I always found it somewhat amusing that people used to point to that quote by Jobs as a knock on him for being wrong. Lately it seems like he may have been right all along.

Or he has been wrong for a long time before others added that feature to their product.

I take the original comment to be that file syncing will never be a product on it's own. The market for people who need file syncing on its own is small and it only really becomes useful for a large number of paying customers when it is something embedded into a more directly useful product (like GSuite or Office 365). And I think he's been largely right. It's common on HN for people to complain about how Dropbox was great when it did just one thing really well but they weren't a profitable company doing one thing really well. They always needed to create a broader product on top of file syncing in order to survive as a standalone business.

Well, I was under the impression/illusion that Dropbox was profitable long before that but it looks like https://www.engadget.com/dropbox-records-first-profit-ever-1... I was wrong.

> While many companies struggle through the pandemic, Dropbox seems to be doing well. In its first quarter, it brought in $455 million, an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year. According to Bloomberg, last quarter was the first time that Dropbox recorded net income since going public in 2018. In other words, it took a pandemic to make the company profitable.

The subtext was of course that Apple would implement it on their phones for free but charge 30% for any competitors to do it for you.

For Apple, everything is either a feature or a product you can skim 30% of.

At this point I think it was an amazing feature that became a mediocre product. I wish dropbox felt like they could make enough money just being the best in the world at syncing files.

Maybe those who now complain about it becoming a product didn't agree with Steve Jobs.

I’m truly sick of seeing this quote every time we have a Dropbox post on HN.