[bane]

I still don't get why DB hasn't come up with a business model to let people just self-host content out of their accounts. They basically offer an instant web-server experience for non-tech folks, but they cap bandwidth for downloads.

- 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.

[thruflo]

Their other acquisition today - Loom - is on the annihilate Flickr path.

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.

[bane]

Well they had/have a huge opportunity to start an entire series of cottage industries like this but have completely failed to grab onto the idea. It seems like a pretty obvious extension of the "put a bunch of files in the cloud and sync" notion to me. After all, what's an app server but a bunch of program files stuck on a server drive?

[grrowl]

Twitter is still free — Dropbox makes money of those who use it the most.

[larrys]

"I just don't get it."

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.

[amirmc]

It's not always about stable growth, either. Sometimes you need to drip feed your customers new tech and possibilities lest you spook them with weird and wonderful things that they were not expecting (with the negative consequence that they no longer understand you and jump ship to 'simpler' options).

[larrys]

"that they no longer understand you and jump ship to 'simpler' options"

Exactly. And both tech people and people with the ability to understand these incremental changes are not in a position to know what amounts to "to much" which can be a problem. Because they might have higher level abilities or they are just processing the incremental features which are relatively easy.

I remember at a company that I owned constantly adding new machinery. I could understand it on delivery same day. Employees who had to operate it couldn't. So I ended up with a bunch of machines that also when new employees were hired were tied together in a very complicated fashion. It caused many problems and complicated the process and offerings.

(Thanks for reminding me of this I had forgotten that point.)

[prostoalex]

They've always viewed themselves as a platform with rich APIs, what you're describing is applications built on top of that platform.

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.

[Blahah]

Dropbox is good at what they do. What you're describing is already served by an ecosystem of sites, which can be connected with, for example, If This Then That (http://ifttt.com) . And you can host static sites from Dropbox in various ways: http://www.maketecheasier.com/4-ways-to-host-your-website-on....

[bane]

Well yeah, of course all this exists somewhere else. And it's making those folks money hosting it, not DB.

The problem is that DB caps your outgoing bandwidth so hosting even moderately large number of users will kill your site dead pretty quick.

It's obvious that people want to use it for these use cases, but DB hasn't been able to execute on that demand.

[evanmoran]

This is true, static hosting is served by the ecosystem -- yet they are buying companies very quickly right now with less obvious user value. Why wouldn't they buy one of these and see if they can grow it into something?

[bdotdub]

I think you just described Drop.io: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/drop-io

[tonyhb]

Loved that service. Completely forgot about it until you mentioned it.

[yoshyosh]

They can easily do a lot of things. I think the challenge is the messaging/marketing. People know dropbox because it does one specific thing well.

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.

[cdelsolar]

Sounds like a cool idea. Why don't you build it?

[xerophtye]

It has already been built. Bane's point is that why doesn't dropbox buy THOSE services and see if they can expand on it. For example docker.io is a paid service for the above use case. Dropbox might be getting a cut from them, but if docker has successfully demonstrated that there is a market for this, wouldn't it be better form dropbox to aquire them and push in that direction?

[nickstinemates]

What an interesting perspective.

[bane]

I don't own dropbox.

[joeframbach]

OwnCloud's plugin architecture allows for all of these things mentioned. But plugin authoring for OwnCloud is opaque and tedious. There's a Hello World and a few examples, but the environment isn't fun to work around.

[dkroy]

This all could be accomplished with their api and your own web-server. The coding would be the hardest part though from an effort standpoint.

[bane]

I actually think DB should be the webserver in this case.

Why can't I just make a "web-server" folder in my dropbox, drop a bunch of html, js and css and a few image files in there, get a URL and voila, instant website?

You sorta can already in truth, but they don't like it and the bandwidth is pretty severely capped on these kinds of sites. Make it part of the paid account (with x-fer up to 1GB/mo or whatever) and have high bandwidth users pay more?

[dkroy]

Those ideas tempted me to stop what I was working on and try one of those ideas though, it was a great set of ideas.