{"id":593,"date":"2014-02-19T16:07:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T20:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=593"},"modified":"2014-02-19T16:07:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T20:07:40","slug":"boy-was-i-wrong-about-dropbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/boy-was-i-wrong-about-dropbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Boy, Was I Wrong About Dropbox"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, I was bearish on Dropbox. \u00a0I thought they would be an <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2011\/08\/14\/its-all-fun-until-you-become-an-os-feature\/\">OS feature<\/a> in time and that turning down a (rumored) <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2011\/09\/13\/dont-get-greedy\/\">$800m from Apple<\/a> was a bad move. On Quora, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quora.com\/What-s-the-most-likely-exit-for-Dropbox\">I wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>I think &#8220;slow fade&#8221; is another probable outcome.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>I&#8217;m reminded of FTP Software, which went like gang-busters selling a TCP\/IP stack for Windows. Their revenues fell very quickly after Microsoft started shipping TCP\/IP as part of the OS.\u00a0 (The same thing happened with all of the disk-compression companies).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Wow, was I off base! \u00a0I think it&#8217;s good to evaluate big entrepreneurial and investment misses and I missed several things (at least).<\/p>\n<p>First, a great product goes a <strong>long<\/strong> way. \u00a0Dropbox has absolutely nailed the product design and user experience in virtually every aspect.<\/p>\n<p>Second, the service is <em>inherently<\/em> viral. \u00a0I routinely create new Dropbox users by sharing files with them.<\/p>\n<p>Third, they covered every platform equally well. \u00a0iCloud works well on OS X, and OneDrive is great on Windows, but Dropbox surfed the whitespace between all of the platforms. \u00a0They did an excellent job on everything: \u00a0the iPad version isn&#8217;t just the iPhone version running 2X and they even support Linux.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t wait to see their IPO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, I was bearish on Dropbox. \u00a0I thought they would be an OS feature in time and that turning down a (rumored) $800m from Apple was a bad move. On Quora, I wrote: I think &#8220;slow fade&#8221; &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/boy-was-i-wrong-about-dropbox\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entrepreneurship","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}