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Comment by martingordon | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it was all of the people thinking HP selling TouchPads at a loss was a good idea or something else, but I've recently gone from indifferent to adamantly opposed to the whole "give it away for free and worry about money later" attitude that pervades our industry.

The only compelling aspect of the offering is the promise of free 10 GB of storage. I don't see a dollar sign anywhere on the site, so I don't understand how they intend to keep that promise for very long. I refuse to sign up for a product, much less take the time to integrate it into my workflow, without knowing that it will be around for longer than a few months.

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I'd have thought HP's idea was brilliant had I managed to get in on the deal.

But "we spent 100k on a domain name for a non monetised service which competes with dropbox file hosting on one hand, picasa and imgur on image hosting, letscrate and sendoid on file sharing, and has nothing to match Dropbox on the high end, and is 'just' framing S3 storage" screams "hello? Bueller? What are you doing?"

I can get 25Gb free from Windows Live Skydrive with Microsoft behind it, soon to be 5Gb free from app-integrated iCloud with Apple behind it, 5Gb free from JungleDisk, 2Gb free with industry leading sync from Dropbox, and miscellaneous 10Gb free from 4shared.com, 50Gb free from Adrive.com temporarily, 1Gb from freedrive, 1Gb from flipdrive, 1Gb from fileden, (and stuck in the past there's 20Mb from filegenie).

Thanks for the detailed comment, truly appreciate it and a lot to take in all at once ;)

There is a lot of noise in the space and a lot of competition, and as someone new entering the space, we definitely have a long way to go. We've only setup a team and started working on Minus full time about a month ago here in NYC. The vision behind Minus is and will be focusing on creating a simple and universal sharing experience.

Minus will evolve over time and we are open to all suggestions and feedback on how to improve and hopefully you'll think differently in few months :) Not sure if you saw, but we have many apps also available via http://minus.com/pages/tools that we're working on simultaneously and improving along with the web front.

Thanks!

The vision behind Minus is and will be focusing on creating a simple and universal sharing experience.

Listen, I'm glad you are enthusiastic about your product and I wish you guys luck. But, seriously what is not simple about Dropbox? Are you hoping to grab market share simply by offering people free space? Who is dying to switch over to your service over Dropbox (or any other large competitor)? OR are you just trying to go along the journey to see if there is anything in the market that will differentiate yourself?

Thanks Michael. It is definitely going to be a long journey and we will learn and improve over. This is only the beginning :)

I can't tell if your refusal to answer the question is just avoiding giving away your plan, or if it's an indication that you don't have one at all.

If you don't have one, my suggestion is to start with native folder support. I use Dropbox because I don't have to use my browser to use it. That would be a good place to start.

thanks for the suggestion, we'll definitely study more and prioritize the next steps and directions to take Minus :)

> but I've recently gone from indifferent to adamantly opposed to the whole "give it away for free and worry about money later" attitude that pervades our industry.

As funding continues to dry up, this problem will take care of itself. (It's already far better than back in the days of the tech bubble, which was really where the "ignore profits" stupidity went parabolic.

Thanks for the comment and your concerns are very valid. We're fully confident in keeping the service up/free and are currently deployed in Amazon's EC2/S3 with many optimizations for cost saving.

We're also seed-funded and that gives us room to go further without monetization for longer period of time while we work the features/bugs out :)

Thanks again!

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