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Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

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Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#141

Post by xerophtye »

omarhegazy wrote: post #126
UVB-76 wrote: post #32

This 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…

How is Dropbox's core business unsustainable? The way I see it, Dropbox wants to be the filesystem and personal hard drive of the Internet. Easy enough business, just sell hard drive space. And as always with any software business, with users, you have data, and with data, you have potential advertiser money and a lot of investor interest. Why can't they rival Google/Apple? Yes, bigger companies have a lot more resou…

But i agree, it's not necessarily unsustainable. They just need to focus on PAYING customers more, and they'd find most of them in the enterprise market. So yes, tying content-creation with content-storage is an EPIC move, but they need to keep in mind that this needs to be done with the focus on the enterprise user.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#142

Post by amirmc »

larrys wrote: post #120
bane wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

"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 w…

It's not always about stable growth, either. Sometimes you need to drip feed your customers new tech and possibilities lest you spook them with weird and wonderful things that they were not expecting (with the negative consequence that they no longer understand you and jump ship to 'simpler' options).

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#144

Post by johnward »

kenjackson wrote: post #124
tomhschmidt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Search was enough to sustain Google and still is its cash cow. They branched out due to interest, not out of necessity. Dropbox's current business will not sustain and they NEED these acquisitions to find viable business models for the long haul. What I don't understand about these acquisitions is how tangential it is to Dropbox's original value prop of being a "dumb" folder that would magicall…

Advertising I'd their cash cow. Google's original business model was enterprise search. It took them a bit of time to land on their current business model m

I think many people forget that Google wasn't really sure how to make money until they completely changed online advertising with AdWords/AdSense. Everyone else was content with your standard banner ads and rates. Google made those relevant to the search context. Since that time they have made money hand over fist.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#145

Post by Retric »

UVB-76 wrote: post #108
encoderer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Acquisitions like this never go to plan." That kind of absolutism sounds silly to me. And my analysis of the situation is different. I see it as dropbox adding a services layer on top of the platform of storage they built. You already see other companies doing this -- using the dropbox platform. If I'm dropbox, I see a lot of opportunity there.

The Dropbox 'platform' is razor-thin, and their core offering is fast becoming a commodity. At the moment, their business model doesn't extend much beyond brokering storage space. They are simply a middle-man between end users and Amazon S3, whose value add is some software that makes the process of storing and sharing files relatively pain-free. They're good at what they do, and their software is nice, but in the lo…

Dropbox works on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux. Because it's not just a website they can do things like automatically backup your phones photo's.

They avoid storing duplicate files between users which dramatically reduces storage space on S3 in ways single users can't. But, also allows them to add cheap versioning as there not storing 1 copy per user of each file.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#146

Post by yoshyosh »

bane wrote: post #89
UVB-76 wrote: post #32

This 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…

They can easily do a lot of things. I think the challenge is the messaging/marketing. People know dropbox because it does one specific thing well.

If they were to do this, I think it would have to be spun out as its own service. This makes it much easier to market and message. You are seeing similar things in the mobile space with Facebook unbundling its app.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#147

Post by larrys »

amirmc wrote: post #142
larrys wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 w…

It's not always about stable growth, either. Sometimes you need to drip feed your customers new tech and possibilities lest you spook them with weird and wonderful things that they were not expecting (with the negative consequence that they no longer understand you and jump ship to 'simpler' options).

"that they no longer understand you and jump ship to 'simpler' options"

Exactly. And both tech people and people with the ability to understand these incremental changes are not in a position to know what amounts to "to much" which can be a problem. Because they might have higher level abilities or they are just processing the incremental features which are relatively easy.

I remember at a company that I owned constantly adding new machinery. I could understand it on delivery same day. Employees who had to operate it couldn't. So I ended up with a bunch of machines that also when new employees were hired were tied together in a very complicated fashion. It caused many problems and complicated the process and offerings.

(Thanks for reminding me of this I had forgotten that point.)

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#148

Post by stillsut »

DropBox looks like the company that walks on four legs, then two, then three. First, it was just a smart choice to replace emailing yourself files. Pretty soon, it will be an IBM, where some sales guy will convince your boss that the DropBox Q1000 is what your business needs for synergy and you'll end up having to use it.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#149

Post by nickstinemates »

xerophtye wrote: post #138
cdelsolar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a cool idea. Why don't you build it?

It has already been built. Bane's point is that why doesn't dropbox buy THOSE services and see if they can expand on it. For example docker.io is a paid service for the above use case. Dropbox might be getting a cut from them, but if docker has successfully demonstrated that there is a market for this, wouldn't it be better form dropbox to aquire them and push in that direction?

What an interesting perspective.
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