Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Although Google launching Google Drive shows that they see value in a dropbox type system, what is that value? I can understand Youtube because video is a huge part of the internet and advertising, but what value is there in hosting peoples files? I can't work out where Dropbox would fit with Google.

View on HN

Every video started out as a file somewhere. Dropbox could do an end-run around all of this with file viewers, including video. And spreadsheets and so on. It could easily end up bigger than youtube, even if the take-off is a lot slower.

They're doing the right thing by keeping it simple as long as they can but I'm fairly sure they're savvy enough to have brainstormed each and every bit that they could add / leave out and their decisions so far have been to keep it lean.

It's smart because that way the bandwidth bill on the free tier is still within bounds, as soon as they pull out all the stops they can go head to head with any content store on the net based on the files they already have in their inventory.

I'm in no way privy to anything going on at dropbox and I have no stake in the outcome but if I were running a service and a formidable competitor announced their entry into my little empire I'd be gearing up for war.

They might do better maintaining Dropbox as a storage platform, and trying to get their storage API into as many web and mobile apps as possible.

So it fits in with their desire to bring all usable files to the cloud with google docs etc, okay that makes a lot of sense. Thanks! I don't use Dropbox regularly so I hadn't considered that people use it to share / manage files, I was only remembering about the desktop sync side of it.

This doesn't make sense to me. Having a lot of files stored on behalf of individuals does not translate into having a lot of files that users want shared or published. My DropBox account has several gigs of files but there aren't any in there that I'd opt to share publicly if they suddenly offered some kind of publishing platform.

Similar to email vs. Facebook, while there are lots of files people want to share, the reality is that _most_ content individual to users (i.e. not music downloads or software packages) is fairly private stuff.

Google wants people to Login. And remain Logged in. Gathering data about people is more valuable when it's tied to an individual.

(I'm very restrictive when i do have to login. I do what i'm there for. Nothing else. Then quickly logout.)

Don't you also need to remove cookies and perhaps clear local data?

I shouldn't have to. But i got no way to be sure Google leaves me completely. I auto-clear all types of cookies on each browser exit anyway, for performance.

I did the same (clear on startup), but then Firefox stopped crashing daily, doing it once a week doesn't seem enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com