I don't disagree that DropBox is a bad example. It is a feature not a product. Maybe better is PowerBI vs Tableau.
But to your point, what should be wildly obvious is that "the market" optimizes for far more than what product is "better", and that "better" (for whatever value of) is often low on the priority, whether it should be or not. It's very often the case that someone in power makes a decision along the lines of "why are we paying for Tableau when we can get this PowerBI thing which Microsoft tells me does the same thing for free". And suddenly, you're trying to learn PowerBI. You can find any number of examples where 'better' things were not what the market picked to survive.
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.
Yeah, but that is because of deliberate choices on their part.
An alternative product model for Dropbox would be to partition the product on one or more features. Something like the ability to share files is an obvious choice, as is things like selective sync.
In retrospect it seems obvious to give all the features to everyone, give away a base level of storage and sell storage upgrades.
Before anyone says who'd be stupid enough to sell backup software any other way look at things like Norton Backup[1], where the license is limited on both the number of computers you can install it on and the size of online storage available.
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.
In many ways, the Dropbox experience matches the user's current habits: it's a folder, on your computer, that you can drag files into.
There were other habits that people had as well: they were using external hard drives to schlep files from work to home. They were emailing themselves files. They were sharing large files on CDs.
What Dropbox did was take the pain out of all those things. Instead of burning a large file to CD, you just drag it to your "Public" folder.
I think the post has two main points:
- you can't always trust what customers say, you have to examine what they actually do.
- just because something seems "better" doesn't mean it's what the customer wants.
Technically, we could say Microsoft's SkyDrive is "better" because it offers more free storage than Dropbox. But there's something about Dropbox that users prefer.
That one in particular is somewhat famous and gets trotted out as an example of a bad, wrong take, highly upvoted and missing the point of the product because the audience here is so technical they can barely perceive normal users' problems
It's sort of ironic now, though, because Dropbox has not been doing very well the last few years, because their product wasn't novel enough to compete with the better-integrated solutions from Microsoft, Apple, and Google that Dropbox inspired
I agree. It also ignores the high switching cost with Dropbox. These companies just get more critique because of how prominent they are. Companies f* up all the time. You don't lose all your customers after one f* up.
I think the reality is between Apple, Google, and Microsoft, their core feature is being given away for free or packaged with existing devices that ppl are buying anyway. Then they’re further integrated into those services. This is on top of a move away from files towards mobile and cloud computing, in addition to hitting a wall with consumers who want/need a Dropbox client and at the prices Dropbox sets. They have to have the business users to sustain themselves, and those business users want collaboration tools as a differentiator to not jump ship.
Dropbox is in a bad spot, I think in part because they haven’t focused deeply enough on real collaboration tools or other related product spaces.
Somewhat agree. Dropbox didn't sell because it had shiny icons for folders or sexy web interface. It sold because it provided immense value and it just worked. Same can be said about Google, YouTube, Microsoft Word etc. None of them had sexy design to start with but they simply worked and provided great value to end-users.
In the eyes of its users DropBox is a fundamentally different product from the filesharing sites like YouSendIt that already existed, or the techie utilities like rsync that HN commenters compared it to. There's an easy way to see this: people talk about dropping a file in their DropBox, they don't talk about this new filesharing program they're using called DropBox.
Similarly, people talk about buying a GoPro and putting footage of it up on YouTube. They don't talk about buying a digital camera from GoPro and putting their videos up on this video-sharing site called YouTube.
Similarly, people Google questions and Xerox pages, they don't search the web with Google and copy documents with a Xerox copier.
Conversely, people stop at the gas station (which might happen to be a Mobil or Exxon or 76 or Valero) in their car (which might happen to be a Honda or Subaru or Ford) on the way to the supermarket (which out here is probably a Safeway, but that varies depending on location). Or they might stop on their way to Whole Foods, which actually did succeed in differentiating, while driving a Tesla.
