The impression I got (at the conference yesterday) is that the dropbox guys are extremely smart and hardworking, but there's a huge amount of luck involved in that the timing was just perfect.
One thing that I kept thinking throughout a lot of the presentations is that certain product/service offerings are almost inevitable. If it weren't DropBox (or Twitter or Facebook or Google or whatever) then it would have been someone else around the same time with something similar that fit the emergent needs of the market. The market, in a way, designs the products by choosing which of the thousands of new things succeed or fail.
High quality product. Good market fit. Smartly promoted. I am not arguing with any of that.
If they had made the same product four years earlier or four years later, I strongly doubt it would have been a success. Too early, the market won't "get" it. Too late, some other product would have owned the space.
I'm not sure I agree. Similar products (or similar-sounding, at least) had been around for years, so much so that Joel Spolsky wrote a post ripping the idea of file-synchronization apps as the biggest failed cliché around. The space was regarded as saturated. So Dropbox was a late entry, not a luckily timed one.
There's another (rather prominent) precedent, of course, for a startup entering a space that was widely believed to be saturated and taking it over on the basis of a simple product that just worked better. I hadn't thought of it before now, but Dropbox kind of reminds me of them in this respect.
Oh, I know it's your point; it's what I disagree with. If those products were anywhere near as good as Dropbox, Dropbox wouldn't have been able to take the market from them.
I guess our disagreement isn't really resolvable since both positions rely on a counterfactual: imagining what would have happened if their timing were different, which of course it wasn't.
This is odd, I'm sure that there are solid examples of a perfectly good product or service failing because it was too ahead-of-its time, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. Ugh.
Anyway, the point I was getting at is that timing does matter, and that DropBox was, in addition to being well-executed, was also well-timed. And that given enough time, eventually, someone else would have come along and executed well once the market was ready for it.
Remember that they choose to create this application at that exact moment. Maybe, 1 year later, they would have worked on a totally different idea and you would have said: Luck is involved, right timing, etc.
I was thinking more in terms of the product than these particular guys, who were wise in all of the products they decided not to bring to market.
What I am trying to express poorly is that you can't look at the success of a particular new technology and say "if it weren't for that implementation, nobody would have built it or brought it to market". If it weren't for the Wright Bros. someone else would have had powered controlled flight. If the DropBbox guys hadn't made a successful online filesystem, someone else would have (successfully) filled that niche eventually.
Comments
The impression I got (at the conference yesterday) is that the dropbox guys are extremely smart and hardworking, but there's a huge amount of luck involved in that the timing was just perfect.
One thing that I kept thinking throughout a lot of the presentations is that certain product/service offerings are almost inevitable. If it weren't DropBox (or Twitter or Facebook or Google or whatever) then it would have been someone else around the same time with something similar that fit the emergent needs of the market. The market, in a way, designs the products by choosing which of the thousands of new things succeed or fail.
But I don't think there was any luck at all in how good a product they made, and that was clearly the most important distinguishing factor.
High quality product. Good market fit. Smartly promoted. I am not arguing with any of that.
If they had made the same product four years earlier or four years later, I strongly doubt it would have been a success. Too early, the market won't "get" it. Too late, some other product would have owned the space.
I'm not sure I agree. Similar products (or similar-sounding, at least) had been around for years, so much so that Joel Spolsky wrote a post ripping the idea of file-synchronization apps as the biggest failed cliché around. The space was regarded as saturated. So Dropbox was a late entry, not a luckily timed one.
There's another (rather prominent) precedent, of course, for a startup entering a space that was widely believed to be saturated and taking it over on the basis of a simple product that just worked better. I hadn't thought of it before now, but Dropbox kind of reminds me of them in this respect.
That's my point. Similar products had been around for years, those products were launched before the market was ready for them.
Oh, I know it's your point; it's what I disagree with. If those products were anywhere near as good as Dropbox, Dropbox wouldn't have been able to take the market from them.
I guess our disagreement isn't really resolvable since both positions rely on a counterfactual: imagining what would have happened if their timing were different, which of course it wasn't.
This is odd, I'm sure that there are solid examples of a perfectly good product or service failing because it was too ahead-of-its time, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. Ugh.
Anyway, the point I was getting at is that timing does matter, and that DropBox was, in addition to being well-executed, was also well-timed. And that given enough time, eventually, someone else would have come along and executed well once the market was ready for it.
Remember that they choose to create this application at that exact moment. Maybe, 1 year later, they would have worked on a totally different idea and you would have said: Luck is involved, right timing, etc.
I was thinking more in terms of the product than these particular guys, who were wise in all of the products they decided not to bring to market.
What I am trying to express poorly is that you can't look at the success of a particular new technology and say "if it weren't for that implementation, nobody would have built it or brought it to market". If it weren't for the Wright Bros. someone else would have had powered controlled flight. If the DropBbox guys hadn't made a successful online filesystem, someone else would have (successfully) filled that niche eventually.