141–150 of 221 posts
Google X: Is the Y party Over? I think I seen this on HN about 4 times in the last year. Is there any front where google managed to beat a good established product (except Android) ? Only good thing to come out of this, is a hopeful price reduction on Dropbox..
Only 4? I don't think you've been watching very closely. Though maybe after deduplication... And yes: Chrome (massive bite out of both IE and Firefox's share), email (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, take your pick), and mapping being the big ones. You could probably toss in online document editing and machine-translation too. Google seems to do reasonably well with taking over tools , and less-so for taking over primarily-…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be underestimating the prevalence of Dropbox shared folders, which make Dropbox into more type I.
Good point, I haven't thought about that. I wonder what percentage of content is shared, though. But this suggests one important strategy for Dropbox, they should immediately put more emphasis and develop better tools for content sharing to make their service more sticky fro people.
I think services/sites can be divided into two when considering how/if people switch between them: (i) aggregate sites whose value is a (generally nonlinear) function of all users who use the site and (ii) personal sites whose impact is just for the person who uses it. The fact that I'm using Dropbox, too, doesn't provide any value to you (except of course economies of scale) YouTube, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are Type I…
Dropbox is a brilliant piece of software however it's hard to justify more than $10/month for backup as a consumer. Since 50Gb only now covers my photos and docs, doesn't cover my music and even my photo collection's needs trimming to fit I would move to GDrive very quickly rather than double that spend to get to the next tier. I've long hoped that Dropbox would segment their pricing plans more. It's unsettling havin…
in the dropbox forums company representatives constantly comment that lower price plans are not feasible. That said, I've always been disappointed by companies that make you buy buckets of units (like postpaid cellphone plans) that they know you will never use rather than offering a per unit price. If the cost to provide 1gb of storage per month is higher than 10/50, than charge the higher price, don't hide it by shi…
Personally, I hesitate at $10 a month when I am currently using less than the 2GB of free space available. If there were a $5/month plan that was even minutely better than the free offering, I would sign up without a second thought. I suspect I am far from the only one in that position.
Here is the fundamental problem of competing against Google as a SW company. Google is an advertising company, as everyone now well knows. They have no problem selling SW cheap, or giving it away for free, if they can help their advertising business (either directly by hosting ads in the service, or mining data from the service for info to help target ads). If you feel like your SW has actual value and charge for it,…
"you either really need a great product (that can't easily be cloned) or very strong network effects." Or a business model where advertising won't easily support the resources needed to provide the service. Theoretically storage is one such service, but I guess with dipping storage costs, the tipping point where its cost effective with advertising alone might have reached now.
As a rule of thumb, I try to rely on Google as little as possible for important services. I don't dislike Google, but their lack of customer service makes it risky to rely too heavily on their services. I use Dropbox for syncing and backup, and since I backup files that are important to me, that rules out Google Drive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only 4? I don't think you've been watching very closely. Though maybe after deduplication... And yes: Chrome (massive bite out of both IE and Firefox's share), email (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, take your pick), and mapping being the big ones. You could probably toss in online document editing and machine-translation too. Google seems to do reasonably well with taking over tools , and less-so for taking over primarily-…
You could probably add Picasa, Reader, Virtual Voicemail / Google Voice, Calendar, Video Chat, Instant Messaging as well.
Their calendar is the best online calendar I've found, but nobody I know uses it except Google-aware geeks and the ones I've taught (they love it now, didn't know it existed before). And online calendars haven't really reached public-awareness or usefulness yet, it seems - the closest most people come to computer calendars is their work's shared calendar that runs through Outlook.
Instant messaging they've certainly impacted, but I think AIM and MSN and Yahoo individually still out-number Google, though that may change with Plus. And Skype dominates video and voice chats, though Google is a threat (again, depends on how Plus pans out).
edit: Though Voice is incredibly awesome and absolutely dominates in its niche - of course, it's the only contender. But nobody knows how to use it, and its user-base consists of a laughable amount compared to , AFAIK.
When I was in YC (same batch as Dropbox) this was a constant question. "What happens to Dropbox if Gdrive launches?" I don't actually remember what Drew and Arash thought, but a lot of people speculated on it. It was probably a real threat to them 4.5 years ago. I can't imagine it is now. Dropbox has a large, happy fanbase that's going to keep using it and keep spreading. They're going to keep growing. They've got a…
If you check Google services (docs, mail), you get for just $5 -> 20GB of storage for a YEAR (or for $20 -> 80GB).
DropBox takes $9.99 a MONTH for 50GB, or around $120 a YEAR!
User lock-in is powerful, but if a competitor can offer a product for a magnitude less in price, I'd be friggin' worry my posterior off.
When I was in YC (same batch as Dropbox) this was a constant question. "What happens to Dropbox if Gdrive launches?" I don't actually remember what Drew and Arash thought, but a lot of people speculated on it. It was probably a real threat to them 4.5 years ago. I can't imagine it is now. Dropbox has a large, happy fanbase that's going to keep using it and keep spreading. They're going to keep growing. They've got a…
Considering that DropBox is building on Amazon cloud storage (S3) and Google have their native storage arrays, I'd be very worried, as Google can offer storage much cheaper. If you check Google services (docs, mail), you get for just $5 -> 20GB of storage for a YEAR (or for $20 -> 80GB). DropBox takes $9.99 a MONTH for 50GB, or around $120 a YEAR! User lock-in is powerful, but if a competitor can offer a product for…
...which tells you the only logical acquirer. Any other will have a middleman of S3 to pay, which will make the financials not very sensible.
If GDrive releases and is viable, Dropbox should put on their best push-up bra and fishnets, and head over to seattle as soon as the mascara is dry.