Dropbox for Gmail
chrome.google.com
chrome.google.com
Joel's article comes into the mind: commoditize products that are complementary to your products. Commoditize storage so Office, GApps & the other non-commodity, difficult-to-copy services will have a larger audience. Let companies who provide the commodities struggle and fight each other.
That line was so incisive when I first heard it in 2011 that it's stuck with me ever since:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...
Edit: Hey guys, it's the only primary source I could find citing Drew Houston's conversation with Steve Jobs, wherein Steve Jobs stated that Dropbox was a feature, and not a product.
With "Not Even Wrong" incoherent nonsense like that, Forbes doesn't belong on HN.
https://www.quora.com/Many-articles-about-Drew-Houston-say-t...
Update: I haven't found video or slides about Rian Hunter's explanation, but I did find this note about his CUSEC 2012 talk:
At the Dropbox talk, Rian Hunter explained how Dropbox was able to integrate into the Mac OS X finder and the hoops that they had to jump through to implement this feature. The technical aspects of the talk were centered on how the engineers used very low level C code to trick the operating system into thinking that the Dropbox client was a part of the finder when it actually was not. An unexpected but enjoyable surprise was the presence of an Apple engineer who worked on the OS X operating system. It was almost if trying to break the software was a game of cat and mouse between Apple and Dropbox, but in the end, both Rian and the engineer created an extremely informative and enjoyable discussion.
-- http://iwarrior.uwaterloo.ca/2012/02/01/13721/softies-invade...
Then it misses all kind of useful features, like getting a list of all files that you shared and unsharing from there.
I always end up sticking with Dropbox because the whole experience is seamless.
That said, Google Drive as a web app rocks, especially with the Docs integration. My hunch is that Google wants it to be that way - users living in the web rather than drive being an extension to your hard disk.
In my experience Drive's usefulness is far greater when use Drive for both Docs and file storage rather than for file storage alone.
This is such a strange strawman argument. Dropbox is not just some dumb storage. You may think syncing across computers and sharing are trivial things, but they are not.
Even if you're right, maybe it's not so bad if your "feature" company makes more money than most other product companies and is heading straight for an IPO.
And when will users complaint? When their storage, data is gone/lost etc, so why would mickeysoft even bother to provide storage. Let dropbox take the blame if data goes missing, M$ part worked flawless, it is dropbox that lost your data.
Gmail already has google drive integration. Dropbox could've made this chrome plugin years ago.
In the future all of Dropbox's revenue will most likely come from SMB's and a few enterprise customers.
Google Drive offers nothing that Dropbox doesn't, except more storage, which as you mentioned, is quickly becoming meaningless.
So they have some clout with developers, SMB's and enterprise customers that's nice but a majority of their revenue comes from consumers who will find a hard time paying for Dropbox when Google will offer Drive for free.
Really? I would expect the majority of their revenue comes from the business offerings. (I couldn't find any published numbers)
Stuff like this strikes me as a bit sclerotic and shortsighted. Sort of the techno-utopian flip side of the Malthusians of the 70s[1] arguing that food will run out on Earth.
The direction of the cost of storage (down) is predictable. But human behavior is not. And the impact of future innovation on human behavior is also not predictable. That's why oil could drop 50% in the last 60 days. It's why Paul Ehrlich and John Malthus were wrong. And why Dropbox could end up being a truly great company.
When we're filming 1 TB/s holograms of our kids playing baseball, Dropbox's free 500 PB tier just isn't going to cut it!
I agree, this is a kind of stupid mistake people keep making given that everything around us proves an opposite point - that resource usage always rises up to the limits. We will invent new ways to waste^H^H^H^H^Huse storage, just like we invented new ways to use up surplus bandwidth (video streaming) or electricity (well, everything now). Random potential use - with petabyte disks it starts to make sense to run full-HD surveillance all the time. Or to have even more bloated web frameworks that download half of the Internet as their dependencies.
But they were in 2010 too. And if you time travelled from 2010 to 2015, you wouldn't really notice anything materially different between Dropbox then and now.
I imagine they have been changing on the enterprise side. I'm just a small business account.
Of course, what's going to happen to btsync as a "product", I don't have a clue. But given the fact that you can host a private tracker and essentially run the whole ecosystem yourself means that the worst that could happen is it might become abandonware.
Though reading about their future attempts to monetize BTSync, I am not too hopeful about its future.
People will scream Syncthing, but that's often not a solution since you need to do port forwarding, which may not always be possible (e.g. if you are IPv4-connected via DS-Lite).
That's a little depressing. Not that they shouldn't make money from their work but... it seems like there's so little to the actual code. Here's hoping that they keep it to an open source project I can donate funds to.
My point wasn't that they don't have a good product or that people won't use their service.
My point is their product is too expensive.
If they're smart, it will be. They're just simply not going to make money otherwise. Get users on board for free, create a nice product to use that feels familiar, now tell them to get their bosses to let you use it for work.
They've been running that model from the outset, I don't see this as being a huge headache for them.
> the cost for storage is infinite and free
If thats so then it will also be cheap for them to give users the same.
I still think dropbox has a good product and will continue to iterate just fine. The product is all in the implementation, its not storage. Storage is the one and only feature of dropboxes app and sharability.
(disclaimer: stopped using dropbox when they had that major security flaw years ago)
It depends. Microsoft and Google sell you storage cheaply because they want you in their ecosystem. Since Dropbox doesn't have other big products, their focus has always been on integration with other apps (e.g. 1Password, Fastmail, etc.).
If there integration continues to be better than the rest. That's definitely a selling point.
Recently, it was reported that an MS me-too product was incapable of dealing with file paths of a certain length. In 2014!
I think this line "a feature not a product" is really really misguided (to avoid using a stronger word); a feature perfectly executed is precisely what a product should be.
So let's talk again in 5 years and see how Dropbox is doing, yes.
This doesn't look like it's officially from Dropbox? (I can't find any blog posts) No thanks.
It looks handy, but I'm not so sure I want to give someone access to my GMail AND my Dropbox when they can't even tell me who they are OR make it clear that they are NOT the service provider. Super sketch.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropbox-for-gmail-...
http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/04/09/dropbox-integration-now-...