This is like comparing Dropbox to "having an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem".

Yes, you could. Or you could use something that's polished and works, with a clean UI and years of real world testing.

For anyone missing the joke, when the Dropbox announcement was posted to HN, that was exactly the reaction it got.

The part that sticks out to me is that it only runs on Apple stuff. I imagine lots of Apple users are multi-device households.

> Yes, you could. Or you could use something that's polished and works, with a clean UI and years of real world testing.

It doesn't work on most computers, of course.

When I need something like that I prefer the crossplatform and open source http://speedcrunch.org

I use dropbox everyday. But, he's still right all these years later isn't he? Dropbox hasn't made money yet. Perhaps it never will.

Andrew W. Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. According to Forbes, his net worth is about $2.2 billion

Dropbox has been touted as Y Combinator's most successful investment to date.

But do they turn a profit as a company?

You're funny.

But to answer your question, yes, it turned a profit:

> The maker of cloud-based file-sharing software reported profit, excluding some costs, of 10 cents a share, above the 6 cent average estimate of analysts polled by Bloomberg.

>excluding some costs

So, not really then?

From the same article:

>The company also posted a narrower net loss of $7.7 million

Dropbox is still not profitable.

I'm sitting here laughing like how can they report a profit, excluding some costs? what? Thanks for pointing this out

It is funny - but to add a little nuance here, it sounds like they're reinvesting tons of cash back into R&D. If they were not reinvesting as heavily, they would be cash positive.

> Dropbox has demonstrated impressive growth since 2015, roughly doubling the number of paying users and revenue. Dropbox became cash-flow positive in 2016, but recorded a loss of $111 million that year after pouring money back into its product development efforts.

https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-for-a-500-million-i...

Probably joy of having good looking and easy to use specialized apps.

Of course “emasc can do anything” is ages old argument, but should it?

Yes! "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures."

I don't care if it's literally Emacs, but I want all my data in one place. Half my programming career was spent taking one dumb format and converting it into another dumb format because the systems were incompatible, and for no good reason.

People complain about needing "dongles" (i.e., adapters) with Apple's new laptops, but there's a simple and obvious fix (buy one), and we can see the endgame (everything USB-C) where even that won't be required.

Programmers spend all day building custom software "dongles", with no end in sight. Why aren't they angry about that?

Yes, the answer is yes it should do it if people want it and are willing to work on it. Let people decide what they want to build and use within the software they use.

I think you're missing the gap between "could fairly easily be" and "has been".

As a programmer, the REPL and/or notebook interfaces for my favorite languages provide what Soulver offers already, so it isn't as valuable to me. To a non-programmer, Soulver seems like a very pleasant, user-friendly tool.

I'm a programmer, at least occasionally, and Soulver is a pleasant, user-friendly tool to me. When I open Soulver, it's because I want to do some unstructured multistep math work and it's faster and easier to do it in Soulver than a spreadsheet program. Jupyter Notebook could undoubtedly do similar work, but it doesn't read to me like it would be the best tool for the job.