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This is how it was always going to go. Dropbox's core business is unsustainable, and they can't compete long-term with rivals like Google and Apple. They're f

• nhangen 13y ago
  True in part, but we haven't seen people flocking to Google Drive in droves, despite the fact that their offering is now bigger and better than Dropbox's. There's something to be said for getting even the little things right.
  • Goopplesoft 13y ago
    And I'm sure something to be said for transitional friction. To me dropbox is very simple: a folder you stick your things in and it syncs. I'm sure Google/SugarSync/Box/Drive etc do that just fine. I rarely if ever go on the dropbox site. Why haven't I switched to a cheaper option? Too much friction to move things over.
• kogir 13y ago
  Actually, they're buying good teams with products that compliment or extend their current offerings. Loom on the consumer side; Hackpad on the enterprise side. I don't know their vision, but both of these make sense to me in many possible contexts other than "floundering."
• rattray 13y ago
  I agree and disagree; file sharing alone was never going to be "enough". But even Search wasn't enough for Google; it's not wrong for companies to expand their offerings. In the case of Dropbox, they need to go head-to-head with the Drive/Docs/Apps provision coming from Google. They're not as well-positioned to do that as they could be, and I'm not sure hackpad will be close to sufficient to get them there. But it's certainly a step in the right direction; documents are moving off the hard drive entirely, and there's no reason Dropbox can't help with the move to the cloud by expanding their offerings with moves exactly like this one.
  • tomhschmidt 13y ago
    The difference is that Search was enough to sustain Google and still is its cash cow. They branched out due to interest, not out of necessity. Dropbox's current business will not sustain and they NEED these acquisitions to find viable business models for the long haul. What I don't understand about these acquisitions is how tangential it is to Dropbox's original value prop of being a "dumb" folder that would magically sync all of your files and stay out of your way. Now, instead of Dropbox passively running in the background and letting me do my thing, they want me to start actively engaging with the software. I agree that it's necessary and overall a smart move, but still a very large and difficult pivot to make.
    • kenjackson 13y ago
      Advertising I'd their cash cow. Google's original business model was enterprise search. It took them a bit of time to land on their current business model m
      • johnward 13y ago
        I think many people forget that Google wasn't really sure how to make money until they completely changed online advertising with AdWords/AdSense. Everyone else was content with your standard banner ads and rates. Google made those relevant to the search context. Since that time they have made money hand over fist.
  • sheetjs 13y ago
    > They need to go head-to-head with the Drive/Docs/Apps provision coming from Google If that's really the play, Hackpad isn't the right acquisition. The real value is in the sheets/excel space, and the knowledge of collaborative document editing doesn't naturally translate to spreadsheets (the general nature of edits are not linear)
    • odl 13y ago
      Is there anyone seriously pursuing the space? There's ethercalc but they don't seem to have much steam ...
• joshuak 13y ago
  Agreed. I'm afraid, the famous quote about Dropbox from Steve Jobs about being a feature not a product is playing out. Dropbox doesn't even own the commodity they sell (as far as I know). They sell you on storage, but you receive a syncing service, not storage. I like dropbox, don't get me wrong, but they need to recognize the core value they brought to the table (and may still have) is better user experience design, not infrastructure. Simply offering more apps that are bound by the constraints of one's Dropbox account seems profoundly myopic.
  • jordanlev 13y ago
    I agree with you that their core value is a better user experience. In my mind, offering their own apps is actually the natural continuation of this core value -- since the underlying storage is just a commodity, they can differentiate by having really well-designed apps that sit on top of it.
    • joshuak 13y ago
      Or have well designed apps that sit on top of something else, the constraint is unnecessary and I argue a net negative.
  • ZenoArrow 13y ago
    Was that quote from Jobs made before or after Apple's attempt to acquire Dropbox got turned down?
    • avalaunch 13y ago
      It was made to the CEO of Dropbox as he was trying to acquire it.
      • ZenoArrow 13y ago
        So standard negotiation tactics then.
        • 13y ago
• shadbs 13y ago
  Countdown to ad-supported free accounts starts...now.
  • ivv 13y ago
    This idea will likely be appalling to many here, but it's an interesting and novel concept -- a promo DB folder with trial versions of, say, five products you can install if you wish, and the contents of the folder refreshes with new stuff every so often. If Dropbox is selective about the stuff it lets into the folder, I'd be up for it. It's kind of like all those subscribe-to-a-box-of-stuff services that are springing up.
• notastartup 13y ago
  This almost sounds like Facebook. Buying virtual reality was the final smoke signal of danger. Microsoft has a tough time competing with Google and Apple. It has decades of experience and loads of cash to burn and still be standing.
  • m3rc 13y ago
    How exactly does a "final smoke signal of danger" work? What happens if there's another smoke signal?
    • Goopplesoft 13y ago
      I think in his usage final = definitive. As in there may be more, but that signal was the 'were in danger' moment. Not that I agree, just clarifying for him.
• encoderer 13y ago
  "Acquisitions like this never go to plan." That kind of absolutism sounds silly to me. And my analysis of the situation is different. I see it as dropbox adding a services layer on top of the platform of storage they built. You already see other companies doing this -- using the dropbox platform. If I'm dropbox, I see a lot of opportunity there.
  • UVB-76 13y ago
    The Dropbox 'platform' is razor-thin, and their core offering is fast becoming a commodity. At the moment, their business model doesn't extend much beyond brokering storage space. They are simply a middle-man between end users and Amazon S3, whose value add is some software that makes the process of storing and sharing files relatively pain-free. They're good at what they do, and their software is nice, but in the long-run, there isn't much money in what they do. Diversification is the obvious course of action, but it pits them against major players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. All of these could probably afford to offer unlimited storage to all their users tomorrow, and if they got the software right, could render Dropbox redundant.
