Competition Doesn't Matter. Look at Dropbox. | Hacker News Reader

Competition Doesn't Matter. Look at Dropbox.

blog.waxman.me

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I disagree slightly, I don't think this can be simplified to all competition doesn't matter at all.

Here's a few cases which I've found that competition doesn't matter:

* Competition is ugly.

* Competition is hard-to-use.

* Competition is broken to some extent.

* Competition is not solving the pain.

In these cases, ignore the competition, it doesn't matter. But some cases, I think competition does matter. If the competition really is doing a great job at solving the pain, has reached a significant scale, and isn't doing any of the above, then it does matter.

I think Mint.com is a beautiful product, easy-to-use, works well, and solves the pain. Competing against Mint as a new, better financial service would be very hard, because its hard to be an order of magnitude better. Some would argue that it is broken to some extent.

Dropbox is beautiful, easy-to-use, definitely not broken, and solves the pain. All others before it were hard to setup, or didn't work well, or didn't solve the real pain (e.g. Microsoft's 6GB filesize limit). I bet Receivd will be good because Dropbox doesn't solve the exact same pain that Receivd is, at least for how I understand it.

Don't take "Doesn't Matter" out of context. This is using this in the context of someone else say "But someone is already doing this" and your reply being "Doesn't matter."

Of course any competition will effect your business, but this can actually be something great. Having competition is like hiring a team of people (for free) to do the same thing you are doing but in a different way and then having them present the results to you.

Competition is not your enemy. It's an important part of a system.

"It reminded me of when, in 2007, Drew Houston stormed onto the scene with his "GDrive killer," which was, of course, Dropbox."

So wait, Drew Houston specifically made and positioned his product in response to perceived competition, and the moral of the blog post is "Focus on your product instead of looking over your shoulder at the competition." Does not follow. The moral I got out of it was that perceived stiff competition can drive you to make something really, really good, even if the competition never actually materializes.

I don't recall Drew ever calling it a GDrive killer, in the couple conversations I had with him about Dropbox. And, GDrive was a hypothetical product at the time, and still mostly a hypothetical product today. I'm guessing they were probably considering the impact a Google competitor would have on their product, just like they probably considered the impact Apple, Microsoft, and others would have. But, I don't think they were designing based on what they thought the big guys would make.

The OP does not precisely attribute "GDrive killer" to Drew, but simply puts the expression in quotes (of someone's - or of public chatter?):

>>Drew Houston stormed onto the scene with his "GDrive killer," which was, of course, Dropbox

The concept is 'coo-petition'. Or at least that was the name of the book.

Your competition actually invests in advertising and other stuff, that actually makes the pie a bigger pie. A big pie is a good industry. No competition can mean a vastly smaller pie.

And you then take a piece of the cake, the bigger the piece, the better for you.

A possibly more precise way of expressing this thought is: "Competition from big players doesn't necessarily equate to a death sentence to small players".

Had a similar thought yesterday: "Google Code and Launchpad are run by big players, yet Github is the real leader. Yet another argument against "XYZ big corp might smash us"." - http://twitter.com/clemesha/status/55400961652441088

> A possibly more precise way of expressing this thought is: "Competition from big players doesn't necessarily equate to a death sentence to small players".

Absolutely. The key point here is that you avoid being squashed by the competition by being better than the competition. Just because the competition is a big company doesn't mean that you can't be better than them.

But, unless I misunderstood the article, competition was not even a factor. The GDrive didn't exist then and it doesn't exist now.

I think the "XYZ Big Corp might smash us" fear is a corollary to the "winner-take-all, and first-to-market wins" fear, which itself is a corollary to the "ideas are everything" paradigm. Needless to say, history does not bear this thinking out in the tech space.

More than in almost any other industry, in technology, the best implementation for the right segment at the right time usually wins. That "right time" might mean first-to-market, but often it doesn't. Sometimes the market needs a first-mover to familiarize people with the concept and establish the pain points with that concept, which the second- or third-mover then perfects.

