5 ms·

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSuite

aeturnum 6y ago
I think it's absolutely correct that, for Google, it doesn't make sense to charge for sync. I also think that anyone who's ever relied on sync knows that there is a lot of value in doing it well - especially in a B2B context. It's true that "just" filesystem sync isn't a full product. The product would probably be sync-as-a-service where you can manage distribution and deduplication of resources across your systems. So we have a situation where it doesn't make sense for Google to focus on the feature, but the fact that they have the feature at all trips up specialist companies.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
Isn't this just it? There's no doubt that there's value and that the software is excellent in both cases. I'm just not sure we should try to turn every software project into a moonshot and expect anything sustainable as a result. It's not sustainable in most industries.
paxys 6y ago
That was and still is a terrible take. You don't get to an annual revenue of $2B and market cap of $10B with a "feature, not a product". In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  You do if you have the only product that is doing the feature well. But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras. After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Hi, you’re mention of s3 piqued my interest, how are you using it?
    - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
      Mainly for sharing files via http and distributing/testing html/webapps when needed. I used to use an app to mount s3 as a filesystem but tend to use command line to upload
bayindirh 6y ago
> Dropbox is a feature not a product. I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops. No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but needs your own infra to run. Dropbox allows me to do a lot of things and they're currently irreplaceable for me. That's not because I can't replace them (would take half a day at most) but, their service worth the money they want.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I thought HN established a long time ago that you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    I can just slap Owncloud or Nextcloud to a VPS and build a relatively secure system within three hours but, some problems will arise. - Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure there will be many other tools which can talk with Dropbox but not with my server. - Collaboration: I bet that not so many people would install another client and remember a username, password, URL triplet to just work with me (e.g. academic research, side project, etc.). They'll either force me to use other tool or things will just break down (just experienced a similar thing at work). - Maintenance: OS, service, add-on updates, licenses, security, monitoring, etc. will be additional time consuming obligations. - Pricing: If I use a VPS, excessive network traffic or resource usage will result in a price hike. - Price/Performance: You cannot beat the competition at the price/performance ratio. I will pay more, spend more time and get less. Why bother? - Environmental: In my case, self-hosting at home is impossible. I neither have the bandwidth, nor the space required to store another system and keep it quiet at the same time. Additional power bill and heat is not welcome, either. These are just the issues coming from top of my head, and can be expanded further.
avrionov 6y ago
> Dropbox is a feature not a product. When you are against FAANG every product is just a feature.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Maybe only if you constantly update "FAANG" such that every tech company who actually succeeds in creating a competitive or impactful product just gets their letter added to "FAANG," and all the companies that fail to make a huge impact automatically get considered "only features." We already see that a lot. Some people wedge Microsoft into the acronym and/or leave out other letters. And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly what we would consider a feature for most big software companies (and indeed many of them have a competing streaming service). If, for instance, Netflix significantly declines in popularity in the next few years, we might just drop it from "FAANG," and someone might still say "When you are against GAFAM every product is just a feature."
  - alecbz 6y ago
    Mostly agree, but Netflix isn't a feature just because Google and FB also do streaming. It's fair to call Netflix a product because it's something that end users actually care about for its own sake. You can pay for Netflix and nothing else and still get value out of it. Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own, you need to have some other data from somewhere else to use with it.
    - peddling-brink 6y ago
      > Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own That just describes a tool. A hammer is useless without a nail, but a hammer isn't a feature. The claw of the hammer is a feature.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median via RSUs since their stock prices were expected to skyrocket, with little downside, so the RSUs were as good as cash. And why other companies couldn't offer comparable pay. And nowadays it still refers to companies whose publicly trade stock prices continue to grow so much that it makes the stock portion of the compensation very lucrative, which include Microsoft. >And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly what we would consider a feature for most big software companies Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A feature is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not, and they are the only place to get it.
