6 ms·

As much as I love Dropbox I have a feeling they're gonna get squished by competing products from Google, Apple, and Microsoft that integrate into mobile platfor

by dstein 16y ago

As much as I love Dropbox I have a feeling they're gonna get squished by competing products from Google, Apple, and Microsoft that integrate into mobile platforms.

kentf 16y ago
agreed. I love them too, but it will be hard to be the underdog in this race.
27182818284 16y ago
Indeed. Under the section of the YCom application for "Who do you fear most" the Dropbox founder wrote, "Google's coming out with GDrive at some point. "
- kentf 16y ago
  haha really? That's awesome. Well, they got enough traction :) I love my Dropbox.
brezina 16y ago
If you think all 3 of these companies (and probably more) need an offering in this category & if you think one or more will fuck it up, fail to ship, etc that actually puts dropbox in an amazing position. They've already executed, the product rocks, and they have a ton of users locked in. They even have a billing relationship with a good percentage of users. Of course, dropbox is most likely going to say thanks but no thanks to these early offers, and the big guys will kick themselves down the road.
jasonlotito 16y ago
Well, despite Apple and Microsoft's offerings, Dropbox has done well so far. Google hasn't come up with a dedicated syncing system like Apple, MS, or Dropbox offer, but competing well against 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
rdrimmie 16y ago
Dropbox has the advantage of being the go-to solution for crossplatform developers. If I write a native app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone and OS X and Windows and want the data easily portable across all of them Dropbox is the obvious solution.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Anything that needs to sync data should just use Dropbox as a back end.
hyperbovine 16y ago
I (sadly) agree. Dropbox is such a great idea, and like many great ideas, it's ridiculously simple. As I see it, there are four key ingredients: delta transfer, cross platform filesystem notification, the web UI, and the code needed to wire it all together. The first is open source (librsync) and the third is pretty much a garden-variety hierarchical, AJAX-enabled database browser. You'd have to surmise that companies like Google or Amazon, with so much in-house talent, would be much better off writing the proprietary, closed-source portions from scratch than paying a hefty premium for them on the open market.
- portman 16y ago
  Over the last 5 years, I've used FolderShare, Live Sync, Live Mesh, and Dropbox. The first three were made by Microsoft, and they all had significant data corruption issues where from time to time files would simply disappear. I've never had that happen with Dropbox. So Microsoft has made three attempts to do what Dropbox does and has still not succeeded. I think there's more to it than what you're proposing. Specifically, I think you're missing key ingredient #5, file conflict resolution.
  - rbarooah 16y ago
    FolderShare wasn't made by microsoft - it was built by ByteTaxi, the people behind the legendary AudioGalaxy using the same engine. It was the dropbox of its day. The issues began after Microsoft purchased and then neglected it.
zmmmmm 16y ago
The main argument against that is that it hasn't happened yet. This idea is just so obvious and stupid simple that it boggles the mind that nobody has really done it. You can look at all the major players and they actually all have deliberately crippled half-implementations. For example SkyDrive should be a Dropbox killer, but for inexplicable reasons MS has never made it so you could just 'mount it as a drive' and thus it is nearly entirely useless. The trivial work it would require for MS to do that and the wildly useful properties of having that feature can only mean that MS has deliberately decided to cripple it. Gdocs is the same - in theory you can shove anything into your gdocs account and get it out again. But Google, who could so easily do it have never released a utility to mount that space as storage. I'm really curious about why every player is half doing this and then stopping short. It can't possibly be that they are all too dumb to see how useful it would be - it can only be that they see significant risks or negative consequences in doing so.
- dstein 16y ago
  You pretty much nail it. But that it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. From recent news, I am fairly certain all 3 (G,MS,A) have big plans on the table for balls-out cloud-everything infrastructures. Apple is the only one making it obvious with their new datacenters and the iTunes cloud rumors. Google is rolling out a cloud filesystem along with ChromeOS. Microsoft, well, they'll probably stumble along like Google and Apple's retarded brother. The computing industry, as a whole, is undergoing a massive shift, and I'm afraid that really innovative companies like Dropbox have simply provided the template by which the filesystems of the future will operate.
stcredzero 16y ago
I suspect that Apple is already out to completely redefine the Memory Hierarchy. In the process Dropbox will get squished or redefined out of existence. I was thinking today: If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? Laptops and mobile devices should have a completely different memory hierarchy: - Registers - L1 and L2 cache - Main Memory - Persistent Memory - Cloud Memory The 1st three are also what we have today, but the last two are completely new. Persistent Flash stores are faster but more expensive than spinning magnetic platter. Cloud Memory is vaster and omnipresent, but much slower and less reliable than the hard drive. Together, they can fill in each other's weaknesses and create something vastly more useful than the old spinning hard drive. Apple is moving in this direction with their new Macbook Airs, which have taken the first step by taking the MLC Flash chips out of the pointless metal box and placed them on a form factor somewhat like a DIMM. They have moved even further with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Here, we have computers as powerful as workstations of the mid-1990s, but there is almost no notion of a Disk Drive. Instead, files are organized primarily by the Apps that create and manage them. My prediction is that Apple is moving toward a world (at least for the average user) where there are only Apps and your data magically takes care of itself. EDIT: Does anyone else also realize that a big reason our lengthy boot-up procedure even exists is because we had to have a spinning disk? Now that we have RAM-like stuff that's cheap enough to use in spinning-disk quantities, we don't really need the kinds of boot-up procedures we have now.
- neilc 16y ago
  If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? I'm not sure we are (other than low-level details like how the kernel does I/O scheduling and filesystem implementation details). RAM is transient; SSDs and magnetic disk are both persistent. Hence, both SSDs and magnetic disk can serve as stable storage. SSDs and HDs have different performance characteristics, but I'm not so sure that a radical rethinking of the storage hierarchy is actually called for. a big reason our lengthy boot-up procedure even exists is because we had to have a spinning disk Offhand, I would guess that a big reason for lengthy bootups is the time required to probe, detect and configure hardware (plus latency stuff like BIOS init). An intelligent OS will be able to arrange the disk I/O that needs to be done on startup so it is mostly sequential; SSDs and HDs are not significantly different with respect to sequential read performance.

