For every Dropbox, there are a thousand companies and products that similar criticisms could be made against that don't actually succeed, sometimes for the reasons stated in those criticisms.

I think it's fair to say that for those failed products/companies, the reason for them failing is a bit more nuanced than "because the core service already exists elsewhere". Competition always exists so you're almost never the sole provider of a particular type of service. If you fail, you were likely out-competed, even if it's in a non-core area like marketing or popularity.

As an aside: this is exactly what tech bros do not get about the AirTags when we try to get the message across about how bad they are for stalking. Every time I try to bring this up, I am told that Tile, GPS trackers, Samsung I-do-not-even-know-what already exists. Who cares -- the AirTags work, alas they work exceptionally well (precision and battery life wise especially), easily accessible, their existence easily discoverable. They are devastating in this field. Problem is, vulnerable people will use public transit where it's practically guaranteed within a ten meter radius there will be an iPhone, especially so in North America where the iPhone is so prevalent. Meanwhile, the victim might not have an iPhone, just some scuffed Android 'cos that's all they can afford. That Apple released (or didn't recall) them is a blow, that Congress didn't ban them is not really because it's not like we expect Congress to be functional, to protect poor people especially women. But watch a stalking case involving one going bad (= rape, murder) in, say, Germany and then watch the EU bringing down the banhammmer.

There are cheap trackers from aliexpress that can be used in place of airtags. Most include GPS and use mobile internet for sending location updates. May be the airtags made tech based stalking more popular but will it reverse just because Apple takes it back. Also its not like finding where someone lives is a particularly difficult task given the ridiculous amount of information there is online. And as for the public transit example, may be all they have to do is wait till the victim gets down the from the bus to find out where they live ? (I mean it is public transit after all).

The caveat is that in the general population, I would expect that there are vastly more people who can figure out how to configure a AirTag versus buy and configure a tracker off of AliExpress, similar to how the graphical user interface enabled vastly more users than the command line.

I don't want to live in a world full of objects that can't be misused. Maybe you do.

Dropbox was a different tech from FTP/Samba/whatever.

This one, it's not the first VM on smartphones at all. Running a desktop OS is possible for years with comparable solutions. What makes this different from Samsung's DeX, for example?

This can run windows application. DeX is ChromeOS-like

You act like Dropbox is successful when they are not. A company paying other companies to advertise and push their products and burning through cash to appear successful is not success.

Dropbox was successful.

Its current financial state is more a case of bigger vendors bundling a good enough alternative with their products AND dropbox not adding much beyond "easy to use"; than HN insight of "lol just rsync/bash/perl instead" being right all along.

Nothing about that indicates that they are making more than they spend. Look at their assets vs liabilities. Their negative keeps increasing.

The liabilities increased significantly only because Dropbox (as with nearly every other company in the United States) wanted to take advantage of the 0% interest rates that the federal reserve has kept.

  1,369.3 (bln) Convertible senior notes, net, non-current

Who wouldn't want to borrow $1.3 billion USD interest free or close to it? We need to take a close look and try to understand these numbers instead of just seeing "negative" = "bad"; more often than not it much more nuanced than that.

Sounds like a terrible idea right now. I think they are only popular here because of their association with YC. I honestly find Dropbox to be terrible and overpriced.

For simply keeping files synced between two computers, I thought Dropbox was the best.

Microsoft OneDrive is fuckin' awful in how long it takes for a file on one system to be synced to another, even when both systems are online at the same time. It also has a habit of completely pausing syncing entirely if it reaches a file it can't read (such as a lock file).

Google Drive works well, but I find its desktop client to be resource-heavy, especially on startup. I like its integration with my Android, though.