Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere” | Hacker News Reader

Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere”

techcrunch.com

45 pointsllambda31 comments

This trend worries me. We're starting to see a collection of "sealed apps" that only explicitly support specific cloud-based services instead of connecting to the local machine's operating system or managing services. Facebook becomes popular and then we start seeing sites that only take a Facebook. Dropbox becomes popular and we'll start seeing apps that treat Dropbox as their only filesystem. What happens to those of us that like basic authentication and filesystems that don't run through centralized, closed platforms?

That's the point of these moves, and it seems to me that the stable equilibrium is one of consolidation of these services due to strong network effects. The alternative seems to be something similar but without lockin - some sort of interoperable open standard that anyone can build to? You probably need a very powerful almost-monopoly-level company (ie Google, Microsoft in the 90's) to commoditize all of this stuff with open, interoperable standards/software. Too bad Google seems to be pulling back inside its walls recently, with all of its culling of the unprofitable arms of its business.

I think WebDav could be part of that answer.

Imagine that I configure a webdav server (dropbox, one on my own server, whatever) on each of my devices once, and have a 'my cloud' button on sites, in apps, etc instead of a 'Dropbox' button.

The interoperable solution needs to be easier to set up and/or much cheaper than Dropbox/Facebook/etc. though. Any interoperability standard will have to be obvious to normal people to have a hope of being a real selling point and make people strongly averse to signing up for a non-interoperable service, and WebDAV doesn't seem to be anywhere near there.

I think you are missing the 'part of' part. To get an interoperable solution for cloud storage, you need a shared protocol for cloud storage, but

a) it the only thing you need.

b) I do not see why the normal users would have to be able to set up a server providing the service. Normal people do not run a mail server or know anything about POP or IMAP, but they can (sometimes with a little help from their email provider) set up er devices to work with any email provider.

If WebDAV were as wide-spread as POP and IMAP, we could have a world where, say, an iPad had a setting where one entered the URL of a WebDAV provider, a user name and a password, and the iPad apps then use that dropbox by default instead of hard coding a way to connect to DropBox.

Having an easy way for people to set up a WebDAV server at home would help getting there, but isn't strictly necessary. What is necessary is that a significant fraction of cloud storage providers agree on a protocol. For that to happen, I think those providers must feel threatened by a large provider (or maybe not; IIRC, Dropbox already has WebDAV support)

With that in place, the final step would be to get device OS manufacturers to support that user setting. That might be the largest stumbling block.

I think that in order for interoperability to happen, interoperability needs to be a visible and well known feature. If it's not, a market leader has little incentive to make it easy for people to migrate to their competitors.

But if Dropbox already supports it, like you say, maybe it'll actually happen. Now we need to find the WebDAV for universal login - OpenID in its current form is pretty clearly a failure at this point.

Yes, that is why I think it would require a sufficiently large part of the market to be afraid to be on the losing side that could make them combine their strengths.

As to that Dropbox WebDAV support: I just checked, and unfortunately, I was wrong (http://www.dropbox.com/help/62). There is third-party WebDAV support for dropbox (dropDAV.com), but that, IMO, barely counts.

We need Web Intents

That transcript should, you know, get cleaned up. You know, to remove filler words:

  And Making, you know, delivering on that at a much bigger
  scale. Working with, you know, great partners like HTC. And
  other folks and developers to help, you know, put Dropbox, 
  you know, help, you know, where Dropbox can help make, you 
  know, all these other products better.

The worst part is, transcriptionists usually leave out filler words during the transcription process unless they're specifically told to transcribe "verbatim". It's not like the transcript needs to be cleaned up after the fact, it probably could have been transcribed that way in the first place. Unless it was an automated speech-to-text transcript in which case my observations are irrelevant.

A buddy of mine is a journalist and this is routine in that profession as well. Of course, as TC is fond of explicitly reminding us (verbatim!): they aren't journalists. Neither transcriptionists, either, apparently.

CaptionBox is a SaaS provided by SpeakerText (speakertext.com). They don’t transcribe themselves.

Eh, they hired 'em. The words are appearing under the TC masthead.

I believe it's automated. Previous transcriptions have included oddities such as "Why Combinator?"

That's still within the realm of human error.

Human error for TC not having a (competent) copy editor, maybe.

I was wondering the same thing as Eric when he asked about "everything is already on the cloud". Not sure if I'm really convinced that Dropbox can thrive in a post-filesystem world, but Drew's awesome so I'm sure they have some secret-sauce plan.

(reposting from TC article)

Taking "everything" literally, most of us still have stuff on our harddrives, even among the earliest of adopters, let alone the mainstream (where the actual money is).

The post-filesystem world will occur with or without dropbox - but someone will lead it and make a bunch of money, and dropbox is well-positioned to be that leader.

After the post-filesystem world has fully arrived (which will take a few years), it will settle down and become commoditized, and dropbox (or whoever led) will only be making residual profits - but there's nothing stopping them and partners from adding features and benefits, and innovating atop the platform (e.g. the developers mentioned in this article).

>But will Dropbox’s strategy be strong enough to fend off popular sites like Instagram and Twitter, which also store digital content submitted by large user communities? Or put more bluntly “five years from now, will I even need Dropbox?” asks Schonfeld.

I'm not sure it's fair to compare Dropbox to something like Twitter or Instagram. I think they only store photos, while Dropbox can store whatever files you need it to. I'd say the majority of people would probably store photos and videos, but there are some who like to back up important documents, books, and other work.

Considering my use of NoScript and RequestPolicy I bet I won't.

I think it's entertaining how Dropbox assumes that customers prefer to throw everything into one place instead of "siloed" data. When I choose to open the Facebook/Twitter silo, I am being social, when I open the MS Office silo, I am being productive. As much as I'd like to churn out code while browsing my friend's status updates, I don't. Dropbox needs to focus on making their service easy-to-use and invisible to people who don't care to see how it works. Making something well-known and well-seen does not make it well-adopted.

Making something well-known and well-seen does not make it well-adopted.

No, but neither does being invisible.

This is the worst piece of interview footage I've every seen. Why is the interviewee shot at the profile? Why do I care to see the interviewer head on?

I stopped watching after the second zoom in on interviewee.

Yeah it's pretty bad, they break a lot of rules I learned in Film school.

Am I missing something obvious? What would you do with this Dropbox button that is going to be everywhere? OK, I can think of a few instances when I would want to send something directly from the web to my Dropbox, but I can't actually imagine that it would be so often it would change the way I interact with the product.

There are a number of iOS apps that make use of Dropbox as a backend storage service and I imagine dropbox buttons in apps would do something similar: anywhere you have an app that needs to store photos or documents they link to your dropbox account to give you an easy in/out method of moving data around.

Yeah we are using Dropbox as syncing / backup in our iOS and Mac budgeting apps currently. To his(Houston's) point, you set it up and then if you throw your phone in the river it doesn't matter. Go get a new phone and you have all of your data.

As space continues to get cheaper, I could see using Dropbox exclusively for storage at some point in the future. Not just a few things I want backed up, but storing everything there. Then any computer I pick up has everything I could ever want or need. Currently it's far too expensive for me to do that though. That is where the real power to "having little Dropbox buttons everywhere" would be for me.

my guess, is you'll drag an image/text/file towards the dropbox button and it'll automatically save that

Great idea -- "add to dropbox" buttons, but 18 months--seriously?

Ya, I hope it doesn't take that long for them to implement. Keep in mind that the interview started out with Erick asking Drew:

What do you need to do in the next 18 months months, to not squander this opportunity.

So Drew may have just been responding to this later question in the same context.

The operative word is "everywhere," which takes a while.

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