by dstein 16y ago

As much as I love Dropbox I have a feeling they're gonna get squished by competing products from Google, Apple, and Microsoft that integrate into mobile platforms.

kentf 16y ago

agreed. I love them too, but it will be hard to be the underdog in this race.

27182818284 16y ago

Indeed. Under the section of the YCom application for "Who do you fear most" the Dropbox founder wrote, "Google's coming out with GDrive at some point. "

kentf 16y ago
haha really? That's awesome. Well, they got enough traction :) I love my Dropbox.

brezina 16y ago

If you think all 3 of these companies (and probably more) need an offering in this category & if you think one or more will fuck it up, fail to ship, etc that actually puts dropbox in an amazing position. They've already executed, the product rocks, and they have a ton of users locked in. They even have a billing relationship with a good percentage of users. Of course, dropbox is most likely going to say thanks but no thanks to these early offers, and the big guys will kick themselves down the road.

jasonlotito 16y ago

Well, despite Apple and Microsoft's offerings, Dropbox has done well so far. Google hasn't come up with a dedicated syncing system like Apple, MS, or Dropbox offer, but competing well against 2 out of 3 ain't bad.

rdrimmie 16y ago

Dropbox has the advantage of being the go-to solution for crossplatform developers. If I write a native app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone and OS X and Windows and want the data easily portable across all of them Dropbox is the obvious solution.

stcredzero 16y ago
Anything that needs to sync data should just use Dropbox as a back end.

hyperbovine 16y ago

I (sadly) agree. Dropbox is such a great idea, and like many great ideas, it's ridiculously simple. As I see it, there are four key ingredients: delta transfer, cross platform filesystem notification, the web UI, and the code needed to wire it all together. The first is open source (librsync) and the third is pretty much a garden-variety hierarchical, AJAX-enabled database browser. You'd have to surmise that companies like Google or Amazon, with so much in-house talent, would be much better off writing the proprietary, closed-source portions from scratch than paying a hefty premium for them on the open market.

