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- Hacker News
- I recall I was using Dropbox on Windows 2003 and Mac OS X 10.4. I was student and actively writing Office documents, AutoCAD, NanoCAD, LabVIEW, plenty of cryptic formats. Eventually Dropbox stopped working on Mac OS X 10.4. And I was not student anymore, I was not dealing with folders. As developer I worked with TortoiseHg and BitBucket, Mercurial repositories and reStructured Text wikis. And returned to neither Dropbox nor similar alternatives. By inertia I synchronized with Dropbox, but when Dropbox stopped working on Mac OS X 10.4, it stopped at all. Eventually I've got OS upgrade, but Dropbox already gone and never returned.by OCTAGRAM
- I recently migrated to a new phone and one of the apps I had to re-login was Dropbox. A feeling of nostalgia washed over me. It was absolutely essential many years ago but now the competition is huge. I'm not a fan of Private Equity but if it can keep the business alive, then it's worth exploring by the leadership.by andreidbr
- No, definitely agree. One of the great SaaS companies, strategy matters, though, and the early success distracted them from building a defensible business.by Taikhoom10
- Keep the business alive? Article says it’s making good money so no risk of it dyingby fsuts
- I understand why it is a reasonable acquisition target for PE and worthy of exploration, but I’m not sure I understand how being acquired by PE would keep Dropbox alive longer other than shaking up the leadership and shifting priorities. Perhaps aggressively targeting enterprise customers currently using Box after rolling out the necessary features?
- Dropbox was huge before everything built in sync as SaaS. I still fondly recall the Dropbox backend to 1Password.by bombcar
- PE's end goal is never the health of the business.
Being bought by PE is a death sentence. Maybe drawn out by years, but a death sentence none the less.
by Krutonium - Sad. I still use Dropbox personally and really like their use experience, but I just don't find enough use for it to pay for a service like that. The technology proved to be far too easy to replicate and they failed to build anything that would make users stick around, I guess. Maybe moving to workspace collaboration solution like Google docs was the play?
As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.
by raz32dust - It would've helped to clarify that "PE" stands for "private equity".by eps
- 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
- Out of curiosity which apps do you miss the most?by dgoldstein0
- 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 - >They started it all.
Actually box.com was first (launched as box.net in 2005), and Dropbox was founded in 2007.
by jh00ker - 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 - I personally agree, but clearly the market doesn’t. You will find here people saying they have moved to GDrive, OneDrive or iCloud. They are supplementary services to existing large platforms/ecosystems. If the problem is small and well defined, most people would look at Windows, Mac/iOS, or Android and angrily complain it’s not part of these platforms. Long gone are the days of people getting mad at Microsoft for using their dominance of an OS to push another platform. People demand that now.
As a result, the problem you solve have to be sufficiently complex with a huge surface to guarantee platform operators don’t cannibalize you. If LLMs weren’t an active area of expensive research and advancement, for example if it was just a couple of models with a simple defined interface, majority of people would use whatever one came on their device or OS. Dropbox had a novelty for its file syncing simplicity and it took few years for platforms to catch up. it was able to establish a market share, but the scale of the others dwarfs it. If LLM advancement hits a wall an all models converge, we might find Apple, Microsoft and Google becoming the most dominant consumer AI providers with other experiences building on top of them, like how apps do today with these storage services.
Large behemoths struggle in innovating new and novel ideas, but they can execute on well defined ones. For example, imagine if something like Tailscale’s use case becomes very common place. You would have “Apple Network”, “Google Chrome Connect” and “Windows Copilot Device Active Link”
- 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
- They acquired already WeTransfer and Dropbox could be a natural fit with that.by thinkindie
- > 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 - Right, but you have to consider how early on this was, with little venture raised; multiples are way better. My point was bundling wins in the long term.by Taikhoom10
- 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 - It is primarily a switching-cost-enabled cash cow.by Taikhoom10
- sorry but this is just dumb. sure, there are a number of ways you can diy this. Congrats, you picked the most annoying and least secure one, that is not even remotely comparable.by fl0id
- Joe Public has no idea what an "FTP" is and just wants a program they can download that does it all for themby voidUpdate
- > From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
This is exactly what I've done: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
- The same comment to bookend the era between "Dropbox is live!" and "Dropbox should be acquired".by aitchnyu
- 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 - Thanks, will do.by Taikhoom10
- I think the people who need those abbreviations spelled out are not the target audience of the article. There is no possible way to think that PE == price to earnings/physical education here and if a reader thinks that they wont understand the article anyway. e.g. hamilton helmer, power, fund 12 being a sequoia fund not a different venture firm, etc.
Its OK for articles to be a short few paragraphs with a smaller audience rather than a few long pages and explain every single thing at a basic level to try reach everyone
by motoxpro - 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 - I was referring to multiples on invested capital. Plus, it's a bit hurtful when you IPO your company, the stock stays flat if not down, and you step down; I think an Apple acquisition like that is much more of a happy ending IMO.by Taikhoom10