munificent 6y ago
Maybe Steve Jobs is right, but maybe it's also good for the world if you can build a sustainable business on a feature. In the world of music, an effects pedal or guitar stomp box is more "feature" than "product". You can't write a song just using a chorus pedal. But there are many many thriving companies that do nothing but produce and sell pedals. Much of this likely rests on the fact that the "protocols" that music gear use to talk to each other are simple, well-established, and legally unemcumbered. Also, for reasons that aren't clear to me, even dominant companies in the market do not seem to have pushed very hard to extuinguish that interoperability in anti-competitive ways. Or, at least, not yet.
- alecbz 6y ago
  I think the problem is: a) it's too easy to build data syncing into other products b) the ease of having syncing built into the product I'm using is really powerful When Dropbox first came out a lot of software was a lot more "local", and Dropbox was a lot more useful. But now we have Google Docs and Office 365 for most documents, git/GitHub, etc. for source code, things like Figma are starting to crop up for designers. For each of these, unless the syncing was especially bad, it's hard to imagine an out-of-band syncing solution differentiating itself in any meaningful way to make up for the more complex UX/setup. Unless someone for some reason comes up with a product that's just amazing compared to its competition but has no syncing capabilities, or syncing becomes incredibly difficult to implement well, I don't see why people would use Dropbox. I'm not a musician, but my guess is that musicians care enough about pedals or the differences between them to justify a separate market for them. Certain pedals are smoother, or offer more resistance, and that matters a lot to certain people? But I don't see an analog to that for data syncing. --- If there were a market for data syncing itself, I feel like it would be product companies paying for it as a service, and not something that end-users want to pay for directly. Another way to look at this is that maybe filesystems are too low-level of an abstraction for most end-users. I found that people would often be confused by the idea of a filesystem that existed separately from any application when I was trying to explain computers to them, and UX seems to be moving away from needing users to think about a filesystem.
  - 6y ago
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
I think the theory of Dropbox is that something like Paper derives its value by being deeply integrated into Dropbox.
koonsolo 6y ago
One of the features that I love about DropBox is that it's not Google. I use Google for a lot of things, but my backups of Google go into DropBox.
Spooky23 6y ago
Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession. There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an individual. They constantly upsell, even after you bought the product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension. Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1 generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70% premium over competitive offers. Good riddance.
- ballenf 6y ago
  They also lost my trust when they sold our small team on a particular plan and then pulled all the valuable features out of that plan and raised prices 50% (or 100% if we wanted most of the features back). The messaging around that was also just cold marketing BS talking about how great these changes were. It all happened within first year of our subscription. Luckily OneDrive was finally getting stable so we migrated over and I haven't touched dropbox since. It quickly became clear they were focusing on enterprise customers and the SMB pricing we had undermined that effort.
- Closi 6y ago
  > Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension. Office 365 is crazy good value in comparison - although I will say my users still complain about onedrive and say Dropbox sync was more rock solid.
- hbosch 6y ago
  > and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. I think this is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article. I very recently signed up for Apple One, for Music/TV/iCloud (family photos in particular)/all the rest and the fact that I now use iCloud sync instead of Dropbox bothers me nil. Prime also comes with Photos, unlimited photo backup. Used to use that just fine. Google Photos is like $1/mo. Honestly, if Disney bundled a cloud storage service into Disney+ I'd probably give it a shot. File syncing is a commoditized feature these days for the average Joe.
ako 6y ago
Funny thing is that these days at work we mostly use Dropbox for Dropbox Paper, much less for file sharing. It's the best collaborative writing tool, and with the work from home situation, it's the best tool to replace never ending zoom meetings with asynchronous collaboration.
cm2187 6y ago
Or you can use synology for free if you own a NAS.
kumarsw 6y ago
Probably Jobs was right, though I sometimes think of a better world where cloud storage and web apps are decoupled. No need to bother with Google Takeout because the data is already yours. I know that diagrams.net (formerly draw.io) does this but it's the only (major) web app I can think of which does.

