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Congrats Dropbox

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Re: Congrats Dropbox

#271

Post by Fnoord »

nicolasbistolfi wrote: post #180

Remember when people used two floppy disks to save files so if one floppy break you have a backup one? I remember the first day I heard about Dropbox and I was amazed by it, it made perfect sense. Since then I'm a client and as an entrepreneur, it's a company I always looked up to.

I remember the first day I used Rsync (developed by famous reverse engineer Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame [1]) and the first day I used WebDAV and later on WebDAVFS. Nowadays, I use TransIP STACK (1 TB free) and Google Drive (15 GB) plus public key cryptography.

Dropbox might've been the first in the field, but it has no selling point above STACK for me since it doesn't implement public key cryptography just like the other providers. Google's sell point is that compressed photos are free storage (although -obviously- unencrypted).

Which suggests, to me, that they're accessing the data or perhaps saving a few GBs with say ZFS dedup (ultimately not a trade-off in the interest of the user). Because otherwise, the lag would be client-side only (after all, the clients employ the cryptography).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#272

Post by DataWorker »

BrandonM wrote: post #249
thaumaturgy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN had a higher percentage of people at that time that would've considered that to be a reasonable alternative to Dropbox.

Hacker News used to be for hackers.

Thanks for this comment and the one about ftp. I also didn’t see the difference between Facebook and MySpace. It’s hard to understand the money side of reality until you are older and have seen some things.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#273

Post by Fnoord »

geofft wrote: post #57
amelius wrote: post #20

This is nice from a business-perspective. But, stepping back ... I'm sure that a lot of the folks here would agree that something as basic as file-sync should be a standard part of any OS, and follow a non-proprietary protocol. So whereas they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business, I'm not sure what we have achieved here.

Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side. AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc. were all around and (to varying levels) built…

"Dropbox was a fundamentally different model"

You mention a bunch of filesystems (some of which with much better scalability than Dropbox), but omit Rsync. Rsync works with any of these filesystems.

The most successful data distribution systems which predate these are from the '90s and before Usenet (esp volume with the binaries) and scene (or FXP). However, the former is mostly public data and the latter is inherently insecure.

Dropbox was nothing special. It was just the first popular one who had a GUI on top of Rsync, and who sold data storage within a package. Its essentially a lucky shot.

WebDAV works great for client-server, but it has a disadvantage: locking works terrible. OwnCloud/NextCloud uses WebDAV, btw.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#274

Post by DataWorker »

andrewprock wrote: post #238
drstewart wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"

I recall having the same basic response to http: "Why would anyone want to keep downloading the same content over and over again when you could just ftp it to your machine?"

Stallman still does this doesn’t he, give or take an email step.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#275

Post by Izkata »

pacofvf wrote: post #149
sincerely wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably 3,000$ and 12,000$ respectively?

2007 Dollars != 2018 Dollars.

Assuming that's what was meant, and not what the other comments did:

$3000 -> $3614.05 according to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#276

Post by MarketingJason »

gk1 wrote: post #256
MarketingJason wrote: post #247

Honest question: What about Sean Ellis? Maybe I am mis-remembering, but wasn't he the person behind the "invite for more storage" growth marketing effort that really helped propel Dropbox to mainstream use?

What exactly is your question? He, like other early employees, is probably sitting on a nice bundle of common stock that he will be able to sell X months after the IPO.

I guess I expected a mention since his work was a huge part of making Dropbox successful.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#277

Post by hughc »

graeme wrote: post #182
BrandonM wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

Well put. Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable because it was voted to the top . Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time, thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them, because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection - who remembers an upvote?

I think people are always looking for a take on a new product that can be shown with 20-20 hindsight to be proven wrong...

" No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." for the original iPod, springs to mind.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#278

Post by jesseendahl »

Fnoord wrote: post #273
geofft wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side. AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc. were all around and (to varying levels) built…

"Dropbox was a fundamentally different model" You mention a bunch of filesystems (some of which with much better scalability than Dropbox), but omit Rsync. Rsync works with any of these filesystems. The most successful data distribution systems which predate these are from the '90s and before Usenet (esp volume with the binaries) and scene (or FXP). However, the former is mostly public data and the latter is inherent…

Dropbox is a lot more than a GUI on top of rsync. Even purely from an engineering standpoint (ignoring product & design) that's incorrect.

You might enjoy this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#279

Post by harshgupta »

matte_black wrote: post #246
TheGrassyKnoll wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading at what 10 x sales ? That's a rich valuation. They've gotta show some impressive growth and get more to the bottom line or its coming back to earth.

Isn’t 10x sales pretty decent compared to the 100x, 200x we seem to see?

They had valued themselves at <10bn. That has doubled in 24 hours, thats definitely not positive, if not an ipo strategy

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#280

Post by mwerty »

dumbfounder wrote: post #175
BrandonM wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

Drew and Brandon, together again!

Feels like the “I’m a Mac, I’m a pc” ad.
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