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But I don't think there was any luck at all in how good a product they made, and that was clearly the most important distinguishing factor.

by gruseom 17y ago

MartinCron 17y ago
High quality product. Good market fit. Smartly promoted. I am not arguing with any of that. If they had made the same product four years earlier or four years later, I strongly doubt it would have been a success. Too early, the market won't "get" it. Too late, some other product would have owned the space.
- gruseom 17y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. Similar products (or similar-sounding, at least) had been around for years, so much so that Joel Spolsky wrote a post ripping the idea of file-synchronization apps as the biggest failed cliché around. The space was regarded as saturated. So Dropbox was a late entry, not a luckily timed one. There's another (rather prominent) precedent, of course, for a startup entering a space that was widely believed to be saturated and taking it over on the basis of a simple product that just worked better. I hadn't thought of it before now, but Dropbox kind of reminds me of them in this respect.
  - MartinCron 17y ago
    That's my point. Similar products had been around for years, those products were launched before the market was ready for them.
    - gruseom 17y ago
      Oh, I know it's your point; it's what I disagree with. If those products were anywhere near as good as Dropbox, Dropbox wouldn't have been able to take the market from them. I guess our disagreement isn't really resolvable since both positions rely on a counterfactual: imagining what would have happened if their timing were different, which of course it wasn't.
      - MartinCron 17y ago
        This is odd, I'm sure that there are solid examples of a perfectly good product or service failing because it was too ahead-of-its time, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. Ugh. Anyway, the point I was getting at is that timing does matter, and that DropBox was, in addition to being well-executed, was also well-timed. And that given enough time, eventually, someone else would have come along and executed well once the market was ready for it.

But I don't think there was any luck at all in how good a product they made, and that was clearly the most important distinguishing factor.

by gruseom 17y ago

But I don't think there was any luck at all in how good a product they made, and that was clearly the most important distinguishing factor.

MartinCron 17y ago

High quality product. Good market fit. Smartly promoted. I am not arguing with any of that. If they had made the same product four years earlier or four years later, I strongly doubt it would have been a success. Too early, the market won't "get" it. Too late, some other product would have owned the space.

gruseom 17y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Similar products (or similar-sounding, at least) had been around for years, so much so that Joel Spolsky wrote a post ripping the idea of file-synchronization apps as the biggest failed cliché around. The space was regarded as saturated. So Dropbox was a late entry, not a luckily timed one. There's another (rather prominent) precedent, of course, for a startup entering a space that was widely believed to be saturated and taking it over on the basis of a simple product that just worked better. I hadn't thought of it before now, but Dropbox kind of reminds me of them in this respect.
- MartinCron 17y ago
  That's my point. Similar products had been around for years, those products were launched before the market was ready for them.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    Oh, I know it's your point; it's what I disagree with. If those products were anywhere near as good as Dropbox, Dropbox wouldn't have been able to take the market from them. I guess our disagreement isn't really resolvable since both positions rely on a counterfactual: imagining what would have happened if their timing were different, which of course it wasn't.
    - MartinCron 17y ago
      This is odd, I'm sure that there are solid examples of a perfectly good product or service failing because it was too ahead-of-its time, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. Ugh. Anyway, the point I was getting at is that timing does matter, and that DropBox was, in addition to being well-executed, was also well-timed. And that given enough time, eventually, someone else would have come along and executed well once the market was ready for it.