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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

I remember the hype when Nautilus first came out. I was a teenager, but even then, I had my doubts as to how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business. IIRC there were conversations about how to monetize it using premium add-ons which seemed pretty ridiculous at the time.

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So extra context that may help at least understand the perspective:

There was a considerable amount of overlap between the browser and the file manager originally. The notion of the modern day internet wasn't really here, and instead a lot of companies saw "browsing the web" as mostly equivalent to "browsing your files - but remotely".

Even Microsoft did this - "Windows Explorer" (The file manager) and "Internet Explorer" (The browser) shared a huge amount of code. To that point that I could still write COM browser helper objects that run in both of those programs as late as 2018 - only stopping when MS finally killed IE in favor of Edge-Chromium.

Basically - Back then the web was just files to be browsed, and that was the job of the file manager, and people correctly identified that the web had monetization opportunities. They were just bad at identifying exactly what they were.

Add to that, all the hype on file systems as well with BeOS FS or WinFS ( I had too look up the name of the abandoned Vista FS, I am almost sure it had another name), plenty of new FS were created during that era as well.

File management was a key activity at that time.

KDE's first browser and file manager was also the same app - Konqueror.

It was more than that. If you look at beta builds of Windows 95* they essentially integrate outlook into explorer. Effectively you would have a hierarchy for each layer of internet communication available from the file management.

*http://toastytech.com/guis/chicago4.html

I guess they figured it would be more profitable to sell that as a standalone product in the office suite.

>Even Microsoft did this - "Windows Explorer" (The file manager) and "Internet Explorer" (The browser) shared a huge amount of code.

And famously got sued for closely tying the browser with the OS, despite the design making technological sense.

I believe you could type a web address into Explorer and it loads the site... or the other way around, my memory is hazy

You can still do that to this day. But it seems like now it hooks into edge or presumably the default browser.

They died only 6 years before Dropbox was founded and had a plan to have cloud storage and an app store. It seems possible they could have executed well on those fronts and have nautilus "just" be a high-end frontend to the services. It probably required a very different mix of engineering focus though.

>how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business

Well, there are Total Commander and other commercial file managers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_managers

But you will note in the cost column that the ones making money are on windows/mac. Its possible to sell commercial software on linux, just not desktop software as such. Between the small and very fragmented marketshare between the distros there is a pretty strong user distaste for commercial offerings. Which means the headwinds for a successful product are a lot worse. If one wants to create a new filemanager/whatever a far better plan is to target windows/macos as the primary offerings/focus rather than linux in the beginning. I guess some of that is application specific (ex a git frontend might work) but one better have a reason other than "I like linux" if they want it to be something other than a hobby.

A user's "home page" is valuable real estate for good reason. If they could have become the home page for a large number of users then they might have been able to monetize without losing those users, but that's a pretty big if on a convoluted path.

> A user's "home page"

We'd (sadly) call that Facebook nowadays.-

No, it's generally talking about the page that comes up when you first open the browser, generally this is google or bing nowadays, or some portal your company or ISP redirects you to.

That homepage. Stand corrected. Thanks.-

yeah it might theoretically mean the first page they navigate to, but generally I think they mean the first page they start at. we had years of browsers and sites and malware all trying to hijack your homepage because it's valuable and often non-technical people don't know how to change it back and will just roll with it being what it is. I remember helping people who were confused if their homepage changed from aol or yahoo because they literally had no real concept of how to browse the internet and check their mail and such if the links weren't on the homepage.

At the time, there was the pervasive notion that a business didn't need to make a profit to be valuable as a public company, as long as it had a large number of loyal users. The practical issues of how to make a profit were almost ignored for most companies of that era. So it is not surprising to see that a company creating a new file explorer would be consider valuable, especially if that browser made lots of people switch to Linux (something that many people believed to be possible).

> At the time, there was the pervasive notion that a business didn't need to make a profit to be valuable as a public company, as long as it had a large number of loyal users.

Right, at the time...

Yeah, I also remember. It was the frothy time of the dot-com era where anyone with a novel idea could raise a couple millions. I was also scratching my head how you'd make money off Linux desktop users, considering there were very few of them, and they hated commercial software.

>Yeah, I also remember. It was the frothy time of the dot-com era where anyone with a novel idea could raise a couple millions.

It's still like that today, you build something attractive to users and assume you'll figure out the monetization later. It was more of a wild west back then because they were throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick since everything was still too new to guess at what would work though.

Their plan was to make people pay for image thumbnails? It all makes sense now! /s

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