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Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

I would suspect that Dropbox has a pretty fanatic group of fans out there. I'm one: Dropbox saved my ass when Boot Camp wrecked my hard drive. 7 years of documents were all saved, even though I'd deleted them from Dropbox previously. That's an incredible service. I recommend it to everybody who needs a good way to store stuff online, or share stuff.

Google isn't omnipotent. Orkut was a terrible social network because they just didn't get what to do. I'd guess same goes with that animated world they made that just recently closed. While they're powerful, it's really hard to beat out a truly stellar product, and Dropbox is one of the best I've seen.

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Not that I like or use Orkut, but keep in mind it's the #1 social network in some countries. The story has to be a bit more complicated than "it's terrible, they just didn't get it."

I've never understood why it's so popular in those countries. It really is an awful site, and they really don't get it. Given a choice between Orkut and MySpace, most people would go for the featureset in MySpace first. Orkut v. Facebook is a goodbye-Google slaughter.

I've never understood why it's so popular in those countries.

That's probably because you don't understand the cultures of those countries. Just because something is attractive to an American does NOT mean it's going to be attractive to everyone else in the world. When a specific social networking site becomes popular somewhere, it may just be that it provides a user experience that the folks in that place truly value.

It's hard to compete with free. Google can afford to undercut Dropbox.

Many people view free as a reason not to use a service.

Clearly, if I was going to use the service as disaster recovery, I'd pay for dropbox. (I use dropbox for free right now)

Google's services are synonymous with free. I don't see many people freaked out by it.

Competing with Google is like competing with MS in '90s... a really hard proposition.

I don't see many people freaked out by it.

Depends on your circle really. For personal stuff, I make full use of google. However for anything business related my leash of trust would be a lot shorter. I'd feel much more comfortable to pay for a service that gives me someone to blame/sue should the response to a disaster be less than adequate. You really just don't get this with google.

I don't pay for Dropbox. Its free service is more than enough for me.

Will you switch if Google offers you more space and better integration with their apps? Imagine being able to access & edit your Gdrive files from Google Docs and Gmail, for example. I think this is where Google's going with this.

No. I dislike Google Docs, I use Mail.app for Gmail, and 2GB is enough for me.

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