Nevertheless, I think bringing in her as opposed to some other apparatchik not so terribly tainted has harmed Dropbox more than they realize.

It's the sort of ill-will that sales and marketing heads will never see, and that doesn't show up on typical market research. No CTO of a major company is going to say "we didn't use Dropbox because they have someone on their board who was involved in perpetuating a trillion dollar fraud that cost hundreds of thousands of lives." They might not even think this -- they just know that their many underlings recommended OneDrive, Google Drive, btSync, or an in-house solution accessed via a VPN. None of these lower-rank employees will cite this as a factor either, even if many of them are thinking it.

Nope. People will just silently make a mental annotation: if there are any alternatives to Dropbox, don't use Dropbox because they have a war criminal on their board.

It's like what happens if you smell bad. People will avoid you, but very few people will tell you you smell bad. That's rude. Instead they'll make up other reasons to avoid bringing up something that could be divisive.

* 2001-2005 - Did NOT advise POTUS to spend 1.7 trillion dollars and thousands of military and civilian lives on obviously shaky WMD testimony.

In the 1990s, when he wrote his memoirs admitting as much, anyone who was anyone in the Beltway attended the celebratory launch of his book.

Carly Fiorina nearly destroyed Hewlett-Packard. After she left HP, Bush the Lesser immediately began floating her name for the International Monetary Fund. When that didn't take, she ran for the Senate against Babs Boxer. She lost that, too. And now this: https://www.carlyforpresident.com/

Left wing and Right wing, our elites seem to be selected for their ability to fail at scale.

* She almost definitely did not advise anyone to spend 1.7 trillion dollars on anything. Did she know how costly the war would be? Should she have known?

* "Obviously shaky" is easy to say in hindsight. What did she know when? What should she have known?

* Did she even advise the President to go to war? We don't know what she said behind closed doors. SecState works at the pleasure of the President-- it is entirely possible she opposed the war personally and in private counsel, but played the good soldier in public.

* If she did personally oppose the war to your satisfaction, was it wrong of her to play the good soldier, regardless of the circumstances? I tend to think so. But was it so wrong that she should be blacklisted from public life?

Life is messy.

> Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government and British government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Should she have known the cost (in $$$ and lives)? It was her job and that of every senior leader involved. They grossly underestimated the effort. Their colossal mistake wasn't just an oopsy-daisy to be waved away.

Incompetence at that scale should follow you around for your whole life.

When everyone begins to care about personal privacy, how could they chose to associate with Condoleezza Rice ? Is there even a worse choice ?

Edit: I'm using Hubic now, hosted by OVH (very very bad desktop app right now, but they're making progress, and it's cheap, 50€ for 10TB / year)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/23/condoleezza-ric... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04...

I'm kind of surprised, personally.

Not much of an improvement.