If DropBox were substantially better, why wouldn’t enough people pay for it to make it a successful product? If they didn’t, the market has said it wasn’t better.
This is just hypothetical. I’m not making a judgment about DropBox.
But, in the case of DropBox, Steve Jobs said a decade ago that it was feature not a product. That is coming to pass.
This is such a strange strawman argument. Dropbox is not just some dumb storage. You may think syncing across computers and sharing are trivial things, but they are not.
Even if you're right, maybe it's not so bad if your "feature" company makes more money than most other product companies and is heading straight for an IPO.
Oh, I know it's your point; it's what I disagree with. If those products were anywhere near as good as Dropbox, Dropbox wouldn't have been able to take the market from them.
I guess our disagreement isn't really resolvable since both positions rely on a counterfactual: imagining what would have happened if their timing were different, which of course it wasn't.
The problem is not Dropbox being "a feature, not a product". It's a perfectly fine product, but it's hard to compete with products given away as loss leaders by companies who have other sources of revenue.
> Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product
Which is the best selling point of Dropbox. It doesn't try to be an office app suite, a photo editing solution, a cloud collaboration platform, etc. It just syncs files between computers and phones, and has simple UX because of it.
While Dropbox is a great service (I can't imagine life without it!), it's a bit delusional to think it could be the next Google or Apple. As Steve Jobs himself said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a company.
I have long thought that one of Steve Jobs' biggest errors was in telling Dropbox "that's a feature, not a company." It sure seemed like he was really wrong, but if Dropbox can't make money, maybe he was right after all.
"In 2009, Steve Jobs wanted to pay more than a hundred million dollars for Dropbox. As Houston later told Forbes’ Victoria Barret, when he politely turned down his hero’s offer, Jobs declared that Dropbox was a feature, not a product."
Ultimately the comment was somewhat correct though. Dropbox's core product is a feature. It misidentified the competition as tech-savvy users, but ultimately it turned out to be MS/Apple/Google. And consequently when those competitors added that feature, Dropbox's growth has stalled and they've been flailing around to find a USP since.
It was enough to get a decade of VC money and even start breaking even in 2020, but it's a far more tumultuous journey than their initial user uptake would have indicated.
I don’t know about Steve Jobs and iCloud, but Dropbox is the kind of thing that can become table stakes, requiring a large surface of interface (esp relative to its core functionality) vs someone else fitting it into their existing infrastructure (e.g. authentication and other tools). That’s basically the definition of a feature.
They only survive at all bc so many competitive alternatives can’t be bothered to invest in doing a good job.
I thought dropbox was a really cool idea, well executed both in engineering and marketing... but not 7.1 billion really cool.
A product that straightforwardly saves businesses time/money is easy-to-buy. Company valuation is just a few steps further. Primary danger is competition.
This is just hypothetical. I’m not making a judgment about DropBox.
But, in the case of DropBox, Steve Jobs said a decade ago that it was feature not a product. That is coming to pass.
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