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

111–120 of 156 posts

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

#111

Post by staticassertion »

bane wrote: post #77

Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud. Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts. Imagine these scenarios: - A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the sit…

Totally agreed. I pay for Dropbox myself, but I don't know that I've shared a file with it in a decade or so. I just use Paper, which they continue to fail to market, despite it being absolutely amazing.

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

#112

Post by dehrmann »

bane wrote: post #77

Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud. Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts. Imagine these scenarios: - A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the sit…

I think they're halfway copying Box's strategy and focusing on B2B.

The first two scenarios might have been huge selling points a decade ago, but Spotify replaced music downloads with streaming (not that Dropbox couldn't have made a stream your own music app), and Flickr faded away. I'm not even sure how people save their photos, these days. Just leave them on their phones?

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

#113

Post by fibbery »

dehrmann wrote: post #112
bane wrote: post #77

Dropbox sells one thing: easy to use drive space in the cloud. Dropbox failed to do one thing: give people compelling reasons to put a growing amount of stuff there so they would keep paying for and upgrading their accounts. Imagine these scenarios: - A user dumps their photos into dropbox and automatically is granted a flickr quality site with all of their photos there and organized. They can add metadata in the sit…

I think they're halfway copying Box's strategy and focusing on B2B. The first two scenarios might have been huge selling points a decade ago, but Spotify replaced music downloads with streaming (not that Dropbox couldn't have made a stream your own music app), and Flickr faded away. I'm not even sure how people save their photos, these days. Just leave them on their phones?

Google photos!

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

#114

Post by nacs »

fibbery wrote: post #113
dehrmann wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're halfway copying Box's strategy and focusing on B2B. The first two scenarios might have been huge selling points a decade ago, but Spotify replaced music downloads with streaming (not that Dropbox couldn't have made a stream your own music app), and Flickr faded away. I'm not even sure how people save their photos, these days. Just leave them on their phones?

Google photos!

Yep and iCloud for iOS devices.

And then for that last remaining few, there's Amazon's free photos storage (if you have Prime)

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

#115

Post by mullingitover »

ImTheMaddest wrote: post #88
mullingitover wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then came "Google Drive" and nobody turned back to Dropbox after that. I wish it were true, but neither Google nor Apple have the most basic, brain-dead feature: "Give me a link that I can give anyone, and they can download the thing without jumping through any hoops." They both require people receiving a file to jump through the hoop of having accounts with them in order to do this most basic action. It's the reas…

Google Drive has this feature, right click the file > get shareable link > Anyone on the Internet with this link can view

I stand corrected! Time to cancel that dropbox subscription.

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

#116

Post by villedepommes »

boring_twenties wrote: post #75
aheilbut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive is a confusing mess, and still doesn’t work on linux.

Maybe not with the official tools, but it works great with rclone [1]. Which to me is far superior to any official tool but hey, to each their own. 1- https://rclone.org/

second that! rclone is an amazing piece of software! With a few simple bash scripts and rclone, my google drive serves code snippets (albeit without code highlighting) and screenshots! there are also armhf and aarch64 builds of rclone!

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

#117

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Except there isn't any jurisdiction where Apple has a proper monopoly.

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

#118

Post by namdnay »

aprdm wrote: post #26

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…

As Jobs said, Dropbox is a feature, not a product. And iCloud is the best feature of apple devices IMHO

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

#119

Post by adventured »

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…

> When Google manages to x y z

When pigs manage to fly. FTFY

If your premise is that Google will stop being so frequently incompetent at product and deliver a killer competitor for Zoom, then it's far more likely that Zoom's future is a bright one.

> Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020 ... Zoom will probably suffer the same fate

Nobody killed Dropbox either, they have continued to expand year after year. Dropbox has grown its business every year for the past decade plus. You act like the competition wiped them out, when nothing like that has happened at all: Dropbox doubled the size of their business over the prior three fiscal years (2017-2019). I'm pretty sure that reasonably qualifies as thriving.

Zoom is growing even faster than Dropbox did, they'll be larger than Dropbox in another few quarters. So how many years will it take for the competitors to catch up in a way that considerably slows Zoom down and how large will Zoom be at that point?

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

#120

Post by harpratap »

pjmlp wrote: post #117
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…

Except there isn't any jurisdiction where Apple has a proper monopoly.

In Japan you can be investigated by Antitrust and there's no proper definition of monopoly there. The only criteria is "superior bargaining position" which anyone can agree Apple does have today - https://globalcompetitionreview.com/jurisdiction/1006143/jap...

> For Party A to have superior bargaining position over the other party (Party B), Party A does not need to have a market-dominant position nor an absolutely dominant bargaining position equivalent thereto, but only needs to have a relatively superior bargaining position as compared to the other transacting party. When Party A has superior bargaining position over Party B, who is a transaction counterpart, it means such a case where if Party A makes a request, etc, that is substantially disadvantageous for Party B, Party B would be unable to avoid accepting such a request, etc, on the grounds that Party B has difficulty in continuing the transaction with Party A and thereby Party B’s business management would be substantially impeded.

Post reply on HN