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

Dropbox for Gmail

chrome.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#41

Post by free2rhyme214 »

malchow wrote: post #17
free2rhyme214 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free. Gmail already has google drive integration. Dropbox could've made this chrome plugin years ago. In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a few enterprise customers.

"5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free" Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food will run out on Earth. The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not predictable. That's why o…

Ok.

My point wasn't that they don't have a good product or that people won't use their service.

My point is their product is too expensive.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#42

Post by brianobush »

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #8
ArekDymalski wrote: post #6

Seeing how courageously Dropbox moves into the territory of giants (first Cloudon, now Google Drive turf) the infamous Jobsian "you're a feature not a product" seems to be an iconic short-sighted mistake.

Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free. Gmail already has google drive integration. Dropbox could've made this chrome plugin years ago. In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a few enterprise customers.

And me. I think Dropbox is an essential service. I think of it as a complete product, since when I need a file I go to the directory or the app on my phone. Across all my machines, it just works. If google had their service earlier, I might have picked it up. However, for now I will use dropbox and happily pay for the service.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#44

Post by ibrahima »

Spooky23 wrote: post #28
malchow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free" Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food will run out on Earth. The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not predictable. That's why o…

It has an air of truth. Dropbox is bar none the best sync client. Almost unbelievably so. But they were in 2010 too. And if you time travelled from 2010 to 2015, you wouldn't really notice anything materially different between Dropbox then and now.

I don't get it either, they have so many competitors and no one seems to actually bother to compete with Dropbox in the client space. I want to like Google Drive just because it's cheaper and integrates with Gmail and all the other Google services I use, but there's still no Linux client and it's just not as simple as Dropbox. Dropbox is just solid and available everywhere.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#45

Post by yeukhon »

sz4kerto wrote: post #14

There's a good reason why Microsoft partnered up with Dropbox. It's exactly because storage is a feature, not a product. It's great for Google or MS if the storage is not provided by them as in the long run, it looks like it's going to have zero margins. If you subscribe for Office365, then it's good for MS if they don't need to subsidize your storage. Same is true for Google. Joel's article comes into the mind: comm…

I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive become object storage for Google Compute as S3 is to AWS services. But no... the GDrive development was slow. Gdrive is trying too hard to be everyone's cloud drive, but it hasn't. I stopped using GDrive because the upload and download was terrible, buggy UI and unusable iPad apps. The app version was so behind the UI I would just send stuff over email to myself, then re-upload to GDrive on my laptop. The only thing I used GDrive for was saving PDF files I received in emails so that I could store the PDFs online and offline.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#46

Post by microtonal »

yeukhon wrote: post #45
sz4kerto wrote: post #14

There's a good reason why Microsoft partnered up with Dropbox. It's exactly because storage is a feature, not a product. It's great for Google or MS if the storage is not provided by them as in the long run, it looks like it's going to have zero margins. If you subscribe for Office365, then it's good for MS if they don't need to subsidize your storage. Same is true for Google. Joel's article comes into the mind: comm…

I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive beco…

I regularly try to love Google Drive, because the storage pricing is more flexible, etc. But in many ways it continues to be unusable. Up and downloading is too slow, sometimes the application doesn't notice that there are new files, sometimes the application crashes and you notice (hopefully after a few hours) that nothing was synced. This is all on the Mac. On Linux there even isn't an official client.

Then it misses all kind of useful features, like getting a list of all files that you shared and unsharing from there.

I always end up sticking with Dropbox because the whole experience is seamless.

That said, Google Drive as a web app rocks, especially with the Docs integration. My hunch is that Google wants it to be that way - users living in the web rather than drive being an extension to your hard disk.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#48

Post by microtonal »

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #8
ArekDymalski wrote: post #6

Seeing how courageously Dropbox moves into the territory of giants (first Cloudon, now Google Drive turf) the infamous Jobsian "you're a feature not a product" seems to be an iconic short-sighted mistake.

Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free. Gmail already has google drive integration. Dropbox could've made this chrome plugin years ago. In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a few enterprise customers.

Really? Tell me how Dropbox is doing in 5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free.

It depends. Microsoft and Google sell you storage cheaply because they want you in their ecosystem. Since Dropbox doesn't have other big products, their focus has always been on integration with other apps (e.g. 1Password, Fastmail, etc.).

If there integration continues to be better than the rest. That's definitely a selling point.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#49

Post by yeukhon »

microtonal wrote: post #46
yeukhon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive beco…

I regularly try to love Google Drive, because the storage pricing is more flexible, etc. But in many ways it continues to be unusable. Up and downloading is too slow, sometimes the application doesn't notice that there are new files, sometimes the application crashes and you notice (hopefully after a few hours) that nothing was synced. This is all on the Mac. On Linux there even isn't an official client. Then it miss…

Certainly. Google has plenty of customers signed up for Google Accounts so users use Google Docs for doc sharing, which eventually means running Box.com inside Google, offering GDrive. Which reminds of Google Wave as various technology used in Wave was eventually used in other Google products, most notably in Google Doc (although Google Doc was a production acquisition).

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#50

Post by girzel »

brisance wrote: post #33
malchow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"5 years from now after the cost for storage is infinite and free" Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food will run out on Earth. The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not predictable. That's why o…

What is your assessment of BitTorrent Sync?

That's what I was wondering. I switched from Dropbox to btsync a few months ago, when I filled up my Dropbox (and Dropbox became inaccessible in China). The sole disadvantage (which is a direct and logical result of all the advantages), is that the syncing computers need to be online concurrently. In every other way I've found it superior to Dropbox.

Of course, what's going to happen to btsync as a "product", I don't have a clue. But given the fact that you can host a private tracker and essentially run the whole ecosystem yourself means that the worst that could happen is it might become abandonware.

Post reply on HN