aeturnum 6y ago

I think it's absolutely correct that, for Google, it doesn't make sense to charge for sync. I also think that anyone who's ever relied on sync knows that there is a lot of value in doing it well - especially in a B2B context. It's true that "just" filesystem sync isn't a full product. The product would probably be sync-as-a-service where you can manage distribution and deduplication of resources across your systems. So we have a situation where it doesn't make sense for Google to focus on the feature, but the fact that they have the feature at all trips up specialist companies.

steve_adams_86 6y ago

Isn't this just it? There's no doubt that there's value and that the software is excellent in both cases. I'm just not sure we should try to turn every software project into a moonshot and expect anything sustainable as a result. It's not sustainable in most industries.

paxys 6y ago

That was and still is a terrible take. You don't get to an annual revenue of $2B and market cap of $10B with a "feature, not a product". In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago
You do if you have the only product that is doing the feature well. But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras. After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.
- rusk 6y ago
  Hi, you’re mention of s3 piqued my interest, how are you using it?
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    Mainly for sharing files via http and distributing/testing html/webapps when needed. I used to use an app to mount s3 as a filesystem but tend to use command line to upload

bayindirh 6y ago

> Dropbox is a feature not a product. I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops. No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but needs your own infra to run. Dropbox allows me to do a lot of things and they're currently irreplaceable for me. That's not because I can't replace them (would take half a day at most) but, their service worth the money they want.

ryandrake 6y ago
I thought HN established a long time ago that you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  I can just slap Owncloud or Nextcloud to a VPS and build a relatively secure system within three hours but, some problems will arise. - Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure there will be many other tools which can talk with Dropbox but not with my server. - Collaboration: I bet that not so many people would install another client and remember a username, password, URL triplet to just work with me (e.g. academic research, side project, etc.). They'll either force me to use other tool or things will just break down (just experienced a similar thing at work). - Maintenance: OS, service, add-on updates, licenses, security, monitoring, etc. will be additional time consuming obligations. - Pricing: If I use a VPS, excessive network traffic or resource usage will result in a price hike. - Price/Performance: You cannot beat the competition at the price/performance ratio. I will pay more, spend more time and get less. Why bother? - Environmental: In my case, self-hosting at home is impossible. I neither have the bandwidth, nor the space required to store another system and keep it quiet at the same time. Additional power bill and heat is not welcome, either. These are just the issues coming from top of my head, and can be expanded further.

avrionov 6y ago

> Dropbox is a feature not a product. When you are against FAANG every product is just a feature.

tshaddox 6y ago
Maybe only if you constantly update "FAANG" such that every tech company who actually succeeds in creating a competitive or impactful product just gets their letter added to "FAANG," and all the companies that fail to make a huge impact automatically get considered "only features." We already see that a lot. Some people wedge Microsoft into the acronym and/or leave out other letters. And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly what we would consider a feature for most big software companies (and indeed many of them have a competing streaming service). If, for instance, Netflix significantly declines in popularity in the next few years, we might just drop it from "FAANG," and someone might still say "When you are against GAFAM every product is just a feature."
- alecbz 6y ago
  Mostly agree, but Netflix isn't a feature just because Google and FB also do streaming. It's fair to call Netflix a product because it's something that end users actually care about for its own sake. You can pay for Netflix and nothing else and still get value out of it. Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own, you need to have some other data from somewhere else to use with it.
  - peddling-brink 6y ago
    > Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own That just describes a tool. A hammer is useless without a nail, but a hammer isn't a feature. The claw of the hammer is a feature.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median via RSUs since their stock prices were expected to skyrocket, with little downside, so the RSUs were as good as cash. And why other companies couldn't offer comparable pay. And nowadays it still refers to companies whose publicly trade stock prices continue to grow so much that it makes the stock portion of the compensation very lucrative, which include Microsoft. >And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly what we would consider a feature for most big software companies Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A feature is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not, and they are the only place to get it.

