I genuinely laugh every time at that comment every time this gets reposted, as if 99.99% of people wouldn't run away if they read 'curlftpfs' and 'mounted filesystem'
Thanks for this comment and the one about ftp. I also didn’t see the difference between Facebook and MySpace. It’s hard to understand the money side of reality until you are older and have seen some things.
Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.
I think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively got out of the way of their users and exposed the underlying function with a little impedance as possible. It's always important to remember that the goal isn't for users to use your product. The goal is for users to get the value your product delivers. That sounds obvious, but a lot of product development teams forget that. Both Dropbox and the original iPod seem to embody that distinction.
As for your "nothing I can deploy on my own server" comment, checkout syncthing or Resilio. Both take a bit more doing than a simple Dropbox install, but I've found syncthing to be pretty bulletproof once it's configured and I've heard a lot of people prefer Resilio.
There was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was superseded by touchscreens.
I don't believe you. firstly rotate the wheel to adjust a level (i.e. level of menu selection highlight) is literally how volume knobs have always worked. secondly clickwheel was in the iPod for 5 years? 8 years? in all the time you never figured out how to use it?
I think it is a reasonable comment, even in hindsight. It didn't dismiss the idea completely like CmdrTaco did, it just offered three criticisms of the business plan. All three points are real issues that Dropbox faced. They obviously dealt with all of them successfully, but there was no guarantee that any company in the space would deal with those issues successfully.
Ha-ha, but for every one where the criticism turned out to be wrong, how many are there where the criticism was spot on? We laugh at things the HN Dropbox critique and the Slashdot iPod critique, but without people there to criticize and point out potential pitfalls, we’re all just patting each other on the back and telling each other how awesome everything is. Is that how good ideas grow?
