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Comment by ljw1001 | Hacker News Reader

Burn investor money (or in this case, profits from your near monopoly position in another business) to give away something for free until your competitors are dead (or never enter the market in the first place. Then raise prices. And raise prices. This Model is the new Silicon Valley way. Consumers love it til the party stops

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> until your competitors are dead

So DropBox, Box, and OneDrive are all dead?

The concept you're describing is predatory pricing, but that doesn't appear to apply at all here. Market competition is alive and well in the cloud storage space.

Dropbox is 2-3TB, Onedrive is 1TB, not really the same.

Box might be comparable? I've heard very little about people using them.

> Onedrive is 1TB

And is also complete ass.

I find that OneDrive tends to get hung up if it comes across a file that it can't read due to a lock. PyCharm for example will create a lock file, and it will cause OneDrive to halt all syncing until I close PyCharm and the lock file gets removed.

Yes, I think most people would say Box is the top cloud storage provider for enterprise, and that Google's playing catchup to them.

You don't hear about them because they're focused on enterprise, not on consumers.

Nearly every other cloud storage provider did the same thing. The only difference is the timing.

Is Dropbox dead?

I had to check. Share price performance tracks Google pretty closely, YTD at least.

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/DBX#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6ImRheSIs...

I was surprised to learn that https://www.engadget.com/dropbox-records-first-profit-ever-1... it's the first year Dropbox is profitable since going public.

I find it funny that Dropbox is used as the example of HN nerds saying how they couldn't understand how something was a business because there are so many easy ways to implement it. If it never made money, it wasn't a business.

The original thread was shitting on the idea of an online storage solution. The idea was good, its just every other tech company jumped on the same boat and crushed drop box.

Was it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Yes. Stating that the product was useless due to FTP+SVN/USB drives was incorrect. The idea was a huge success. Dropbox just wasn't the one that got the reward.

My comment didn't say that the product was useless, and it certainly didn't shit on the idea of an online storage solution. In that thread, I was saying that I already had an online storage solution, and it was working pretty well for me. When I said the notorious "quite trivially" phrase, I was in fact predicting that it would be easy for every other tech company to jump on the same boat.

Regarding USBs, Dropbox's messaging at the time was "throw out your USB drives", and this was before smartphones or ubiquitous dependable network connections. At the time, if I had to give a presentation in a university classroom, Dropbox wasn't moving the bar much on that particular problem.

It's hilarious now you're backtracking and pretending that you weren't shitting on the idea but that other players would implement the same. Very clear that you were saying since someone could do it themselves why would they need a seperate app for it ,why else did you list it as qualms with the app?

Is your ego really that fragile that you can't admit you made a mistake judging a business?

No, but they keep trying to do things with accessibility on my Mac to give them access that Apple doesn't think they should have.

Their price on 2TB for $9.99/month is competitive with Apple but we have 4 Macs, 5 iPads, and 5 iPhones. Much easier to have the Apple devices backing up to iCloud.

I did look at their Plus/Professional/Team offerings https://www.dropbox.com/plans and they do look useful for a lot of business cases.

By the way, they cut the number of devices that could access an account from unlimited to 3 on the free account. Fair enough but I was somebody who earned extra gigabytes in 250MB chunks for every person I referred to them.

That's an OS upgrade thing. They didn't request enough access originally and after upgrades had to ask for more. As annoying as those access restriction requests are, they're probably the best implementation I've seen that is clear enough for the average user to accept and still understand what they're doing.

Google drive is a pretty amazing failure though.

Dropbox use has only increased and MS bundling Onedrive with O365 was genius.

I started using using Drive because Pop OS automatically mounts it when you enter your gmail.

Drive is the easiest thing to setup on Linux and my iPhone...

This is how you get market capa that are 40x annual revenue. It is the potential of extraction.

Nothing new: Oracle has paved the way with Java and databases. Exploit the potential until the last customer leaves. Which makes a corollary: Most of the revenue of a company happens when customers are massively leaving.

Also nothing new: Online banks. "Hey, put your money in us and get this great interest rate!" Couple years later: "Oh, now you get .005%. Enjoy."

Although banks have to be careful since transferring $100k to another bank is significantly faster and easier than transferring 100TB to another cloud storage service.

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