[HN Gopher] Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)
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Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)
Author : wallflower
Score : 44 points
Date : 2020-07-10 02:10 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field
| full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the
| casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably
| suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the
| little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you
| already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate
| Gsuite with whatever chat service comes after Meet/Hangouts/Allo,
| then Zoom's days are numbered.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| Does this apply to Slack as well?
| echelon wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.
|
| Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company.
|
| File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company.
|
| The company that does all three of these things in an
| integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a
| platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive
| moat.
|
| These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger
| fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering
| headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features
| with.
| askafriend wrote:
| > Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.
|
| That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many
| organizations.
|
| For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows
| in our company run through Slack. We use it more than
| email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack
| commands as well as interact with our staging environments
| - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows
| we've built out with Slack's APIs.
| echelon wrote:
| That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect
| gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to
| Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade.
|
| Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies
| doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm
| also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you
| make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean
| it's widely adopted, practical, or wise.
|
| Or supported.
| quineoa wrote:
| That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops
| work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as
| possible seeing how critical each action is.
|
| I would never want my production deployment rollback tied
| to my instant messenger plugin working.
| pmart123 wrote:
| They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on.
| Prior to their IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending
| time to migrate off of AWS versus continuing to build around
| their core offering. As it stands now, they could still target
| consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching, etc.) if
| order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive,
| Microsoft, etc.
| OriginalPenguin wrote:
| Unless Amazon decided that they want to give DropBox a huge
| discounted rate for the PR, it would simply cost too much to
| have stayed on the Amazon cloud.
| fermienrico wrote:
| I love Dropbox as a product and happily pay for it. It always
| works. No fuss. No conflicts, it just works.
|
| Something to be said about tools you forget that you're even
| paying for, they silently make your life better.
|
| Lately, they're getting slightly annoying though. Designers at
| Dropbox - it's a fucking file syncing tool, not a life
| philosophy. Get over the garish design non sense and allow
| Guido(retired)...ehhh engineers to do their thing.
|
| The problem is the shareholders. Dropbox doesn't need to grow.
| It can stay the same and continue to be helpful (and make
| money, provide a living to many employees). But the goddamn
| shareholders will ruin a perfectly good product. Public
| companies get hollowed out and the marrow sucked by the
| shareholders. I want a Drew Houston & Sons Co.; not Dropbox
| Incorporated.
| kerneltime wrote:
| Smugmug.. I love those guys..
| nvarsj wrote:
| > No fuss. No conflicts, it just works.
|
| I felt the same until they stopped supporting most Linux
| filesystems bizarrely - forcing me to reimage multiple
| machines. Despite years of perfect behaviour on non-ext4. I
| also think the price is very high for what I get. Only reason
| I haven't swapped to something else is my life is locked into
| it from the early days. I'd love to drop it at this point. I
| don't even need that much space - just something cross
| platform.
| pm90 wrote:
| Small nit: Guido left Dropbox in 2019, he is now retired.
| trimbo wrote:
| > allow Guido to do his thing
|
| Guido van Rossum? He retired.
|
| https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you--guido
| gumby wrote:
| > Get over the garish design non sense and allow Guido to do
| his thing.
|
| Guido retired last November.
| fermienrico wrote:
| Oh great. Good for Guido.
| xmodem wrote:
| In today's SV mantra, standing still means falling behind,
| and waiting until you either get disrupted by other startups,
| copied by big tech, or both.
|
| No, something must be done, and trying to force themselves
| deeper into their customers' workflows is something. So they
| did it.
| fermienrico wrote:
| I think standing still with _500 million_ users in my book
| is standing way the hell up there. Boosted into space at
| this point.
|
| Why shy away from competition? Should face it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a
| higher end offering
|
| what I don't get is why they don't have a price plan in the
| 100-200GB range like google drive has for two or three bucks.
| I've set up like seven or eight of those for family members and
| relatives, it's a very good price point and size for the
| average user.
|
| The free plan of dropbox pretty much is super small and the
| next thing is 5TB.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The theory is it would cannibalize their $10/mo plan. They
| have a lot of users who don't have tons of files but value
| paid features. Google and Apple's storage services are
| plainer offerings.
| Havoc wrote:
| Recently saw an appealing -40% discount on amex for dropbox. That
| could be cool - esp if stacked with a promo. Headed over to their
| subreddit in search of a special...literally an entire subreddit
| of complaints.
