Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was that quote from Jobs made before or after Apple's attempt to acquire Dropbox got turned down?
It was made to the CEO of Dropbox as he was trying to acquire it.
So standard negotiation tactics then.
Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
111–120 of 154 posts
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get why DB hasn't come up with a business model to let people just self-host content out of their accounts. They basically offer an instant web-server experience for non-tech folks, but they cap bandwidth for downloads. - How awesome would it be if I could dump a bunch of mp3 files and an html page or index file or something, get a URL from the service and suddenly my band has a website. Then if I go to…
Their other acquisition today - Loom - is on the annihilate Flickr path. I must say I do like your auto monetization angle though. If carousel is anything to go by, their 'we build UX ontop of your content' execution is so far a bit meh. Trouble is, as Twitter showed, there's no long term joy in building a competitor to a service using its API.
Well they had/have a huge opportunity to start an entire series of cottage industries like this but have completely failed to grab onto the idea. It seems like a pretty obvious extension of the "put a bunch of files in the cloud and sync" notion to me. After all, what's an app server but a bunch of program files stuck on a server drive?
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hackpad is an Etherpad fork, so you might conclude that someone has already done the work of wrangling Etherpade code and making those patches. ;)
Very true! It's not like it defies the laws of physics ... but, it also shows how much effort is needed to get to something with hackpad's usability on the etherpad core: years worth of work from very smart devs. If collaborative editing were the main focus of what I was working on, I'd say "yay, market opportunity!" But as it is, I just want to be able to plug in (and contribute to) a good open-source option. Which…
maybe the hackpad creators will open-source and/or release upstream patches to etherpad! cough
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
"suburb" Yeah, it turns out there's a lot more space in suburbs than urban centers.
Point taken. In downtown Chicago, I can get an extremely nice 2000sqft+ 2 bed/2bath luxury condo with 2 parking spaces, and still have money left over at $4K/month. I still believe SFBA real estate to be insane.
I think a better word than "insane" is "unsustainable." A pet theory of mine is that if the median household salary in a given locality isn't enough to qualify for the median mortgage in the same locality, that locality has a problem. All of San Francisco has that problem and an increasing amount of the area around it does, too. I'm not sure when this will come home to roost, but I'd be surprised if it isn't within the next couple of years. (I also suspect the tolerance for spending three hours a day commuting between SF and the South Bay, even on private buses, will drop as the commuters age, but we'll see.)
There are still places which are considerably cheaper and even still accessible via regional transit like BART, but they're cheaper because they're not considered "interesting" neighborhoods. In another 6-12 months we may see a lot more people deciding the East Bay isn't so bad after all.
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They need to go head-to-head with the Drive/Docs/Apps provision coming from Google If that's really the play, Hackpad isn't the right acquisition. The real value is in the sheets/excel space, and the knowledge of collaborative document editing doesn't naturally translate to spreadsheets (the general nature of edits are not linear)
Is there anyone seriously pursuing the space? There's ethercalc but they don't seem to have much steam ...
I'd consider Smartsheet.com to be playing in that space.
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
So was a trillion dollars in fraud. "NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said."
Most people here who don't have good opinion of Condoleezza Rice (myself included) because of the significant parts she played during the Bush Administration probably agree with the points you're making. However, gender has nothing to do with it. Building your criticisms on top of misogyny throws your entire motivations into question. The foundation has already rotted out and the rest of your arguments fell through;…
I sort of agree, believe it or not. At the same time, I must confess to harboring a dislike for polite civilized discourse in at least a couple circumstances.
The films in the Hunger Games series (especially the first) really nail something: the way barbarians hide behind polite rhetoric and noble behavior. The brilliance of things like the original punk movement -- and comedians since time immemorial -- has been to mock that, to discuss the piggish behavior of corrupt elite deviants in appropriately piggish language.
Condi's behavior in the 2000s I believe merits a little mockery for the upper-class rules of conduct that people like her hide behind.
Of course I've had a mild personal disdain for the trappings of polite society ever since I did a stint in business consulting and watched the way white collar sociopaths conduct themselves in the real world. I'd rather count myself among the trash, thank you very much.
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#117Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#118This is how it was always going to go. Dropbox's core business is unsustainable, and they can't compete long-term with rivals like Google and Apple. They're flailing in all directions at the moment; pushing for the enterprise/government market with the appointment of Condoleezza Rice, now burning a load of money acquiring businesses offering tangential services, in the hope they can diversify their business model. It…
I still don't get why DB hasn't come up with a business model to let people just self-host content out of their accounts. They basically offer an instant web-server experience for non-tech folks, but they cap bandwidth for downloads. - How awesome would it be if I could dump a bunch of mp3 files and an html page or index file or something, get a URL from the service and suddenly my band has a website. Then if I go to…
Dropbox is good at what they do. What you're describing is already served by an ecosystem of sites, which can be connected with, for example, If This Then That (http://ifttt.com) . And you can host static sites from Dropbox in various ways: http://www.maketecheasier.com/4-ways-to-host-your-website-on....
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politicians aren't the source of power, they are conduits of power. Rice happened to be a very good conduit.
May I ask what/who you think is the source then?
In the anarchic world the power originates at the muzzle of a gun, which in turn roughly corresponds with the economic power. However, this arrangement has high costs of conflict resolution, so in the post-anarchy world violence is ceded by society to be the monopoly of the state, and politicians are set to be conduits of the economic power towards the power of the state. Where politicians don't do their job, economic power goes out whack with political power resulting into a violent upheaval.
Therefore in modern society power lies with economic actors - people, capital, or any other entity that has economic impact and can be modeled as pursuing its own interests (self-preservation and some expansion).
A stable society would represent the interests of the people and the interests of the capital in proportion to their economic influence. Some actors will usually try to usurp the power at the expense of less diligent and/or less organized actors.
A great deal of the usurpation is based on demoralizing the opponent - if your opponent believes fighting for representation if power structures is pointless, you will have more power for yourself.
Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)
#120This is how it was always going to go. Dropbox's core business is unsustainable, and they can't compete long-term with rivals like Google and Apple. They're flailing in all directions at the moment; pushing for the enterprise/government market with the appointment of Condoleezza Rice, now burning a load of money acquiring businesses offering tangential services, in the hope they can diversify their business model. It…
I still don't get why DB hasn't come up with a business model to let people just self-host content out of their accounts. They basically offer an instant web-server experience for non-tech folks, but they cap bandwidth for downloads. - How awesome would it be if I could dump a bunch of mp3 files and an html page or index file or something, get a URL from the service and suddenly my band has a website. Then if I go to…
"I just don't get it."
Timing (sometimes) matters. [1]
It is entirely possible that they might actually have offerings like this planned but prefer to offer them either later or in stages in order to keep up some type of growth that investors expect.
Similarly it's common in some types of businesses to hold off booking sales until a later time period if recent revenue is "good enough" for a particular purpose.
That way you can continue to grow and not, for example, "shoot your load" all at one time.
Of course I have no clue as to why what you suggest is not being offered (independent of whether it is actually a good idea or not). But in business there are definitely reasons not to offer all the things you can do just because you can.
(And of course there could be a slew of other reasons as well, I'm just offering one perspective.)
[1] Another example might be (happened frequently in "olden times") rolling out software features not all at once so customers have a reason to buy a later version of the product.