171–180 of 221 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Convenient as the other only logical acquirer is also in Seattle.
Do you see MS putting Amazon in their critical path? I easily picture Ballmer saying NFW, but would love to hear why MS would hand such power over to Amazon.
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…
Nice to see this guy back.
I love Dropbox and Google Drive would have a hard time getting me to switch. Dropbox seems to "get it" when it comes to simple, easy to use file synchronization. The one area that GDrive might wiggle into is making it even easier to use Google Docs. I really like GDocs but I don't use them very much because its just not convenient to do so with local files. However, if I can "upload" a file to a directory on my machi…
One thing that Dropbox doesn't do well is file segregation Dropbox does do that. In the preferences, each folder has a checkbox for "Sync this folder to this computer"; uncheck it and the folder won't be on that device. It's marginally clunky to set up since you have to do it for each folder on each device - it doesn't have a higher level abstraction like "no large zip archives" - but the functionality is there.
If I remember correctly, the older clients don't update to new versions automatically (or at least this was the case a year ago) and you will need to download a new client to make this feature available.
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…
I don't know if that holds true for any significant number of Dropbox's users but pricing and additional functionality could easily make an equivalent service more attractive for my use case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. File sharing is the type of thing where you can't just rely on first-mover-advantage. Google has the ability and infrastructure to offer more space for free on more devices and platforms.
Dropbox's success isn't about hardware. The interface is the product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good example. MS successfully killed off Netscape (the company) within a few years by bundling an inferior browser. It also prevented them from entering desktop OS, which was perceived as a threat back in the day. Edit: FYI, Mosaic was the one I had in mind, which was free.
In it's day, IE was not an inferior browser. Quiet the opposite, actually.
Putting aside the snarky remark about IE's apparent target audience, there are any number of contemporary sources which give examples of how your intended statement is factually incorrect.
For example: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/v-e.pdf
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox's success isn't about hardware. The interface is the product.
And really it's their lack of an interface--it just works.
Does GDrive do that? Not yet.
Also sync'ing with local storage means allowing users to use non-Google Docs editors (MS Office) and all these cool collaboration things Google Apps are useless when you move in Gdrive mode.
Maybe building a good iphone/Android app to edit google docs online would be better investment of their talent?
And, on side note, as cloud storage becomes integral part of our lives, the companies which will win are not the cheapest one. But the ones with the best customer service and quality of product.
This is unexpected given their position on it before [1]: Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive a…
If this is true, I will be a little irritated because Google is not fixing simple things in Google Docs (like that stupid thing that all new documents are immediately saved as "Untitled" without even asking me what would be a name of documents). Now they are building something completely unrelated to what they were telling us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In it's day, IE was not an inferior browser. Quiet the opposite, actually.
"In it is day, IE was not an inferior browser. [Making little or no noise] the opposite, actually." Putting aside the snarky remark about IE's apparent target audience, there are any number of contemporary sources which give examples of how your intended statement is factually incorrect. For example: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/v-e.pdf
There is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree, but my conversion circa IE4 was not an outlying datapoint.