|
| Don't think they'll be around in 5 years time.
| seanieb wrote:
| Find me a technical saas product of tyat scale that doesn't
| have support forums that are on fire? Checkout gdrive or
| iclouds.
| boultonmark wrote:
| Steve Jobs called them 'a feature'. Methinks you are right,
| that they will be gone in 5
| daveoc64 wrote:
| I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus
| plan, and that does everything I want - albeit at a higher price
| than I'd like, but it always seems like their marketing is so
| heavily geared towards business use.
|
| Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should
| consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan.
|
| I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".
| hartator wrote:
| My main thing is almost always 100% cpu on my huge 1tb folder
| when working there.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can
| already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting
| an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then
| using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac,
| this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
|
| ...
|
| Not mine, but a HN classic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
| mulmen wrote:
| This would be a lot easier to parse if it was in double quotes
| or had a greater than to indicate its a quote. Or at least if
| your disclaimer was the first line instead of the last. I
| initially parsed this as your actual beliefs about Dropbox.
| superfrank wrote:
| The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really
| Dropbox's target audience.
| paxys wrote:
| The people who can do it are still their target audience,
| once they try it and realize how much of a pain it is to
| maintain.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| In case you or others missed it, the parent commenter is
| quoting a comment that was posted on HN's original thread
| announcing Dropbox in 2007, where the poster questioned if
| Dropbox would ever generate income.
|
| Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often
| laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting
| Dropbox's success.
| fireattack wrote:
| Should really use quote marks I guess.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> [pg] That does count for a lot with us. It's surprising how
| many of the groups who apply have a cofounder who's not willing
| to quit his or her job. It's a worrying sign when someone who
| knows the company a lot better than we do isn't willing to bet
| on it. But again, there are always exceptions.
|
| The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job
| to wok on dropbox part-time.
|
| The problem I see with pg's logic is that the founder and YC
| are not betting the same value on the company. The way I see
| it, YC is asked to bet some money, but the founder is asked to
| bet everything they got. If YC was asked to bet everything they
| had on that one company, they'd say no. In that case, having a
| plan B is not a sign of lack of resolve, it's a sign of sanity.
|
| But I'm probably missing something. I really don't have the
| whatsitcalled, entrepreneurial spirit. It all looks like
| gambling to me and I hate gambling, especially when the odds
| are stacked against me; which they always are, otherwise it's
| not gambling. So I guess I don't get it.
| [deleted]
| JohnHammersley wrote:
| I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because
| most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment
| and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for
| whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might
| struggle to be successful.
|
| I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't
| have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as
| a business requires so much effort, it's likely that if
| you're not able to quit to work on it, you'll lose out to a
| team that can.
|
| PS: I'm saying this as a founder who quit his job (as did my
| co-founder) when it looked liked we had something, and I
| doubt Overleaf would be where it is today if we'd not. So I
| may be biased in that direction!
| hansvm wrote:
| Just wanted to drop by and say that Overleaf is an amazing
| product, and my only complaint is that I didn't learn about
| it sooner.
| JohnHammersley wrote:
| Thanks hansvm, always good to see replies like this :)
| Glad you're finding it useful!
| aprdm wrote:
| I just recently was shopping for a solution for myself and
| considered google drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud .
|
| What motivated me shopping around was me running out of space on
| Dropbox which I have been (a free ) user for 8 years.
|
| I really wanted to go with Dropbox but their pricing were the
| worse, I also got super confused about their site which didn't
| try to sell to people but instead to enterprise only.
|
| As a person that needs around 300gb and want it integrated with
| my MacBook/iPhone I ended up paying for iCloud .
| mehrdada wrote:
| Dropbox feels more bearucratic internally than Google, a company
| two orders of magnitude its size. I feel like it is a perfect
| case of all the "VC-style" advice of "CEO job changes every 6
| months and you should adapt" going haywire; mistaking the focus
| to be building an abstract hierarchical HR org, while completely
| losing the ability, vision, or desire to build a product that
| people love.
|
| Reminds me of Steve Jobs' quote on monopoly businesses, except it
| happened before they got a proper monopoly.
| https://youtu.be/lmFlOd0MGZg In fact, the early success may have
| been a curse there, thinking they have the genie in the bottle
| when they really had not.
| tim_sw wrote:
| In what ways is it bureaucratic? Is there a lot of process to
| get things done across teams or to ship new features?
| ykevinator wrote:
| Feels like Dropbox is a slow moving worthless company
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