For me, it's this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.
One of the things I look for when getting into a new venture, investment, etc is that most people don’t understand how it would succeed. If I have a deep, realistic understanding of how it will work, that’s all I need. Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does, but you know they will all see your reality as the truth with time.
> Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does
Dunno man, is that really true? It's true that some of the outsized winners out there are those that bet big on long odds (i.e. had vision and acted on it). But not everyone that bet big on log odds were outsized winners.
Ignoring the large number of cases where the vision is just wrong, sometimes the timing is off.
So I don't think vision guarantees success. It's just that in _some_ cases, success requires vision.
Another way to think about it is that no product is ubiquitously liked by the entire population. One important part of developing a new product is figuring out who your target audience is. Their feedback is likely relevant to you, but the feedback from someone who'd never use it anyway can probably be taken with a grain of salt. It's very common for people to think that, for something to be successful, everyone must appreciate it. However, that's not true. For instance, there are lots of things I don't see the point of (like tiktok or instagram); yet, they're very successful products. I'm just not the target audience.
That said, I don't even think his main point was really invalid. Dropbox didn't really replace pendrives, people are still carying those around. As pointed out, connectivity is still an issue and people want to have an offline backup.
Predates HN, but the famous Slashdot review of the first iPod is one of those “moments in history” events when nobody really had any inkling of the coming change
Like "640k is enough for everybody", the iPod review isn't as bad as it seems in retrospect. It's a review of the first version of the iPod, which was Mac only and actually wasn't a great product yet. It was a few years and 2 versions later that they had a design breakthrough and started selling a lot of units. I don't think a reviewer should get dragged for not knowing that a product would be vastly improved a few versions later.
In defense of the commenter, there’s a follow up the next day acknowledging Drew’s points and wishing him the best luck. I had always read the first comment only.
The comment is interesting because it's such an exception. This community is almost fatally optimistic and has blind spots where skepticism and criticism could be. Our website should have the X-files "I want to believe" poster as the HTML background.
My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.
There is some optimism about the Theranos mission, and a lot of skepticism about their implementation. Most of the comments are centred around the composition of the board and (correctly) surmise that the lack of medical expertise is a huge red flag.
I think there's some comments from me here or on reddit (can't recall) where I'm telling the founders of github that their idea is stupid. I underestimated the needs of the open source community, but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.
> I still don't understand why it's such a successful business
From what perspective? The logic seems relatively straightforwards to me.
- The GitHub interface is usually easier to use than the git interface. This is mostly true for technical users (programmers) and very true for non-technical users (many project managers).
- Setting up a repo on GitHub is easier/faster than setting up your own server+git+backups+etc.
- GitHub adds useful features on top of what git can already do
-GitHub has excellent mind share by virtue of being the defacto home of open source software. It’s the first thing I think of for free and premium source hosting.
- The pricing of GitHub professional packages is small, a rounding error on the salary of your programmers and PMs.
>but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.
It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.
I get the idea of SaaS version control I just didn't see how they would be competitive. It wasn't virgin territory. I also thought got would lose to Mercurial.
There are a confluence of factors behind Mercurial's and svn's losses for git to emerge as the dominant SCM tool.
I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?