    • Retric 13y ago
      Dropbox works on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux. Because it's not just a website they can do things like automatically backup your phones photo's. They avoid storing duplicate files between users which dramatically reduces storage space on S3 in ways single users can't. But, also allows them to add cheap versioning as there not storing 1 copy per user of each file.
• bane 13y ago
  I still don't get why DB hasn't come up with a business model to let people just self-host content out of their accounts. They basically offer an instant web-server experience for non-tech folks, but they cap bandwidth for downloads. - How awesome would it be if I could dump a bunch of mp3 files and an html page or index file or something, get a URL from the service and suddenly my band has a website. Then if I go to www.dropbox.com under some "music" category see my band listed there next to a bunch of other bands. Voila, instant promotion. Now the entire independent music industry has a promotion venue. Setup some kind of friendly payment processor and now bands can sell their music direct. (and oh yeah, you get automagic copyright protection since they can scan all other user's accounts for illegal copies of your music). - How about letting my Dad dump some word documents in a folder called Chapter 01.docx Chapter 02.docx etc. get a URL and people can come check out his book's site with automatic conversion to various ebook formats (and a payment processor to handle the transactions)? - Or in my "podcasts" directory dump an mp3 of my latest podcast and have it automatically publish out to iTunes and various other podcast search engines? - Completely annihilate flickr and other services by letting me dump a bunch of photos into a folder, get an admin URL so I can type up descriptions and other metadata (and geolocate stuff on a map) and a publish URL to give out to people. Let me do that with with both a personal folder and a "pro" folder. Let people go to my publish URL and buy photos from me (auto watermarked by DB) or partner with a photo print service so people can buy prints at various sizes. the list goes on and on and on and I'd bet people would pay a little money to be able to do some of this. It seems so obvious and the little bit that DB supports (like photo albums) is so lackluster its almost not worth using. It would get people to start filling their spaces up with stuff further upselling them on the need to buy more space. With a little finagling they could even wrap a social network on top of all this content and back door into Facebook's space. I just don't get it.
  • cdelsolar 13y ago
    Sounds like a cool idea. Why don't you build it?
    • bane 13y ago
      I don't own dropbox.
• d0m 13y ago
  Real-time editing of documents might very well be in their vision.. and if they can get an incredible team, what's the problem?
  • UVB-76 13y ago
    The problem is monetizing real-time editing of documents. Ideas welcome.
    • peterwoo 13y ago
      Charge money for it?
• omarhegazy 13y ago
  How is Dropbox's core business unsustainable? The way I see it, Dropbox wants to be the filesystem and personal hard drive of the Internet. Easy enough business, just sell hard drive space. And as always with any software business, with users, you have data, and with data, you have potential advertiser money and a lot of investor interest. Why can't they rival Google/Apple? Yes, bigger companies have a lot more resources. But that doesn't mean that only big companies can succeed. If small companies have nailed a service that big companies can't wrap their heads around/move quick enough to take over, then they'll outperform big companies in that market. Once upon a time, Apple was a small company, too. But they did personal computer and personal computer software better than competitors long enough to become a large company. Not too long ago, Google was a small company too, competing with large companies. The reason they succeeded to go on to become a big company is their superior product. Yahoo and other search engine competitors just couldn't tap into what Google had, whether it be because they didn't possess the genius/talent/skill/anything-other-than-resources Google employees had that made their product better, or because Yahoo was too large to move strategies fast enough to beat Google to market. Even more recent than Google being a small company, Dropbox was just another Y Combinator application that was shat on by oblivious HNers who thought "Don't people just use rsync and ftp?". But because they could provide a product that people wanted before big companies could catch on in time, they grew in size. Small companies have a chance against big companies. If they didn't, it'd be a pretty fascist society where everyone'd be forced to use the same products and services for all of forever. How is this "flailing"? Google integrates cloud editing (Docs) with cloud storage (Drive) pretty well and that great integration is what's allowing Google to enroach on Dropbox's vision of being "the file system and hard drive of the Internet." Google has just shown us that integrating content creation tools with content storage tools isn't "flailing" or feature creep or anything; it's a valid strategy to boost content storage. And Dropbox is catching the hints. That's why this acquisition exists. So they can integrate content creation (HackSpace) with content storage (Dropbox). Now claiming HackSpace is going to put up a good fight against Google Docs is pretty absurd, but 1. now they're being backed by Dropbox, which should aid in the fight, and 2. remember what I said about small companies having a good chance if their product is good enough? With proper leadership (Drew Houston and Condoleezza Rice [moral issues aside, she has business and leadership skills that are completely separate from her political views which wouldn't affect anything about her position at Dropbox] -- check), resources (Dropbox -- check), and product design and development (this is the risk Dropbox is taking by purchasing HackSpace -- will DB be able to produce a better product than Docs?), yes HackSpace can beat Docs. "Acquisitions like this never go to plan, and they are almost always a waste of money." Why does HN do this? Toss around bold and interesting rhetoric that is completely baseless and has no substance or logic. Like the Michael Bay of writing. This is so absurd, I don't even feel like I need to argue against it; it's like saying "The idea of companies never go to plan and are almost always a waste of money." It's just so ridiculous and against the way the real world works that it's more on you to prove your radical theories than it's on me to prove them wrong. If acquisitions didn't work to produce a net benefit, then successful companies wouldn't do them, period.