The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here. If you're building a car or a skateboard, you're seeking to fit into an existing category in their head. Even if you win (which is unlikely, because incumbents optimize very heavily with lots of resources), you lose, because you're a commodity in a market with lots of substitutes. If you want to actually win - in the sense of create a monopoly product that defines its own market - you, as an entrepreneur, need to be thinking in terms of the overall problem that the user wants solved (transportation, or information access, or answers) so that you can define the terms of the market in a way that you're the only reasonable solution.
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.
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.
The problem is not that companies or products increase their scope. Most companies do need to increase their scope in order to grow. The problem is increasing scope in an untargeted way that leads to more cost but without a commensurate increase in revenue.
I don't think any sane person would argue that DropBox going into the enterprise was a bad business decision.
"Dropbox is just one of the best examples out there of everything that makes a software product solid: do one thing, do it well, don't bother the user, and be profitable."
I hate to be cynical here, but they're EBITDA profitable, not profitable, and they've been in business for 10 years. I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.
The difference is that Dropbox was a product everyone already understood the concept behind--nobody needed five paragraphs of text to understand "it syncs files"--but was sold entirely on the execution, and how much better that execution was than all the challengers who had failed to penetrate the space before it. And you really can't get execution from a speel.
To make a gaming analogy: you can effectively market a JRPG through commercials, because, in essence, what people are buying is the narrative. But you can't market Tetris in a commercial, because what's being bought there is the experience of gameplay. Some things can simply be described; other things can only be shown; and still others need to be played with.
They've clearly spent a significant amount of product development on building out their enterprise functionality. The functionality there is pretty powerful.
Dropbox has a lot going for it. While the concept of a "file" is constantly being abstracted away by The Powers That Be, its still the most general form of data storage and sharing, and its something every power user will always need. Dropbox has proven that they have unique organizational expertise in this area; competitors have had years to come up with something as powerful as Dropbox Sync, and no one has yet. I'd argue Google is the only company close, and its still not as good.
I might be in the minority, but I am fine with Dropbox's product development speed. They could go out and buy new companies, but I'm afraid they'd start approaching "Atlassian-style" product development; silos of products that only work together through tightly defined integration paths, bad user experiences, promoting a piecemeal "we use Jira but nothing else because they're not the same product" approach instead of a single "Dropbox Experience".
What I'm not fine with is their product direction. Enterprise features are great! But Showcase? Why did they have anyone working on that? They should be focusing on attacking the team collaboration space. Maybe that means building out knowledge base functionality like Quip or Confluence. Maybe that means more Paper-like document types, like powerful spreadsheets or spreadsheet/database hybrids like Airtable. Maybe that means enterprise chat like Slack! Or, maybe foundational PIM tools like email, calendar, contacts, custom domain management, etc. I don't know. But they definitely do feel like they're in a period where they're not sure what direction they should be moving in, and I hope they fix it.
Indeed it's a tough for companies like Dropbox to compete against the Big Tech players. The proverbial you win some battles but lose the war.
On the other hand, Dropbox could've shifted more towards the enterprise customers and gained traction before the likes of Microsoft and Google ramped up their competing products. That'd have built them a better moat than being subject to the fickleness of mass consumers.
I can't blame Dropbox for the Microsoft thing -- Microsoft hasn't figured that out in a decade in SharePoint.
Mostly DBX makes me sad, as there is so much potential there. I also find it frustrating that they cannot come up with a pricing model that allows me to actually give them money.
What I don't get is how dropbox fell behind in this enterprise storage game. Box was a terrible product, buggy UI and all. Dropbox was a joy to use and yet somehow Box seems to be leading in the enterprise market. I don't quite get it.
But to your point, what should be wildly obvious is that "the market" optimizes for far more than what product is "better", and that "better" (for whatever value of) is often low on the priority, whether it should be or not. It's very often the case that someone in power makes a decision along the lines of "why are we paying for Tableau when we can get this PowerBI thing which Microsoft tells me does the same thing for free". And suddenly, you're trying to learn PowerBI. You can find any number of examples where 'better' things were not what the market picked to survive.
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