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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

Famously, Steve Jobs once called Dropbox “a feature, not a product.”

Steve also said "There’s no better mobile computing tool than your finger"... Now they're rolling out mouse support on the iPad.

I’m sure Jobs also commented on the merits of juicing, what does that have to do with Dropbox?

Damn!

Mouse support on iPadOS is explicitly an accessibility feature. It's pretty awkward to use and not what you'd choose if you have a choice.

I’d even call it intentionally designed to be bad, because they don’t want you to use it. Which is the opposite of what the parent comment is implying. They have the ability to port over the full Magic Mouse/Trackpad drivers from macOS with intuitive scrolling and gestures, but they chose to leave them broken and awful to use.

Maybe "products" are actually bad when they lock you into an ecosystem like the company Steve Jobs headed does.

You get that Dropbox has been desperately trying to turn into an ecosystem for its entire existence, right?

Yeah, VC is cancer.

I typically hear the categories as feature, product, platform (aka ecosystem). Apple is a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox is a feature/product, but definitely not a platform.

In SV, "just a feature" has a derogatory connotation, sort of like "lifestyle business". It causes people who run feature companies to try to get away from this characterization – even if it means stretching their business into something that it cannot easily become. This is especially true for features that have no moat, and which would therefore be Sherlocked [1] by companies like Apple.

1: https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-co...

Yeah, you've accurately explained how Silicon Valley culture can ruin companies that would be completely sustainable otherwise. Thanks!

For the record, I think both of these derogatory connotations are crap, and I run a "feature" startup myself. Fortunately, we don't need venture investment since we're running breakeven. Even with issued patents and paid licensees, it's nigh impossible to find VCs interested in a feature company.

It's true, Apple has deviously engineered it so their operating systems only run applications written for those operating systems. It's a good thing nobody else does that!

How can I sync to iCloud on my Android phone and Linux desktop?

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