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Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

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Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#81

Post by camus2 »

mimiflynn wrote: post #25
opendais wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that immediately sees that as a sign of 'Maybe people should setup satellite offices and stop recruiting in the Valley due to costs'?

Is remote work a viable option?

SF is really about concluding deals face to face and access for startups. Your main office could be in Costa Rica or Moldavia it doesnt matter(and I have great respect for these countries ), you want to sell a product or VC,it's better to actually have someone in SF, network is everything in business.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#82

Post by audreyt »

odl wrote: post #62
sheetjs wrote: post #54

Earlier 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 ...

"They" is just me and our wonderful & kind contributors. :)

EtherCalc was, is, and will remain a F/OSS infrastructure project, not a business enterprise.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#83

Post by dublinben »

unhush wrote: post #65

My favorite parts of Hackpad were the features that weren't intended to have mass-market appeal (ex: code syntax highlighting, markdown-inspired keybindings, ability to easily create/delete accounts). These will likely be gone in whatever notes product that Dropbox makes with the help of the (wonderful) Hackpad team. So for me, this acquisition seems like a loss. I realize that Hackpad has said that they'll keep the…

Have you tried Etherpad? I'm pretty sure it supports both markdown and syntax highlighting.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#84

Post by encoderer »

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…

"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.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#85

Post by encoderer »

api wrote: post #13
opendais wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the human capital pool really that tight in the Valley?

Given that a 2br apartment is $8000/month in some places, yeah.

This is silly. Nobody HAS to live in an $8k/mo 2br. Even here. You probably read that TC article which mentioned some apartments in a complex in Mountainview.

Yes, it's expensive, but no, it's not 8k, it's half that.

Moreover, what on earth would that have to do with acquihires?

The GP's assertion was hyperbole. Acquihires are not the "default hiring method."

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#86

Post by camus2 »

aridiculous wrote: post #42
DenisM wrote: post #35

Earlier 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?

the private corporations their party are financed by.

Cheney used to be the CEO of Halliburton, And strangely the Ben Laden family were investor in the Carlyle group: https://www.google.fr/search?q=bin+laden+family+investors, as were former CIA operatives ,the Ben Laden family are bankers.

Not even going into who The Bush family friends are,but a lot of answers and explanations can be found in the "Kingdom", Saudi Arabia.

EDIT :i'm not a conspiracy theorist, yet when you just follow the money, things get really really strange. But it did not start with Bush 2, Clinton was highly corrupted with Saudi money too.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#87

Post by toomuchtodo »

encoderer wrote: post #85
api wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that a 2br apartment is $8000/month in some places, yeah.

This is silly. Nobody HAS to live in an $8k/mo 2br. Even here. You probably read that TC article which mentioned some apartments in a complex in Mountainview. Yes, it's expensive, but no, it's not 8k, it's half that. Moreover, what on earth would that have to do with acquihires? The GP's assertion was hyperbole. Acquihires are not the "default hiring method."

> Yes, it's expensive, but no, it's not 8k, it's half that.

That's insane. I can live in a 4,000 sq foot 2 story 3 car garage in a very swank Chicago suburb for that price.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#88

Post by unhush »

dublinben wrote: post #83
unhush wrote: post #65

My favorite parts of Hackpad were the features that weren't intended to have mass-market appeal (ex: code syntax highlighting, markdown-inspired keybindings, ability to easily create/delete accounts). These will likely be gone in whatever notes product that Dropbox makes with the help of the (wonderful) Hackpad team. So for me, this acquisition seems like a loss. I realize that Hackpad has said that they'll keep the…

Have you tried Etherpad? I'm pretty sure it supports both markdown and syntax highlighting.

I'm aware that there's modules you can add to do those things. Are there public instances that have those installed? It's been a while since I used Piratepad et al.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#89

Post by bane »

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 www.dropbox.com under some "music" category see my band listed there next to a bunch of other bands. Voila, instant promotion. Now the entire independent music industry has a promotion venue. Setup some kind of friendly payment processor and now bands can sell their music direct. (and oh yeah, you get automagic copyright protection since they can scan all other user's accounts for illegal copies of your music).

- How about letting my Dad dump some word documents in a folder called Chapter 01.docx Chapter 02.docx etc. get a URL and people can come check out his book's site with automatic conversion to various ebook formats (and a payment processor to handle the transactions)?

- Or in my "podcasts" directory dump an mp3 of my latest podcast and have it automatically publish out to iTunes and various other podcast search engines?

- Completely annihilate flickr and other services by letting me dump a bunch of photos into a folder, get an admin URL so I can type up descriptions and other metadata (and geolocate stuff on a map) and a publish URL to give out to people. Let me do that with with both a personal folder and a "pro" folder. Let people go to my publish URL and buy photos from me (auto watermarked by DB) or partner with a photo print service so people can buy prints at various sizes.

the list goes on and on and on and I'd bet people would pay a little money to be able to do some of this. It seems so obvious and the little bit that DB supports (like photo albums) is so lackluster its almost not worth using. It would get people to start filling their spaces up with stuff further upselling them on the need to buy more space. With a little finagling they could even wrap a social network on top of all this content and back door into Facebook's space.

I just don't get it.

Re: Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12)

#90

Post by jdp23 »

unhush wrote: post #73
jdp23 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones Hackpad added :) And, raw Etherpad has a lot of usability problems as well. Plus it's challenging to integrate it with an outside authentication mechanism. I've looked at the code some and while on the one hand this could all be added, it's a clunky base. Node's come a long way since etherpad lite started.

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 may wind up being Etherpad, but I'd like to do better ...

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