Steve Jobs vowed to ‘kill’ Dropbox with iCloud | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs vowed to ‘kill’ Dropbox with iCloud

itbusiness.ca

37 pointscedel2k147 comments

I am repeating myself[1], but that premise just fundamentally doesn't make sense. A huge part of dropbox's value proposition is that all your files are on all your devices (and available to all your apps on those devices).

Apple's vision was/is of a feature that only works on your Apple devices. That's not the same thing at all, and isn't nearly as cool or groundbreaking.

[1]: http://masonmark.com/why-icloud-cant-ever-be-as-good-as-drop...

Apple would certainly like that future, but they've released iTunes and even a limited form of iCloud on Windows that can sync calendars, contacts and photos.

The main problem with iCloud is that they tried to do away with the traditional file system and force sync integration at the app level, and they tried oing this while still delivering an inferior solution compared to Dropbox.

The point still holds: crappy, brain-dead versions of their competing service for Windows, versus Dropbox which is on Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows.

It kind of makes sense if you think he wants everyone to use only Apple devices, because he thinks they are the best.

It's consistent. Apple's vision was that all your devices would be Apple devices. Given that, you can sync them all up with iCloud.

I'm conflicted...i love OS X, but Apple's other software efforts seem profoundly directionless. I'll leave Siri and Maps out of this since heir problems are more likely due to the data gap against Google (or is it whatever software processes they're using to wrangle data?)... But a standout flop to me is the App Store on iOS...I just don't get it...when I jump from a URL to a store link, I'm taken to a modal in which if I accidentally tap outside, the modal is gone and I have no way to get back to that app page except by revisiting the browser again...modals are, I thought, typically used for quick web transitions, not actual landing pages. But then the App Store itself is so slow that speedy transitions are irrelevant...why is it that every action, from scrolling to searching to clicking is so stuttering slow in an application that is core to Apple's mobile dominance?

I've never developed for iOS but the many complaints about CoreData and my own consumer experience with iCloud syncing doesn't give me much reason to think iCloud will kill Dropbox by merit alone

CoreData tries to solve several problems. It solves most of them well, but fails on others. Document-level iCloud sync (Dropbox equiv) works great.

But Dropbox also offers cross platform support and better web access for arbitrary file formats, two things I don't think Apple has any interest whatsoever in working on.

As for the App Store, I agree. The UI is often frustrating (web, iTunes, OSX app, and iOS app!), and the slowness is just incomprehensible. Been like that for years, total mystery. It's also pathologically crashy on older iOS, which I suspect is due to heavy use of UIWebViews. Still inexcusable.

And then he never actually tried to replicate the core features and use-cases of Dropbox.

If you want to watch Steve Jobs call out Dropbox by name: http://www.apple.com/apple-events/wwdc-2011/ and skip to 1:22:15.

It's so sad and inspiring to see him in such a state and still have the willpower to do the WWDC like that.

Yeah, it's sad to see someone use their last few breaths to threaten to kill somebody else. Only in the tech industry would this be considered a sign of a successful life.

He was not threatening to kill someone. He was proposing to take marketshare from another (very successful) business. Maybe he used the word "kill" but it definitely wasn't in reference to a person.

Come to think of it, he's an obvious troll, not worth an answer...

That did cross my mind, but his/her history looks legitimate. I think it's just an instance of the tendency that some people have to overly personify businesses.

Of course, I could have just been responding to the language in the headline, but... nah, how likely could that be.

If there's a troll in this particular cave, it's the author of the misleading headline, not me.

Threaten to ... "kill somebody else"?

For one, Dropbox is not a person you know.

Second, all he said if that they (Apple) want to do something better.

Apple apparently doesn't think i'm an important enough demographic to share their content:

"Streaming video requires Safari ..., or QuickTime 7 on Windows."

Shrug.

Apple's page worked fine for me in Firefox. Also, it's available on YouTube. Apple hasn't (to my knowledge) ever objected to the redistribution of their keynotes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjelKEE3LSI

He looks just so incredibly ill, but you just have to admire his moxie for getting up on stage and doing WWDC. He was probably terminal metastatic at that point... but he never gave up.

I agreed with what a lot of Jobs said, disagreed with much more of it, but his dedication is deserved of some immense praise and respect.

Quote:

  "Now some people think that the cloud is
  just a hard disk in the sky. You take a
  bunch of stuff and you put it in your
  Dropbox or your iDisk or whatever, and
  then it transfers it up into the cloud
  and it stores it, and then you drag
  whatever you want back out on your other
  devices. We think it's way more than
  that -- and we call it iCloud."

