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

Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 156 posts

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#21

Post by echelon »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #19
recursivecaveat wrote: post #18

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 af…

Does this apply to Slack as well?

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.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#22

Post by daveoc64 »

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".

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#23

Post by seanieb »

Havoc wrote: post #12

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.

Find me a technical saas product of tyat scale that doesn’t have support forums that are on fire? Checkout gdrive or iclouds.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#24

Post by nvarsj »

fermienrico wrote: post #3
pmart123 wrote: post #2

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.

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 engi…

> 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.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#25

Post by ativzzz »

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

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#26

Post by aprdm »

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 .

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#27

Post by superfrank »

ativzzz wrote: post #25

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

The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#28

Post by JohnHammersley »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #14
dang wrote: post #5

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124983

>> [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 l…

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!

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#30

Post by tim_sw »

mehrdada wrote: post #15

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’ q…

In what ways is it bureaucratic? Is there a lot of process to get things done across teams or to ship new features?
Post reply on HN