How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions • Hacker News Board

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#71

Post by ralfd » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

> ...as he sat down in his seat, Mr Houston realised that he had forgotten the memory stick that contained all the files. "I was so frustrated because I felt like this kept happening," he says. "I never wanted to have the problem again, so having nothing else to do... I started writing some code [to find a solution], having no idea what it would become." What Mr Houston came up with was the idea for Dropbox - remote storage that users can access online wherever they may be. Within two weeks he had created the prototype, and come up with the name.

Funny. I (and I guess countless people before) would have come up with a remote login via dyndns to my home computer or using ftp to some server. The idea of dropbox seems so obvious in hindsight but we were all blind.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#72

Post by msh » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:18 AM UTC

telchar wrote: post #55

arbie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me about it. Google Backup and Sync is a horrendous mess, taking several hours just to start syncing every time the sync engine is relaunched.

Really? And I thought Dropbox was slow. I find myself asking what's the point of gigabit internet when I haven't found a service that users more than 50Mb.

I had the same Dropbox slowness. On Google drive I see speeds around 400 megabits over my gigabit fiber.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#73

Post by laumars » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:20 AM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #71

> ...as he sat down in his seat, Mr Houston realised that he had forgotten the memory stick that contained all the files. "I was so frustrated because I felt like this kept happening," he says. "I never wanted to have the problem again, so having nothing else to do... I started writing some code [to find a solution], having no idea what it would become." What Mr Houston came up with was the idea for Dropbox - remote…

I wouldn't say obvious. The reason you and I would have engineered the kinds of solutions you described (albeit I'd use HTTP(S) rather than FTP(S) because FTP needs to die) is because we would have designed something that didn't require installing additional software on the client machine (I mean other than what you'd normally expect on said machines).

Dropbox was originally scorned on HN because they took a different approach yet history has now proven they had a good idea.

So I wouldn't say it was obvious at all.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#74

Post by k__ » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:39 AM UTC

matte_black wrote: post #49

How many schools allow you to recontinue your education again if you drop out to start a company but it fails? Seems like if I had this option I would have dropped out at least once.

Some remote universities, I guess.

I'm studying a MCompSci for 7 years now and it only costs me 11€ when I don't do any courses in a semester.

I got all courses done, just need time for the thesis, hehe

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#75

Post by israrkhan » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:46 AM UTC

ValentineC wrote: post #44

kornish wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably done to prevent people from creating many free accounts and sharing folders with each other to simulate having more storage space.

Google Drive seems to have done this right — the file only counts towards the storage quota of the creator/"owner" of the file. That particular approach does have some other issues though.

What is wrong about Google Drive is that they count your email and drive storage in same quota. Few months ago, I exceeded my quota on Drive, and Gmail started giving me warning that I am running out of space, and will stop receiving emails if I do not upgrade, or free-up space.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#76

Post by xyzzyz » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:48 AM UTC

israrkhan wrote: post #75

ValentineC wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive seems to have done this right — the file only counts towards the storage quota of the creator/"owner" of the file. That particular approach does have some other issues though.

What is wrong about Google Drive is that they count your email and drive storage in same quota. Few months ago, I exceeded my quota on Drive, and Gmail started giving me warning that I am running out of space, and will stop receiving emails if I do not upgrade, or free-up space.

What is wrong about it? Would you prefer to have 2 GB shared quota, or separate quota of 1 GB each? With shared quota you have more flexibility as to what service you prefer to use more.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#77

Post by tjoff » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:02 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #76

israrkhan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong about Google Drive is that they count your email and drive storage in same quota. Few months ago, I exceeded my quota on Drive, and Gmail started giving me warning that I am running out of space, and will stop receiving emails if I do not upgrade, or free-up space.

What is wrong about it? Would you prefer to have 2 GB shared quota, or separate quota of 1 GB each? With shared quota you have more flexibility as to what service you prefer to use more.

Email is a critical service. Loosing emails because a misclick or uploaded a too big of file is not acceptable UX.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#78

Post by throwawayqdhd » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:09 AM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #7

_bxg1 wrote: post #6

When Google Drive and iCloud and One Drive all cropped up, copying the same service with the addition of deeper integration into different devices and software, I was worried Dropbox would be unable to compete. But they've hung in there, and I remain a happy customer.

Out of curiousity, what does Dropbox do for you that they don't? Have you stayed because of price, service, features, laziness to switch? :) I personally don't have many storage needs so I just email myself important files, back up some things to USB, and sometimes will add things to Google Drive

Google Drive lost some of my files due to syncing errors early on. Dropbox didn't.

Google Drive might have improved since (and I do use Google Apps for email and documents), but I haven't been able to forget that experience and trust Dropbox.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#79

Post by keerthiko » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:17 AM UTC

toomanybeersies wrote: post #33

Slightly off topic, but I discovered the other day that shared folders count towards the disk quota for each account it's shared to. I had several GB of photos shared with me on Dropbox, and it blew right over my free limit, despite the fact that none of them were actually mine. The photos also count towards the quota of the account sharing with me. That's soured me quite a lot on Dropbox.

You can leave shared folders if you don't want it to take up your space. Just ask the owner to make the folder public and share the link with you and you can view the pictures in the browser or download the folder as a zip and keep a snapshot of the folder locally. Seems reasonable to me.

If they didn't have this limitation, I would 100% have made tens of accounts and shared folders across all of them owned by just one of them, each device running a different dropbox account, effectively quadrupling my space for free.

Re: How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

#80

Post by kristianp » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #6

When Google Drive and iCloud and One Drive all cropped up, copying the same service with the addition of deeper integration into different devices and software, I was worried Dropbox would be unable to compete. But they've hung in there, and I remain a happy customer.

What kind of deeper integration do you find useful in those competing services?

For me, I found OneDrive being automatically installed on windows and nagging me to sign on too intrusive. Windows setting the default Document folder to onedrive would be convenient if I hadn't already signed up to dropbox, but it's just annoying if I don't have Onedrive. I like the fact that Dropbox isn't part of google or microsoft, which already have a lot of my info in their email services.