Reminds me of this HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
> I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.
The full comment by dang has more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
People make fun of this post on account of Dropbox having been a commercial success, but the first points are still valid (and even more true today, with modern tooling) that FOSS self-hosted solutions are far better, more flexible, and serve as a learning/building opportunity - something the 2022 world of vendor lock-in, dumbed-down "user friendly" solutions, and vast data collection sorely needs more of.
> without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Dropbox was initially pitched as a free service, which was absolutely not sustainable, and someone would have been right to be very skeptical about the underlying business model. People might not have been quite as enthusiastic if they'd said from the beginning "oh, and it'll be $100/year for the rest of your life, or until you get your shit together and move your data elsewhere".
The relevant bit to this is the “quite trivially” do X, Y, and Z non trivial thing.
Technical people often underestimate the value of good UX, generally there’s a lot of demand for it. That’s also where a lot of the value is in making something good. He also acknowledges as much in his reply to Drew.
In this case the “main benefit” of the flipper being ease of use, software, and hardware vs. some random components off of Ali express just reminds me of that.