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Good point. I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all. Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining?
by fiatjaf 9y ago
Good point.
I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all.
Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.
- afarrell 9y agoIt is worth noting that Dropbox took a bundle of business problems that already had been solved in one small community and solved it for a much wider community. Specifically, the problems of "cloud" file storage were being solved by AFS in MIT's Project Athena. So, to argue at Dropbox's founding that it was a toy would require first arguing that businesses didn't have problems that resembled "All the folks working on this class project need to have one accessible and shareable place to store files".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jharger 9y ago> Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys. That's only from the perspective of the user. From the perspective of businesses using the data for marketing, the actual customers, social networks are definitely not toys.
- morgante 9y agoThe marginal cases can be debated, but it's still a useful framework. Ex. Facebook obviously felt like a toy at the beginning whereas Salesforce has never been a toy.
- quickthrower2 9y agoWas Facebook a toy? It wasn't the first social network, and it was built to solve a problem on campuses for students.