The Dropbox case is an excellent learning opportunity.<p>They have created a long needed seamless service, approaching quickly a huge number of people praising them nearly religiously, as well as exceptionally good press. Then, surprisingly, it took them few months to revert their perception completely.<p>To put aside whether they should receive so harsh words now, I think that all startup founders, and managers, should try to understand what happened, in order to avoid similar mistakes.<p>I do not have a clear answer but I do not think it is only a matter of unclear Terms of Service, or blog posts. If I would have to guess, they have overpromised hugely.<p>For everyone with a basic understanding of security, it's obvious that no remote storage can be both extremely secure and so easy to use on so many channels. The idea of managing encryption private keys is beyond regular users' intuition.<p>If I'm right, the best thing they could have done was stating clearly, from the beggining, that the data is as secure as possile, and they do their best to ensure (as I'm sure they do), but it will not be a military grade. The latest authentication bug did not help, too.<p>With the previous bold security statements, likely slightly misunderstood by a less tech savvy folks, it's not a suprirse that some of their users feel angry and feel somehow cheated.<p>What is very odd, the security itself was never Dropbox's the most important feature. The easy to use interface, and seamless synchronization between on many channels, was.