As for XYZ Big Corp, it's true that they'll always have resource advantages. But they've also got resource disadvantages in the form of corporate politics, bureaucracy, prioritizations and allocations of capital and talent, and so forth. Plus, one should not underestimate the advantage that a handful of uberpassionate-bordering-on-obsessive, working-all-hours hackers will have over an equivalent handful of corporate clock-punchers assigned to a project.

I think fear of big players is sort of orthogonal to the thoroughly debunked "ideas are everything" notion. Even if you are the first mover in a given market, you might afraid that Google could release a competing product tomorrow and eat your lunch.

In terms of Google, those fears are pretty unfounded. Google releases new products all the time that fail to gain traction.

Yes. There's always grass to eat between the feet of the elephants.

I've always thought soda is the ultimate example. Tons of players, big and small, even though Coke "owns it" by practically every metric. 100% market share is extremely rare.

"Richard Revell had hoped to launch his cola and lemonade milk soda at the National Fieldays in Hamilton in New Zealand, which attracts about 140,000 farmers." "But instead of being on show, he has been banned from selling his drink because it constitutes competition for Coca-Cola."

[Fizzy milk maker takes on Coca-Cola](http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/13/2925765.htm)

They 'own' small players more than you realise.

Ummmm...Dropbox has had competition from the start. Skydrive, Box.net, Syncplicity and so on. So the article's premise really doesn't stand (though I don't disagree with him on the quality of Dropbox)

I agree. This premise is really based on specific markets/niches/products.

Dropbox has had competition from the start, but their specific focus was entirely different. Skydrive gave an enourmous amount of space for free. Dropbox made it easy to insure that your files are available anywhere. Even with Windows Live Mesh and 25gb of space, Dropbox is still far superior because of it's focus on "just works" file syncing and access.

This is so true. I have yet to find another competitor that even compares to dropbox. All the other competitors have their own client to move/view files (Receivd looks like it does too). dropbox works right away and the learning curve is nill. All you have to do is login and use your computer like normal.

Livedrive is very similar to dropbox.

In fact, I found Dropbox looking for alternatives to Livedrive when their Beta ended.

I'm not sure the different companies that Dropbox may ultimately kill would agree that competition doesn't matter.

In a large complex market with enough differentiation there can be many new varied startups all of whom thrive. When several companies go after the same well defined space and one is better then most of the rest will suffocate e.g. Google v. other search engines.

What this article really says is "competition doesn't matter if you're the winner" which is sort of true but not very informative.

The premise of this article is flawed at best. Once it's established that one firm in an industry has a clear advantage, it doesn't make sense to say "Competition doesn't matter. Look at X" because that's selection bias. Of course at that point that firm X has succeeded, but not because there was no competition, but because, for some reason, X beat its competition either on the product, marketing/positioning, or otherwise.

Certainly competition Did matter: Dropbox is competing with other solutions and killling Them.

"And who knows why Google hasn't launched a cloud storage locker yet. But this is four years later."

They did. It's called Google Storage for Developers and it's similar to Amazon S3: https://code.google.com/apis/storage/

I am not familiar with inner mechanism of Dropbox, so the following comment only comes from my daily use:

Is Dropbox a storage service or sync service? I more felt like the latter. Dropbox aggressively cache everything in your Dropbox folder into local, which would eat up the local storage space. In that sense, it doesn't provides extra storage space, rather, it provides a way to sync files between different devices, includes a S3 storage backend. Well, that maybe different from its mobile client, but on PC client, I really don't see why Dropbox will help you save your local disk storage cost (though arguably why you should save local disk storage cost since it is so cheap).

Would have to disagree with competition being bad, its not the cure all, thats for sure, but its not pointless by any means. AT&T proved this quite well when they had a monopoly of the telephone system. Innovation was on its door step, but it had no motivation to let it in, because they were the only gig in town. Competition in the business world also keeps you on your toes. The initial idea, the building of the business, might motivate to start, but a threat of competition keeps you trying to improve for the long haul. Perhaps there is a distinction in there, competition is great for the end users, it gives them better products, for business it makes a sporting event out of it, where you can win or loose. Competition is good of course when, the people competing play nice, and strive to be the best at what they do, and actually make a better product. Instead of doing what ever it takes, no matter how dirty to win. Where then its not about a competition of skill in the chosen market, its about cutting down the competition so you look better. Sort of like patent squatters, nothing to do with the skill of creating a great product, and everything to do with profiting off someone else taking it from idea to product.

