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.

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"

How about a strange outdated idea.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

> 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?

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“ 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

iCloud is just rebadged GCS.