Except perhaps in the case of an acquihire; if they're going to pull the plug on the service, there's not much point in advertising what you can't have ;)
It is also really bad when all the links point back to the blog
I have a half-written blog post from months ago on why Dropbox should by Quip for this reason - they should be trying to leapfrog Google Docs to stay competitive.
Best of luck to the team!
So for me, this acquisition seems like a loss. I realize that Hackpad has said that they'll keep the site alive, but I expect it to be less functional if everyone maintaining it is a full-time Dropbox employee now. Fingers crossed that there will someday exist a good collaborative doc editor for hackers that doesn't fall over when >10 people connect or require a Google account!
Full disclosure: I have written code and done security auditing for Hackpad. I tried to get them to add vim mode. :)
Honest question, why is that irony?
In this case it is more like having the kids grow up and being successful than anything nefarious. And YC gets to put 'acquired Apr '14' in the box of outcomes.
A toast, then, to Hackpad. Well done.
Congrats to the Hackpad team and to Dropbox here. Solid deal.
What's the state of the opensource alternatives? Etherpad development seems to have plateaued a while ago.
And, raw Etherpad has a lot of usability problems as well. Plus it's challenging to integrate it with an outside authentication mechanism.
I've looked at the code some and while on the one hand this could all be added, it's a clunky base. Node's come a long way since etherpad lite started.
Dropbox's core business is unsustainable, and they can't compete long-term with rivals like Google and Apple.
They're flailing in all directions at the moment; pushing for the enterprise/government market with the appointment of Condoleezza Rice, now burning a load of money acquiring businesses offering tangential services, in the hope they can diversify their business model.
It won't work. Acquisitions like this never go to plan, and they are almost always a waste of money.
In the case of Dropbox, they need to go head-to-head with the Drive/Docs/Apps provision coming from Google. They're not as well-positioned to do that as they could be, and I'm not sure hackpad will be close to sufficient to get them there. But it's certainly a step in the right direction; documents are moving off the hard drive entirely, and there's no reason Dropbox can't help with the move to the cloud by expanding their offerings with moves exactly like this one.
What I don't understand about these acquisitions is how tangential it is to Dropbox's original value prop of being a "dumb" folder that would magically sync all of your files and stay out of your way. Now, instead of Dropbox passively running in the background and letting me do my thing, they want me to start actively engaging with the software.
I agree that it's necessary and overall a smart move, but still a very large and difficult pivot to make.
If that's really the play, Hackpad isn't the right acquisition. The real value is in the sheets/excel space, and the knowledge of collaborative document editing doesn't naturally translate to spreadsheets (the general nature of edits are not linear)
But even Search wasn't enough for Google; it's not wrong
for companies to expand their offerings.
- How awesome would it be if I could dump a bunch of mp3 files and an html page or index file or something, get a URL from the service and suddenly my band has a website. Then if I go to www.dropbox.com under some "music" category see my band listed there next to a bunch of other bands. Voila, instant promotion. Now the entire independent music industry has a promotion venue. Setup some kind of friendly payment processor and now bands can sell their music direct. (and oh yeah, you get automagic copyright protection since they can scan all other user's accounts for illegal copies of your music).
- How about letting my Dad dump some word documents in a folder called Chapter 01.docx Chapter 02.docx etc. get a URL and people can come check out his book's site with automatic conversion to various ebook formats (and a payment processor to handle the transactions)?
- Or in my "podcasts" directory dump an mp3 of my latest podcast and have it automatically publish out to iTunes and various other podcast search engines?
- Completely annihilate flickr and other services by letting me dump a bunch of photos into a folder, get an admin URL so I can type up descriptions and other metadata (and geolocate stuff on a map) and a publish URL to give out to people. Let me do that with with both a personal folder and a "pro" folder. Let people go to my publish URL and buy photos from me (auto watermarked by DB) or partner with a photo print service so people can buy prints at various sizes.
the list goes on and on and on and I'd bet people would pay a little money to be able to do some of this. It seems so obvious and the little bit that DB supports (like photo albums) is so lackluster its almost not worth using. It would get people to start filling their spaces up with stuff further upselling them on the need to buy more space. With a little finagling they could even wrap a social network on top of all this content and back door into Facebook's space.
I just don't get it.
I must say I do like your auto monetization angle though. If carousel is anything to go by, their 'we build UX ontop of your content' execution is so far a bit meh.
Trouble is, as Twitter showed, there's no long term joy in building a competitor to a service using its API.
Timing (sometimes) matters. [1]
It is entirely possible that they might actually have offerings like this planned but prefer to offer them either later or in stages in order to keep up some type of growth that investors expect.
Similarly it's common in some types of businesses to hold off booking sales until a later time period if recent revenue is "good enough" for a particular purpose.
That way you can continue to grow and not, for example, "shoot your load" all at one time.
Of course I have no clue as to why what you suggest is not being offered (independent of whether it is actually a good idea or not). But in business there are definitely reasons not to offer all the things you can do just because you can.
(And of course there could be a slew of other reasons as well, I'm just offering one perspective.)
