Comment by on_
11 years ago
Smart play. If they can lock people in to their free chat client they can get a stronger foothold into enterprise and servicing smaller start-up/SMB companies. This is what Paul Graham talks about building an e-mail client, just call it a todo list.
This is a storage application front-end. Slack and hipchat charge the money for secure storage, file transfer and data. That is Dropbox's competitive advantage and a great way to break into the market discreetly.
Client looks cool, I will be downloading it.
For others who didn't get the PG reference:
http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it.
Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is "Bring Back the Old More's Law", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a "sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious.
[0]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s [1]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s
"Sufficiently Smart Compiler" refers to something which has been hand waved away as a "Simple Matter of Engineering" or an "Exercise for the Reader" as to be impossibly difficult. Compilers are already very smart, usually the sufficient part of the SSC is a tongue in cheek Spock like sufficient. See the failure of Itanium betting that it could produce the SSC to create fast code. It was never built, the performance never matched expectations and it failed.