[guhcampos]

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.

[RigelKentaurus]

It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking. Organic customer churn and attrition means that you're just a few years away from irrelevance. If DBX wants to stay a stable tech company, it should figure out a way to go private.

[devsda]

> It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking.

Dont we frequently complain that the primary driver behind ensittification of products is the need for perpetual growth at any cost.

I understand the need for growth but if the market is saturated and profits are stable, then may be thats a signal that they need to innovate or branch out into other/adjacent tech without making it worse for their existing customers. But leaders take the shortcut.

[brendoelfrendo]

Yeah but in a market where the current suppliers are satisfying demand, I feel like the churn just means your customers will go across the metaphorical street to the other guy, and you likewise have the opportunity to bring in someone from a competitor. So you still, of course, need to invest in marketing and retention, but as a means to maintain stability, not to grow forever. The cloud storage market feels pretty mature, so customers are going to be constantly shopping around for the best deal, or the best support contract, or whatever.

[blks]

In the current economic system, if capital is not growing, it’s reducing.

[MikeTheGreat]

Can you explain this further?

For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?

[jacobgkau]

I think they're saying that inflation means the $6B is reducing in buying power.

[reverius42]

A bank account (or a spread of bank accounts across different banks to stay under the FDIC insurance limit per-account) is way, way, way safer than a flat market cap publicly traded company -- and with the same or perhaps better rate of return. Stocks are "supposed" to give better rates of return than "flat", in exchange for the higher risk.

[blks]

Inflation, plus if you’re not trying to grow your market share, competition will be taking it away from you.

[BoorishBears]

HDDs, SSDs, RAM for their servers are all up what, anywhere 50% to >100% for the year?

[dchevell]

inflation … ?

[reverius42]

My rule of thumb is inflation will eat half your principal every 20 years unless you're growing. An average of 3.5% growth will double every 20 years.

[throwaway894345]

Exponential growth can’t last forever, and I do worry about what will happen when the gravy train stops. Maybe we can figure out interstellar travel before it does so the limiting factor becomes “the galaxy” rather than “our planet”.

[asdff]

Not everything is in the exponential growth model. Most small businesses in your town for example. Margins might afford an upper middle class lifestyle for the owner and that is a good enough business model for this company to last decades, even pass down through the family.

[mrhottakes]

Don't worry, private equity is working diligently to make sure that can't happen anymore.

[throwaway894345]

On the micro level, I agree. On the macro level, I don't know how viable those businesses will be when the wider economy is no longer growing exponentially (and frankly that may well be the least of all concerns).

[asdff]

Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine. They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local and they serve a need that has kept them in business for decades already, even with how many eras now of outsourcing and globalization and online shopping and all these other touted death blows that have been weathered all the same by these businesses.

[throwaway894345]

> Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine.

This is a non sequitur. If the economy contracts and 99% of these businesses go under, 1% may well remain (“they exist…”) but that does not mean that all is well (“they will be fine”).

> They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local

The local economy in most of America is highly coupled with larger corporations. Either the large corporations are the major employers or the large corporations are the major customers for the area’s employers. Even if it’s not that, everything is tightly coupled to the banking system, as we learned in 2008.

[idiotsecant]

I think impending demographic collapse might give us a peek at that sooner than you'd think

[mplewis]

Clarify exactly what you mean by "demographic collapse."

[idiotsecant]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

[saghm]

> In the aftermath of World War I, birth rates in the United States and many European countries fell below replacement level. This prompted concern about population decline.[8] The recovery of the birth rate in most Western countries around 1940 that produced the "baby boom", with annual growth rates in the 1.0 – 1.5% range, and which peaked during the period 1962–1968 at 2.1% per year,[13] temporarily dispelled prior concerns about population decline, and the world was once again fearful of overpopulation. After 1968, the global population growth rate started a long decline. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has reported that in the year 2023 it had dropped to about 0.9%,[13] less than half of its peak between 1962 and 1968. Although still growing, the UN predicts that global population will level out around 2084,[81] and some sources predict the start of a decline before then.

In other words, the last time everyone got worked up over this, the trend reversed itself too hard within a few decades, and then reversed itself again. Meanwhile, over half a century after the "decline" started, we have over twice as many people as we had when it started, and the earliest projections for when growth will stop is another half century from now. I think there are a lot bigger problems we'll need to reckon with before then, and if we manage to remain stable by then, it seems like we have good precedent for reversing it fairly quickly.

[hcurtiss]

I'm not so sure that global population growth tells the right story vis-à-vis declining birth rates in western countries.

[jagraff]

> at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.

Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive capacity (for example, enough solar/wind/nuclear/renewable power to completely eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels)

[mplewis]

What does any of that have to do with Dropbox?

[whiplash451]

The point is that we should be directing our energy in a direction that’s net useful for human kind which should translate into growth. Dropbox is not one of those because there are many viable alternatives.

[saghm]

If we stop chasing clouds, we'll have to go back to local offline storage!

[jon-wood]

I mean sure, but marginally better/more profitable file storage isn’t any of that, and artificially juicing the share value doesn’t actually make any difference to the real economy it just makes some people who like gambling on made up numbers happier for a bit.