Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

tech.fortune.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 90 posts

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#81

Post by batiudrami »

code_duck wrote: post #42
bradleyland wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. I am incredibly optimistic about Dropbox's future. It constantly blows my mind that home users don't have any file sharing running on their network. The go-to solution is to email files to each other, even while sitting on the same network. When I learned that Dropbox supported LAN sync, I immediately started recommending it as an alternative to emailing files back and forth. Just drop files you would normal…

If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.

From what I remember of Windows 98, it was really simple. If you shared something on the network, it was shared to everyone on the network. No passwords, no permissions, no home groups, everything was just shared. I wish Windows 7 could do this for me.

With Windows 7, I need to connect to a network, customise my security settings so that files can be shared, and even then I need to go into advanced permissions and add a user called 'Everyone' to every folder I share, just so that other people can access them. Sharing on Windows in its current format is unaccessible and difficult.

(Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I'm very computer literate and it's a fight every time I want to share something, so I can't imagine it's easy for 'mum and dad' users)

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#82

Post by orionlogic »

I like Dropbox but i use it less often. What i am waiting for is the same solution from Apple. Their cloud facility has been just finished and they will probably offer similar service not later than this year. It might not start as pure storage facility but will start by account and device activation from cloud, iphoto & music backup and then after figuring out how this cloud thing work will probably offer similar subscription fee based service. After all why they still didn't buy Dropbox? Probably they are working on it.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#83

Post by franze »

pge wrote: post #44
51Cards wrote: post #11

I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community.…

What is fascinating to me is how quickly dropbox spread outside the HN demographic. My 70 year old mother, who was as far from a techical user as one could be, asked me in early 2009 if I used dropbox so she could share some photos with me. That's when I realized they were really on to something. It was just that easy to use, and it was spreading very rapidly in non-technical communities - they had reached a user lik…

any product that installs growl per default on my system can not be mentioned in the same sentence with the terms "elegance".

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#84

Post by luca-giovanni »

51Cards wrote: post #11

I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community.…

Dropbox wasn't the first such product and you can argue better ones exist out there. What they have done is make a product with little or no friction to get up and running across multiple devices. That is the power of their product. It is super easy to use and difficult to break. A lot of companies can learn from their success and focus on user experience.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#86

Post by cageface »

code_duck wrote: post #56
asnyder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft had built in cloud storage, something like live space, or live disk, or something along those lines. It was very similar to dropbox, but for whatever reason it didn't catch on. I know a few people that still use it.

That's the thing - Apple and Microsoft have both had somewhat similar offerings, but in some way they were not as user-friendly, or were not presented to users properly (Apple has iDisk, or something like that). For LAN use, cloud (external) storage isn't even needed though.

It's a perfect example of the importance of execution. This isn't a new idea, but Dropbox was the first to make it dead simple & reliable.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#87

Post by kahawe »

nbashaw wrote: post #58
ch0wn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Dropbox for not using this horrible term.

Horrible term? Just because it's the catch phrase du jour doesn't mean it's totally meaningless. I get annoyed with the buzz and malapropism just as much as the next guy, but like it or not, cloud computing is a major global phenomenon.

It still is a horrible term, as are most buzz words and hypes.

And secondly, like it or not, it is nothing new - not even a new concept. See e.g. grid computing and what Foster et al. describe as "utility computing" in their vision; it makes cloud computing look more like a sub-category.

I have the same feeling about "web 2.0" - it was merely "normal people" catching up with the tech savvy crowd on a large scale.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#88

Post by Hume »

phlux wrote: post #43
DufusM wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Live Mesh, an equivalent Microsoft product, has the p2p sync functionality in addition to cloud sync. http://www.winsupersite.com/article/product-review/how-to-li...

I dual boot most of my machines, so I find anything that is 100% windows only to be less than optimal. But the tech is interesting.

It supports linux too, I've had it up and running on Mint and Ubuntu for at least 6 months.

Re: Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

#89

Post by code_duck »

batiudrami wrote: post #81
code_duck wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, what blows my mind is that Microsoft has failed that significantly on connecting systems which share a LAN. There should have been something as easy as Dropbox built into Windows, and made known to users, at least 10 years ago.

From what I remember of Windows 98, it was really simple. If you shared something on the network, it was shared to everyone on the network. No passwords, no permissions, no home groups, everything was just shared. I wish Windows 7 could do this for me. With Windows 7, I need to connect to a network, customise my security settings so that files can be shared, and even then I need to go into advanced permissions and ad…

I had huge problems ever getting LAN sharing set up on Win98. It seemed like the only way was to reboot both of the machines at exactly the same time, plus mystic dance moves, etc. Often one machine could see the other, or you could browse but not access files, the 'network neighborhood' would show then not show the other machine, and so on. Like most of the rest of Win98, it was unstable to the point that one wondered how MS could keep a straight face when releasing it. But then, sometimes it would work with no problem at all.
Post reply on HN