What did Steve Jobs mean by: Dropbox / storage being 'a feature, not a product.' | Hacker News Reader

What did Steve Jobs mean by: Dropbox / storage being 'a feature, not a product.'

How can we differentiate between feature and product?

With examples please.

It should be part of other apps, where the option of storage class (local/cloud) is configured. Sure it's something you sign up for and install stuff to accomplish, but in that way it's like a driver or support for a file system.

E.g. I never, ever run Dropbox's 'app'. I have no interest in their weird way of looking at files. I just want my docs to be available everywhere. That's it.

> E.g. I never, ever run Dropbox's 'app'. I have no interest in their weird way of looking at files. I just want my docs to be available everywhere. That's it.

Thank you. This is the kind of intuitive example I was seeking.

IIRC this came up when Apple tried to buy Dropbox - it was a way to accelerate the building of iCloud Drive. The Files app is essentially Apple's version of Dropbox, they make money charging for storage.

From what I recall a MSFT executive made a similar comment to Google that search was not a product (which turned out to be true).

How do we know for certain (certain) that Search is not a product? After all, hasn't Google made billions off of it? If it's not a product, then is it a feature? What is it a feature of? If neither product nor feature, what is it?

What Google has made money on are the ads that show up next to the search results. That's their way of "charging" for search if you like.

Similarly for iCloud Drive / Dropbox, what they charge you for is storage, not the ability to look things up.

Search is a feature of the index / overall data catalog.

Fair point. So in this conceptualization, Google's "product" is advertising, and search is a feature that supports advertising.

That's right. :)

It sure is a product when the incumbents won't support that "feature".

Microsoft wants to write to it's cloud(s), apple wants to write to icloud, phones, laptops, desktops, etc.

Apple still protects their "not a product" icloud by saving lots of things there that it won't let you do yourself, then sort of scares you into paying for it.

sigh. Would be great to have a decent personal icloud.

he probably meant: syncing your files across devices should be a feature not a product. a feature of the os (icloud).

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