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Dropbox for Gmail

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Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#51

Post by bambax »

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.

Cost of storage is already almost-infinite and almost-free, and yet Dropbox is thriving. Any big (or even not so big) tech company could have built Dropbox, and yet none did; they all produced a half-assed attempt that failed miserably in the marketplace.

Recently, it was reported that an MS me-too product was incapable of dealing with file paths of a certain length. In 2014!

I think this line "a feature not a product" is really really misguided (to avoid using a stronger word); a feature perfectly executed is precisely what a product should be.

So let's talk again in 5 years and see how Dropbox is doing, yes.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#52

Post by microtonal »

girzel wrote: post #50
brisance wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. We basically have an always-on Raspberry Pi in the closet to have a peer available all the time.

Though reading about their future attempts to monetize BTSync, I am not too hopeful about its future.

People will scream Syncthing, but that's often not a solution since you need to do port forwarding, which may not always be possible (e.g. if you are IPv4-connected via DS-Lite).

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#53

Post by girzel »

microtonal wrote: post #52
girzel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. We basically have an always-on Raspberry Pi in the closet to have a peer available all the time. Though reading about their future attempts to monetize BTSync, I am not too hopeful about its future. People will scream Syncthing, but that's often not a solution since you need to do port forwarding, which may not always be possible (e.g. if you are IPv4-connected via DS-Lite).

> monetize BTSync

That's a little depressing. Not that they shouldn't make money from their work but... it seems like there's so little to the actual code. Here's hoping that they keep it to an open source project I can donate funds to.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#54

Post by revorad »

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…

storage is a feature, not a product

This is such a strange strawman argument. Dropbox is not just some dumb storage. You may think syncing across computers and sharing are trivial things, but they are not.

Even if you're right, maybe it's not so bad if your "feature" company makes more money than most other product companies and is heading straight for an IPO.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#55

Post by Veus »

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…

Maybe 'dead' for personal usage however as part of Google Apps it is a no brainer and integrates nicely with the whole of the Apps suite. I am prepared to eat my words however I would be extremely surprised if Google kill off Drive for Apps.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#56

Post by digital-rubber »

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…

What is seen as a feature from mickeysofts point of view, is still a proper product from dropbox point of view.

And when will users complaint? When their storage, data is gone/lost etc, so why would mickeysoft even bother to provide storage. Let dropbox take the blame if data goes missing, M$ part worked flawless, it is dropbox that lost your data.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#59

Post by anarchitect »

Veus wrote: post #55
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…

Maybe 'dead' for personal usage however as part of Google Apps it is a no brainer and integrates nicely with the whole of the Apps suite. I am prepared to eat my words however I would be extremely surprised if Google kill off Drive for Apps.

I am in the process of migrating our organisation's various systems into one Google Apps domain.

In my experience Drive's usefulness is far greater when use Drive for both Docs and file storage rather than for file storage alone.

Re: Dropbox for Gmail

#60

Post by mercer »

ibrahima wrote: post #44
Spooky23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps it's harder to make something like Dropbox work? I wouldn't know; just wondering. Having Guido Van Rossum on board either means that they're doing hard stuff, or they like hiring overqualified people...
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