Competition doesn't matter, if your competitor...

...has a flawed vision. Then it is just market validation.

...has entrenched interests inside the company. Then it is subject to the innovator's dilemma. The bigger the company, the more likely they will drop the ball.

...is human (or Microsoft :-) ). Then they are prone to missteps.

A market without competitors is not necessarily a blessing! There might be a good reason.

Despite the colorful name, "Marketing Warfare" (Al Ries and Jack Trout, 1986) is a classic (and concise!) book about product positioning: defining your product in relation to your competition. They describe the unique strategies that smaller competitors can use to "own" a position in your customers' mind. Dropbox vs GDrive/Skydrive would be a perfect case study.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Marketing_war...

Why is the focus on GDrive in an article written today? Sure, 4 years ago it was a reasonable fear to believe that Google would crush the competition in any space they entered. Since then Facebook has revealed significant weaknesses in Google's ability to compete in social and brought them down to earth considerably. An analysis of DropBox's success needs to consider the numerous competitors at the time they started rather than a years-old Google specter.

Perhaps a better way of articulating this is: "Focus on your own game." Be Tiger Woods (before the hookers, etc). Focus on being the best at what you do. Let the competition follow you.

The reason I rephrased is that the competition always matters. You may be able to make a better product, but if the competition is so strong and differentiation so lacking in the market that you will never be able to make any money, then you are in trouble regardless.

Next big thing in the "cloud storage" market: cloud storage aggregator.

I don't want to keep track of where all my stuff is between Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, SkyDrive, Zumodrive, MobileMe, etc. - or at least do want a tool to manage them and move files between without hassle and from any interface (browser, PC, iPad, etc).

Get busy guys.

How can it be competition if there is no competition? I'd rather call it the expectation of upcoming competition. Or the fear of future contenders; but isn't that universal? Whatever innovative product we craft, whatever niché we delve into, there's always the danger that competition will come.

If someone wants to inch in on dropbox's territory they could allow users to store their data where they choose - eg. their own server, friend code, or another computer with the same account anywhere on the net.

I think min.us may be the real dropbox killer. Dropbox is actually hard to understand for non-techies. Easier than ftp and stuff but still hard. There's a lot more innovation possible in this area.

You all missed the point.

>> Solve a problem. Build something that people want. Make it good. Focus on your product instead of looking over your shoulder at the competition.

subpoint (for you seth godin people out there) - don't let competition keep you from shipping.

Competition sometimes does matter. Proof: what if your competition were Dropbox?

I just started using Skydrive. 25GB of space for free. Competition does matter.

I had to lookup skydrive to find out what it was. DropBox is known, skydrive isn't. Even though it is a Microsoft product that doesn't guarantee success. What's the user experience? How is it growing? Are people recommending it?

You're right, competition does matter. It matters because it pushes people to constantly create improvements and better products.

However, the point of the article is to not fear competition to the point where you don't take action.

Also, even just thinking about using Skydrive on my Ubuntu netbook is painful. Dropbox is truly cross-platform and painless.

I should explain further. I started out with Dropbox and am almost at the limit. I don't have disposable income (startup founder). So I started looking for alternatives - that's when I discovered Skydrive.

PS. Have you tried Zumodrive - it's almost exactly like Dropbox.

Is $10/month disposable income? I spend more than that on coffee.

"I spend more than that on coffee."

LOL. Every web service is pitched to me at "less than the price of a cup of coffee a day"

Here are a few - 1) LinkedIn Business account 2) Emusic subscription 3) Adobe PDF writer 4) Freshbooks and the list goes on...

Competition does matter, but unadulterated awesomeness can trump it.

Competition doesn't matter. Look at Alta Vista.

why do you think google never launched a gdrive?

The moment you start focusing on protecting market share instead of improving your product or giving your customers more for their $$$ you're doomed.

OK. Vaporware does not matter.

I think we all know that :)

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