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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

There's a good reason why Microsoft partnered up with Dropbox. It's exactly because storage is a feature, not a product. It's great for Google or MS if the storage is not provided by them as in the long run, it looks like it's going to have zero margins. If you subscribe for Office365, then it's good for MS if they don't need to subsidize your storage. Same is true for Google.

Joel's article comes into the mind: commoditize products that are complementary to your products. Commoditize storage so Office, GApps & the other non-commodity, difficult-to-copy services will have a larger audience. Let companies who provide the commodities struggle and fight each other.

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> a feature, not a productive

That line was so incisive when I first heard it in 2011 that it's stuck with me ever since:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo...

Edit: Hey guys, it's the only primary source I could find citing Drew Houston's conversation with Steve Jobs, wherein Steve Jobs stated that Dropbox was a feature, and not a product.

> [Drew Houston] reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

With "Not Even Wrong" incoherent nonsense like that, Forbes doesn't belong on HN.

Sure, but it was the only primary source I could find for Drew Houston recounting his conversation with Steve Jobs. Most all the other coverage at the time was blogspam.

A hint of explanation of the reverse-engineering:

https://www.quora.com/Many-articles-about-Drew-Houston-say-t...

Update: I haven't found video or slides about Rian Hunter's explanation, but I did find this note about his CUSEC 2012 talk:

At the Dropbox talk, Rian Hunter explained how Dropbox was able to integrate into the Mac OS X finder and the hoops that they had to jump through to implement this feature. The technical aspects of the talk were centered on how the engineers used very low level C code to trick the operating system into thinking that the Dropbox client was a part of the finder when it actually was not. An unexpected but enjoyable surprise was the presence of an Apple engineer who worked on the OS X operating system. It was almost if trying to break the software was a game of cat and mouse between Apple and Dropbox, but in the end, both Rian and the engineer created an extremely informative and enjoyable discussion.

-- http://iwarrior.uwaterloo.ca/2012/02/01/13721/softies-invade...

I suspect GDrive is going to be a dead product in a few years. Googlers probably can comment whether GDrive is "dead" like G+ and Google Code. I don't even know if there is any active real goal for GDrive these days. When it first came out I thought it would be a great addition to cloud drive. I even though that GDrive could become an alternative to S3 when Google Compute came out; I would imagine one day GDrive become object storage for Google Compute as S3 is to AWS services. But no... the GDrive development was slow. Gdrive is trying too hard to be everyone's cloud drive, but it hasn't. I stopped using GDrive because the upload and download was terrible, buggy UI and unusable iPad apps. The app version was so behind the UI I would just send stuff over email to myself, then re-upload to GDrive on my laptop. The only thing I used GDrive for was saving PDF files I received in emails so that I could store the PDFs online and offline.

I regularly try to love Google Drive, because the storage pricing is more flexible, etc. But in many ways it continues to be unusable. Up and downloading is too slow, sometimes the application doesn't notice that there are new files, sometimes the application crashes and you notice (hopefully after a few hours) that nothing was synced. This is all on the Mac. On Linux there even isn't an official client.

Then it misses all kind of useful features, like getting a list of all files that you shared and unsharing from there.

I always end up sticking with Dropbox because the whole experience is seamless.

That said, Google Drive as a web app rocks, especially with the Docs integration. My hunch is that Google wants it to be that way - users living in the web rather than drive being an extension to your hard disk.

Certainly. Google has plenty of customers signed up for Google Accounts so users use Google Docs for doc sharing, which eventually means running Box.com inside Google, offering GDrive. Which reminds of Google Wave as various technology used in Wave was eventually used in other Google products, most notably in Google Doc (although Google Doc was a production acquisition).

Maybe 'dead' for personal usage however as part of Google Apps it is a no brainer and integrates nicely with the whole of the Apps suite. I am prepared to eat my words however I would be extremely surprised if Google kill off Drive for Apps.

I am in the process of migrating our organisation's various systems into one Google Apps domain.

In my experience Drive's usefulness is far greater when use Drive for both Docs and file storage rather than for file storage alone.

storage is a feature, not a product

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.

What is seen as a feature from mickeysofts point of view, is still a proper product from dropbox point of view.

And when will users complaint? When their storage, data is gone/lost etc, so why would mickeysoft even bother to provide storage. Let dropbox take the blame if data goes missing, M$ part worked flawless, it is dropbox that lost your data.

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