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To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.

by wand3r 8y ago

jjeaff 8y ago
Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that others charge for, it makes me wonder where it all ends. Many internet companies have been put out of business by free services offered by the bigger guys. A similar issue is the endless supply of people or businesses willing to take a loss on their product, either because they have VC money, some other revenue source, or because they are just ignorant. Google was able to lose money on YouTube for the better part of a decade, for example. I once had a thriving business buying items at US postal auctions for resale. But the get rich quick bloggers eventually found out about the auctions and then, for years, an endless supply of clueless suckers just kept showing up and paying above MSRP for things like MacBooks and other high end electronics. Ya, they would lose their shirts, and never come back, but there were always fresh meat each month to do the same thing. So most of us that were actually making money previously, had to move on to other things. It seems like this phenomenon could become more proliferated as some of these core internet companies get larger and larger.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future. For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get.... - 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud - 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices - 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite. -Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year. Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.
  - danieldk 8y ago
    Simple: Apple sucks at cloud services. They provide them because it is easier for a subset of their users not to have to think about getting a third-party service. Google and to some extend Microsoft want/expect you to do everything in the cloud. Their sync clients are generally less reliable, do not support P2P sync, and do not do block-level sync. Google even syncs placeholders for Google Doc documents, rather than real local office files. Microsoft encourages people to create/open documents directly on/from the cloud (with its standard dialog boxes). If you want to own your data and reliably sync them between your machines, Dropbox is the best choice. And probably they'll continue to be the best, because sync is their product and not some way to funnel people in other products.

To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.

by wand3r 8y ago

To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.

jjeaff 8y ago

Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that others charge for, it makes me wonder where it all ends. Many internet companies have been put out of business by free services offered by the bigger guys. A similar issue is the endless supply of people or businesses willing to take a loss on their product, either because they have VC money, some other revenue source, or because they are just ignorant. Google was able to lose money on YouTube for the better part of a decade, for example. I once had a thriving business buying items at US postal auctions for resale. But the get rich quick bloggers eventually found out about the auctions and then, for years, an endless supply of clueless suckers just kept showing up and paying above MSRP for things like MacBooks and other high end electronics. Ya, they would lose their shirts, and never come back, but there were always fresh meat each month to do the same thing. So most of us that were actually making money previously, had to move on to other things. It seems like this phenomenon could become more proliferated as some of these core internet companies get larger and larger.

scarface74 8y ago
Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future. For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get.... - 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud - 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices - 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite. -Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year. Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.
- danieldk 8y ago
  Simple: Apple sucks at cloud services. They provide them because it is easier for a subset of their users not to have to think about getting a third-party service. Google and to some extend Microsoft want/expect you to do everything in the cloud. Their sync clients are generally less reliable, do not support P2P sync, and do not do block-level sync. Google even syncs placeholders for Google Doc documents, rather than real local office files. Microsoft encourages people to create/open documents directly on/from the cloud (with its standard dialog boxes). If you want to own your data and reliably sync them between your machines, Dropbox is the best choice. And probably they'll continue to be the best, because sync is their product and not some way to funnel people in other products.