portman 16y ago
Over the last 5 years, I've used FolderShare, Live Sync, Live Mesh, and Dropbox. The first three were made by Microsoft, and they all had significant data corruption issues where from time to time files would simply disappear. I've never had that happen with Dropbox. So Microsoft has made three attempts to do what Dropbox does and has still not succeeded. I think there's more to it than what you're proposing. Specifically, I think you're missing key ingredient #5, file conflict resolution.
- rbarooah 16y ago
  FolderShare wasn't made by microsoft - it was built by ByteTaxi, the people behind the legendary AudioGalaxy using the same engine. It was the dropbox of its day. The issues began after Microsoft purchased and then neglected it.

zmmmmm 16y ago

The main argument against that is that it hasn't happened yet. This idea is just so obvious and stupid simple that it boggles the mind that nobody has really done it. You can look at all the major players and they actually all have deliberately crippled half-implementations. For example SkyDrive should be a Dropbox killer, but for inexplicable reasons MS has never made it so you could just 'mount it as a drive' and thus it is nearly entirely useless. The trivial work it would require for MS to do that and the wildly useful properties of having that feature can only mean that MS has deliberately decided to cripple it. Gdocs is the same - in theory you can shove anything into your gdocs account and get it out again. But Google, who could so easily do it have never released a utility to mount that space as storage. I'm really curious about why every player is half doing this and then stopping short. It can't possibly be that they are all too dumb to see how useful it would be - it can only be that they see significant risks or negative consequences in doing so.

dstein 16y ago
You pretty much nail it. But that it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't. From recent news, I am fairly certain all 3 (G,MS,A) have big plans on the table for balls-out cloud-everything infrastructures. Apple is the only one making it obvious with their new datacenters and the iTunes cloud rumors. Google is rolling out a cloud filesystem along with ChromeOS. Microsoft, well, they'll probably stumble along like Google and Apple's retarded brother. The computing industry, as a whole, is undergoing a massive shift, and I'm afraid that really innovative companies like Dropbox have simply provided the template by which the filesystems of the future will operate.

stcredzero 16y ago

I suspect that Apple is already out to completely redefine the Memory Hierarchy. In the process Dropbox will get squished or redefined out of existence. I was thinking today: If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? Laptops and mobile devices should have a completely different memory hierarchy: - Registers - L1 and L2 cache - Main Memory - Persistent Memory - Cloud Memory The 1st three are also what we have today, but the last two are completely new. Persistent Flash stores are faster but more expensive than spinning magnetic platter. Cloud Memory is vaster and omnipresent, but much slower and less reliable than the hard drive. Together, they can fill in each other's weaknesses and create something vastly more useful than the old spinning hard drive. Apple is moving in this direction with their new Macbook Airs, which have taken the first step by taking the MLC Flash chips out of the pointless metal box and placed them on a form factor somewhat like a DIMM. They have moved even further with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Here, we have computers as powerful as workstations of the mid-1990s, but there is almost no notion of a Disk Drive. Instead, files are organized primarily by the Apps that create and manage them. My prediction is that Apple is moving toward a world (at least for the average user) where there are only Apps and your data magically takes care of itself. EDIT: Does anyone else also realize that a big reason our lengthy boot-up procedure even exists is because we had to have a spinning disk? Now that we have RAM-like stuff that's cheap enough to use in spinning-disk quantities, we don't really need the kinds of boot-up procedures we have now.

neilc 16y ago
If persistent Flash memory has RAM-like characteristics, why are we still treating it like it's a spinning disk? I'm not sure we are (other than low-level details like how the kernel does I/O scheduling and filesystem implementation details). RAM is transient; SSDs and magnetic disk are both persistent. Hence, both SSDs and magnetic disk can serve as stable storage. SSDs and HDs have different performance characteristics, but I'm not so sure that a radical rethinking of the storage hierarchy is actually called for. a big reason our lengthy boot-up procedure even exists is because we had to have a spinning disk Offhand, I would guess that a big reason for lengthy bootups is the time required to probe, detect and configure hardware (plus latency stuff like BIOS init). An intelligent OS will be able to arrange the disk I/O that needs to be done on startup so it is mostly sequential; SSDs and HDs are not significantly different with respect to sequential read performance.