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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

you remember individual comments from 15 years ago?

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

>It's sort of ironic now, though, because Dropbox has not been doing very well the last few years

Yes, but not for the reasons that famous comment thought it wouldn't (people ...trivially rolling their own with Linux+FTP+SVN or whatever). If anything, for the opposite reasons: because even more turnkey/integrated solutions than Dropbox became available as you say. Which makes that comment appear even more off now!

(Of course the point of that comment was already obliterated when Dropbox turned on to become a multi-billion worth company, even if it's "not doing very well" 15+ years after the comment was made. We could only wish we have that kind of "failure"!).

Well, the original comment made 3 distinct arguments which can basically be summed up as:

1) Its feature-set is easily duplicated (from a technical perspective)

2) It doesn't solve one particular use-case (that it wasn't designed to solve)

3) It's hard to imagine it catching on, let alone making money

Point #1 was widely mocked after Dropbox caught on, but turned out to be kind of correct - it just wasn't end-users that mimicked its feature-set, it was other companies.

Point #2 is irrelevant.

Point #3 was hilariously wrong. It went viral as hell, and the founders could've rode off into the sunset with a boatload of cash if they sold the company to Apple when they were approached. In the alternate universe where that happened, Apple devices just have a Dropbox feature instead of iCloud, a la Siri and Shazam.

Regarding #1, being easily replicated by end-users was the whole point of Point #1 in the original comment. It rested entirely on how easy it is to just slap such a thing together, and how people will just do it and skip using Dropbox which would mean the product would fail.

Whether it could be duplicated by other companies (with billions in the bank and thousands of engineers and OS/device access for integration) is irrelevant to the original comment's point.

This comment is unusually well known. If you google the url wrapped in quotes, you'll see it referred to as "the famous/infamous dropbox comment".

It's become something of a symbol for how hackernews commenters sometimes confidently miss the appeal of products/services. It's relevant here because the Push 3 doesn't compete with iPads on processing power.

It's a rather notorious HN comment, pretty much our equivalent of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Wow, I had forgotten about that! Could just as well replace it here :)

The linked comment is something of an in-joke on Hacker News. BrandonM famously provided some quick, critical feedback on a Dropbox announcement. Dropbox of course went on to see a lot of success.

Edit: it looks like a few other folks responded with a similar comment as I did. Sorry to spam you.

No, it's a famous comment that has become sort of a HN/hackerspace meme.

Oh, yes, I know one of those comments too

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

(iPod launch, CmdrTaco, /. 2001)

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” —Carl Sagan

(Though I'd prefer Galileo in the top spot instead of Columbus; if anything Columbus could replace Bozo: the people that laughed at him were actually completely right, not failing to recognize his genius.)

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