41–50 of 156 posts
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
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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.
Should really use quote marks I guess.
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> 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…
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 sup…
Sorry, but I have to post this now:
https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl
"xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes."
"You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses."
It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.
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>> [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 e…
Edit: hansvm is right, Overleaf is cool :)
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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 mu…
I think you're referring to this fiasco? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856209
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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 mu…
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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 garg…
Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation).
And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is orders of magnitude bigger than that!
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> 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.
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.
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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 garg…
So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while.
Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.
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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.
I'm on Google Drive mainly because they dpn't offer such a plan. Dropboxes client is better, but I'm not paying an extra $8/month for storage I don't need.