Used them since i can remember. Never had issues.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

Related Stories