All Steve is saying is he thinks they have a better idea for how the cloud should work. I don't see anything remotely similar to "vowing to kill" any particular service. I think his quote misunderstands the beautiful simplicity of Dropbox, but that's about it.

Most charitably, you could argue that when Steve has previously said words to the effect of "we think we've done something better," entire industries were occasionally upturned. For the CEO of Dropbox, to hear that phraseology used in their direction, I can imagine how they might interpret it that way.

I didn't watch the video to see Jobs saying this, just reading from the parent transcript, but can we be sure Jobs was actually referring to Dropbox here? And not the default shared folder that ships with OS X called 'Dropbox'? (Which many people had automated to back up dropped files to a remote server in the past).

Unlikely, as the built-in Drop Box isn't anything to do with cloud, it's just a way to allow people to copy files onto a networked computer without authentication.

one could say that Houston's bayesian perception of those words were a little different.

Steve Jobs vowed to kill a lot of stuff.

Unlikely considering that I can't really see Apple releasing x-platform iCloud clients.

The sad thing was that iDisk was cross-platform (with native Mac & Windows clients, and since it was WebDAV, you could get Linux and *BSD to work with it), but it died along with the rest of the iTools/.Mac/MobileMe suite of services.

Dropbox's success depends on OS' file system representation. It's currently the perfect solution for the folder/file system but new systems like iOS and Android don't need a dropbox. I remember reading that Steve Jobs wanted to abstract out the folder/file representation for a simpler and easier to use iOS. They hide the files inside each app and it is all synchronized by iCloud. Dropbox clearly is aware of this paradigm shift and that's why they are pushing their new SDK and have a conference to promote Dropbox integration with any other apps.

that sounds fine until you want to share data between applications as well as people.

Which is why it's not the case with Android. You can easily share files between applications.

Dropbox also against to ALL the online/web services. All the web services are using non-file abstraction of data.

If all the apps go to cloud, Dropbox will be dead immediately. The problem is, that's actually happening now. So number of potential user of Dropbox is decreasing. Doesn't seem to be a long-term sustainable business if you believe web will conquer the world.

Also, Dropbox can't offer very high level user features, or platform specific features. It breaks symlinks, erases file permissions. Dropbox drops many kind of informations which can be essential to high-end users. Their speed and capacity is too low for high-volume data users - such as media works.

So Dropbox is losing potential users in both ends, and honestly, I don't know who will use Dropbox for what in future.

The cucumbersome file system access(and lack thereof) on smartphones sucks big time and is part of a reason dropbox is so usefull. Just sync the folders across and good apps that let you save and open files will work.

Dropbox solves the problem well when you need to bridge between devices that have different ideas about how data should be organized. Files/folders is really the only abstraction that is universal and somewhat standardized.

Another article is posted to HN right now about cloud storage. It seems significant but I guess it is not worthy of the front page: Tencent will apparently be offering up to 10TB of free storage, hosted on servers outside China. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759714

Will they be an Amazon S3 reseller like Dropbox? Amazon storage is expensive. I do not know how Dropbox can compete with companies who build their own datacenters.

This assumes pricing is the primary thing that consumers chose by. Which isn't true. Also, as storage costs decrease (and they will, of course), owning your own datacenter isn't as big of an advantage in the long term.

Steve Jobs vowed to kill a lot of things, including Android. As in the words of Larry Page,

"How's that working out for you?"

Well knowing that on his deathbed, he gave "some advice" to Larry.

And seeing how Larry has been running his company. I will dare to say that it is working out perfectly. Steve might be able to kill Google from beyond the grave.

One of the coolest features of Dropbox is block-level sync. Works wonderfully well with encrypted containers (not needing to upload the whole thing when you change a file in the container). I know Google Drive & Skydrive don't have it. Don't know about iCloud.

5 gigs for free with dropbox and icloud isn't enough.

I'm waiting for both companies to up their free storage offering, as Flickr now offers 1 terabyte to back up your photos and videos.

Flickr is not a backup service.

They can and have lost photos in the past. A friend who used to be a PM at Yahoo! lost some family photos that he didn't have backed up... so he was able to contact them personally, but I am not sure how it ended.

I use Flickr as my main storage site, but I have a custom script that backsup photos and some meta-data to my local NAS.

> 5 gigs for free with dropbox and icloud isn't enough.

I see this as a loss leader for dropbox, they offer you 5 gig for free and then try to convert you to paid services. The internet isn't free you know, companies need to make money :)

Why do you think either of them want you as a customer? You clearly don't plan on giving them any money.

really? 5 gigs isn't even close to the amount I need. I'm already hitting my 100GB limit..and will probably buy some more space in the next couple of months.

Is there video of the interview anywhere?

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