[1] Another example might be (happened frequently in "olden times") rolling out software features not all at once so customers have a reason to buy a later version of the product.
With that said, recent releases (Carousel, Mailbox) point that due to the dearth of applications built on top of Dropbox they're bootstrapping the application layer themselves.
If they were to do this, I think it would have to be spun out as its own service. This makes it much easier to market and message. You are seeing similar things in the mobile space with Facebook unbundling its app.
I like dropbox, don't get me wrong, but they need to recognize the core value they brought to the table (and may still have) is better user experience design, not infrastructure. Simply offering more apps that are bound by the constraints of one's Dropbox account seems profoundly myopic.
I don't know their vision, but both of these make sense to me in many possible contexts other than "floundering."
And my analysis of the situation is different. I see it as dropbox adding a services layer on top of the platform of storage they built. You already see other companies doing this -- using the dropbox platform. If I'm dropbox, I see a lot of opportunity there.
At the moment, their business model doesn't extend much beyond brokering storage space. They are simply a middle-man between end users and Amazon S3, whose value add is some software that makes the process of storing and sharing files relatively pain-free.
They're good at what they do, and their software is nice, but in the long-run, there isn't much money in what they do.
Diversification is the obvious course of action, but it pits them against major players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. All of these could probably afford to offer unlimited storage to all their users tomorrow, and if they got the software right, could render Dropbox redundant.
The way I see it, Dropbox wants to be the filesystem and personal hard drive of the Internet. Easy enough business, just sell hard drive space. And as always with any software business, with users, you have data, and with data, you have potential advertiser money and a lot of investor interest.
Why can't they rival Google/Apple? Yes, bigger companies have a lot more resources. But that doesn't mean that only big companies can succeed. If small companies have nailed a service that big companies can't wrap their heads around/move quick enough to take over, then they'll outperform big companies in that market. Once upon a time, Apple was a small company, too. But they did personal computer and personal computer software better than competitors long enough to become a large company. Not too long ago, Google was a small company too, competing with large companies. The reason they succeeded to go on to become a big company is their superior product. Yahoo and other search engine competitors just couldn't tap into what Google had, whether it be because they didn't possess the genius/talent/skill/anything-other-than-resources Google employees had that made their product better, or because Yahoo was too large to move strategies fast enough to beat Google to market. Even more recent than Google being a small company, Dropbox was just another Y Combinator application that was shat on by oblivious HNers who thought "Don't people just use rsync and ftp?". But because they could provide a product that people wanted before big companies could catch on in time, they grew in size. Small companies have a chance against big companies. If they didn't, it'd be a pretty fascist society where everyone'd be forced to use the same products and services for all of forever.
How is this "flailing"? Google integrates cloud editing (Docs) with cloud storage (Drive) pretty well and that great integration is what's allowing Google to enroach on Dropbox's vision of being "the file system and hard drive of the Internet." Google has just shown us that integrating content creation tools with content storage tools isn't "flailing" or feature creep or anything; it's a valid strategy to boost content storage. And Dropbox is catching the hints. That's why this acquisition exists. So they can integrate content creation (HackSpace) with content storage (Dropbox). Now claiming HackSpace is going to put up a good fight against Google Docs is pretty absurd, but 1. now they're being backed by Dropbox, which should aid in the fight, and 2. remember what I said about small companies having a good chance if their product is good enough? With proper leadership (Drew Houston and Condoleezza Rice [moral issues aside, she has business and leadership skills that are completely separate from her political views which wouldn't affect anything about her position at Dropbox] -- check), resources (Dropbox -- check), and product design and development (this is the risk Dropbox is taking by purchasing HackSpace -- will DB be able to produce a better product than Docs?), yes HackSpace can beat Docs.
"Acquisitions like this never go to plan, and they are almost always a waste of money."
Why does HN do this? Toss around bold and interesting rhetoric that is completely baseless and has no substance or logic. Like the Michael Bay of writing.
This is so absurd, I don't even feel like I need to argue against it; it's like saying "The idea of companies never go to plan and are almost always a waste of money." It's just so ridiculous and against the way the real world works that it's more on you to prove your radical theories than it's on me to prove them wrong.
If acquisitions didn't work to produce a net benefit, then successful companies wouldn't do them, period.
If dropbox goes down that path, not only would they lose a huge chunk of their existing customers, they would definitely perma-ban themselves from enterprise market. And that is where the real money is.
Dropbox would ultimately have to start matching them & then slowly starts a downward spiral. However, if they move into the applications layer, the pricing pressure is less intense.
To me dropbox is very simple: a folder you stick your things in and it syncs. I'm sure Google/SugarSync/Box/Drive etc do that just fine. I rarely if ever go on the dropbox site.
Why haven't I switched to a cheaper option? Too much friction to move things over.
Buying virtual reality was the final smoke signal of danger.
Microsoft has a tough time competing with Google and Apple. It has decades of experience and loads of cash to burn and still be standing.
(note - for anyone not familiar, a common strategy just before an IPO is to cash out on a large chunk of capital so as to sweeten the deal for the much larger public capital raise)