munificent 6y ago

Maybe Steve Jobs is right, but maybe it's also good for the world if you can build a sustainable business on a feature. In the world of music, an effects pedal or guitar stomp box is more "feature" than "product". You can't write a song just using a chorus pedal. But there are many many thriving companies that do nothing but produce and sell pedals. Much of this likely rests on the fact that the "protocols" that music gear use to talk to each other are simple, well-established, and legally unemcumbered. Also, for reasons that aren't clear to me, even dominant companies in the market do not seem to have pushed very hard to extuinguish that interoperability in anti-competitive ways. Or, at least, not yet.

alecbz 6y ago
I think the problem is: a) it's too easy to build data syncing into other products b) the ease of having syncing built into the product I'm using is really powerful When Dropbox first came out a lot of software was a lot more "local", and Dropbox was a lot more useful. But now we have Google Docs and Office 365 for most documents, git/GitHub, etc. for source code, things like Figma are starting to crop up for designers. For each of these, unless the syncing was especially bad, it's hard to imagine an out-of-band syncing solution differentiating itself in any meaningful way to make up for the more complex UX/setup. Unless someone for some reason comes up with a product that's just amazing compared to its competition but has no syncing capabilities, or syncing becomes incredibly difficult to implement well, I don't see why people would use Dropbox. I'm not a musician, but my guess is that musicians care enough about pedals or the differences between them to justify a separate market for them. Certain pedals are smoother, or offer more resistance, and that matters a lot to certain people? But I don't see an analog to that for data syncing. --- If there were a market for data syncing itself, I feel like it would be product companies paying for it as a service, and not something that end-users want to pay for directly. Another way to look at this is that maybe filesystems are too low-level of an abstraction for most end-users. I found that people would often be confused by the idea of a filesystem that existed separately from any application when I was trying to explain computers to them, and UX seems to be moving away from needing users to think about a filesystem.
- 6y ago

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

I think the theory of Dropbox is that something like Paper derives its value by being deeply integrated into Dropbox.

koonsolo 6y ago

One of the features that I love about DropBox is that it's not Google. I use Google for a lot of things, but my backups of Google go into DropBox.

Spooky23 6y ago

Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession. There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an individual. They constantly upsell, even after you bought the product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension. Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1 generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70% premium over competitive offers. Good riddance.

ballenf 6y ago
They also lost my trust when they sold our small team on a particular plan and then pulled all the valuable features out of that plan and raised prices 50% (or 100% if we wanted most of the features back). The messaging around that was also just cold marketing BS talking about how great these changes were. It all happened within first year of our subscription. Luckily OneDrive was finally getting stable so we migrated over and I haven't touched dropbox since. It quickly became clear they were focusing on enterprise customers and the SMB pricing we had undermined that effort.
Closi 6y ago
> Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension. Office 365 is crazy good value in comparison - although I will say my users still complain about onedrive and say Dropbox sync was more rock solid.
hbosch 6y ago
> and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. I think this is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article. I very recently signed up for Apple One, for Music/TV/iCloud (family photos in particular)/all the rest and the fact that I now use iCloud sync instead of Dropbox bothers me nil. Prime also comes with Photos, unlimited photo backup. Used to use that just fine. Google Photos is like $1/mo. Honestly, if Disney bundled a cloud storage service into Disney+ I'd probably give it a shot. File syncing is a commoditized feature these days for the average Joe.

ako 6y ago

Funny thing is that these days at work we mostly use Dropbox for Dropbox Paper, much less for file sharing. It's the best collaborative writing tool, and with the work from home situation, it's the best tool to replace never ending zoom meetings with asynchronous collaboration.

cm2187 6y ago

Or you can use synology for free if you own a NAS.

kumarsw 6y ago

Probably Jobs was right, though I sometimes think of a better world where cloud storage and web apps are decoupled. No need to bother with Google Takeout because the data is already yours. I know that diagrams.net (formerly draw.io) does this but it's the only (major) web app I can think of which does.