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- Hacker News
- Dropbox pulled the plug on so many good apps. They should have built the full office suite in the browser and eventually slapped an email service on it. As a competitor to Google Workspace, they would have a real chance. Storage as a Service is too little of a moat in the cloud age.by perks_12
- I used to use Dropbox at work and also personally.
Work didn’t like it as Dropbox was new/unknown and eventually banned us from using it. This was about 15 years ago and the only way to share files between colleagues was to manually upload a file to their shared drive (through a browser) and then ask your colleague to go download it.
Works Dropbox was replaced by Microsoft. My personal Dropbox was replaced by Google Drive, and then by iCloud.
Nice to know Dropbox is still make lots of cash really. They started it all.
by nugzbunny - Call me crazy, but I think we need more Dropboxes and fewer Metas or whatever.
Make a product that solves a sufficiently common problem, and make it extremely high quality. Want more growth? Find another problem to solve and launch a product in that space.
As for Steve Jobs and selling out, Apple bought FingerWorks. That's how they ended up with excellent, multi-touch touchpads while the rest of the computing world suffered. Make great products (or "features") and never sell out to soulless megacorps.
by snozolli - Bending Spoons must be watching Dropbox closely. Like the other companies that have been acquired by them, Dropbox has reached its final stage of stability.by telotortium
- > But a lesson from this story is twofold: when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it.
Not quite sure how the author reached that conclusion, considering – by their own calculations – Dropbox is profitable, rich on cash flow and worth at minimum 10x what Steve Jobs offered for it.
by paxys - I have a few qualms with this PE Target:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
by blitzar - Somewhat off-topic: When writing like this, explain your abbreviations and who the various people and companies are. PE Target? Price to Earnings Target, that makes no sense. Perhaps Physical Education, no, that's not right either. 10-K (might bold to assume that the reader knows what that is). Even smb (which should be SMB, even if it doesn't help) is probably not Small Message Block.
Think what you will of their writing and opinions, but one thing The Economist get right is that they don't assume you know what things are, it's spelled out at the first mention. So first mention of PE would be: private equity (PE).
Or
> And Sequoia’s (a venture capital firm) investment in Dropbox was a great one, second to Airbnb in Fund 12 (another venture capital firm).
by mrweasel - Not sure why this is on the front page but anyway...
> But a lesson from this story is twofold: when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it. Economically, the return from a capital efficiency standpoint would be much better. Second, public companies that are truly just a feature never give you great returns.
Dropbox was a private company when Jobs offered to buy it for $800 million in 2009. Drew Houston (the founder) has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation since then and is today worth over $2 billion. He's also on the board of Meta.
So the point about investing in companies that are features might be a decent (if obvious) one for retail investors looking at public equities, but the lesson here isn't "when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it".
by ElProlactin