Could someone explain what the point of Dropbox as a company is now? They literally own their space, everyone loves them, and I'm sure they're making money hand-over-fist.
1. Enterprise, as someone else mentioned. It's still mostly considered a consumer brand, especially as they've focused on features like photo syncing with mobile phone partnerships. They're an ideal fit for enterprises though and still have huge opportunities.
2. An app platform or what I call "Bring Your Own Data" (not unlike App.net and to some extent Evernote). This is a rising paradigm where users own their data and 3rd-party apps hook into it. Instead of the prevailing cloud model where apps and data are silo'd. An early example is Tunebox, which plays and manipulates MP3s within your own Dropbox instead of hosting them on your behalf. Another example is the way 1Password uses Dropbox to sync data instead of doing its own hosting and syncing.
The app platform is really big as developers don't have to think about syncing. Traditionally data sync has been one of the main benefits of the web. But Dropbox API means developers can write rich, native, apps on any platform and assume the syncing "just works".
This is a bit like the other fork in the road that Twitter walked away from, ie to be the underlying cloud infrastructure for apps. (I wouldn't be at all surprised if Dropbox acquired App.Net or similar to provide a powerful pubsub layer too.) Developers focus on making awesome user-interfaces and delegate all the network infrastructure to Dropbox. That's similar to the way developers can use tools like Firebase and Parse, with the key difference that data resides with the user.
Just as a quick point of reference, they don't actually own the space. I do love them - I think they are an awesome company and expect they'll do well, but I just switched my entire company from Dropbox to Box. In short, Dropbox falls very short when it comes to "enterprisey" stuff like fine-grained permissions, etc.
They certainly _could_ own the space, but at the moment Box has a vastly superior enterprise offering.
I'm of course not even close to be familiar with business and investments but what I think is going on here is that you can't rely on 'cash cow' forever.
Link bait title aside, I'm a little bored with these "We don't like x, so you shouldn't use it" articles.
The main downside of MongoDB is that it's new. This means less knowledge of best practices, incomplete or missing support in third party integrations, and feature-lacking tools. It also takes a different approach to architecting systems than you would take when using a SQL approach.
There's also the fact that what they were trying to do in Mongo was not what you should do in Mongo. Use a relational or graph database for data that is best represented as a relation or graph.
Nothing like using a hammer to paint a wall and then say you should never us a hammer.
> or remove useless buttons like the calculator and timer buttons
Pure opinion here. Personally I use the calculator a lot on my phone, and love having a quick way to access it. The timer icon is actually the clock app, I got confused by the icon too.
After playing around with the Beta for a while, I can say that the design doesn't make sense until you actually use it. Give it some time.
Just started playing with the beta and I have to agree, it is something you must experience to judge accurately. Using iOS 7 feels good. There will definitely be refinements to come, but I think it's a huge step in the right direction. The stock apps, especially the App Store app, feel much nicer to use.
Although I have to agree with the OP about the app icons. I just don't think they look that nice.
...and those of you who were laid off will no doubt be reading this email on our website as security has shut down your network access and escorted you from the building.
>Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.
Basically Jobs is saying "Hey, we can be in this together. Let's just give it a try." - which is rather humanizing in a way, and masks the negotiation as a soft sell.
You're making a pretty big assumption that everyone works in consumer-facing markets, and not with small- to medium-sized businesses.
The app store model is broken because it has too much Internet in it. Anonymity + Platform = arsehat. Dealing with clients one-on-one is really rewarding.
Clients can be rewarding or a nightmare. I have dealt with both. There are good and bad clients you deal with just as there are "arsehats" in the consumer facing businesses.
I'm an iOS developer in Dallas too. Without going into too much bagging on our terrible developer community, I will say that you have a couple of choices:
1. Bag a few freelance gigs. Build up your skills and confidence.
2. Try to get your foot in the door with a creative agency. Dallas has a lot of agencies and they generally are always looking for iOS developers for projects. The work is usually pretty simple.
3. Get in touch with Bottle Rocket. They're a local iOS development shop and may have need of junior developers.
If you ever want to grab coffee let me know. My contact info is in my profile.
You're not kidding about the lack of a developer community. Thanks for the tips. I'll look into the creative agencies. I'll definitely reach out to BR and see what happens. I'm pretty green though so, we'll see. Thanks for the offer for coffee, I may take you up on that!
Someone coming in cold to freelancing will spend time building up to this level.
They may need to take $50/hr jobs for a few months to build up a portfolio and references, and gradually raise your rates. Good, reputable clients will stick with who they know before hiring someone from the 'outside'. After that, referrals from their current contractors, then friends at other companies. You'll be working at this tertiary level for a while when you start. It sucks, but you just have to put in your time.
As a general rule of thumb, I also do not recommend taking gigs with individuals. The line can be blurry, but generally 'guy with an app idea' is not anyone you want to work with.
Another method you might consider is milestone based payment. You have a project-as-a-whole cost but have set milestones and when they are met you get paid. This is nice for both parties at the beginning of a relationship to "test the waters". If they flake out on you, you aren't out as much time. They also have less risk.
You can get creative with how it is broken up as well. I've taken the approach before of having the first few milestones be less expensive to get a foothold and get them "hooked" on my skills. At the same time, I am evaluating them on communication, requirements, and how we work together.
FYI: Retainer based pay is usually a hard sell to make but once they do it, they love it. I have yet to have a client not want to do it after we have started down the path. However, I have had several potentials deny me outright. Since I do freelancing part time this is okay by me. I really favor long term/large clients. The hustle of getting clients is annoying to me. I'd rather give a decent discount (e.g. 35k vs 60k) for a client who knows they will use a whole month of my time (all I do per year). When I did the cost analysis, it was about even. However, I'd rather be coding than marketing another client.
I second the milestones idea. I used to do this back when I was freelance web developing and it helps the client feel more comfortable knowing they're paying as they see progress. (Helps you a ton too cuz you get money as you go along).
This was one of the major features of my new startup matchist (http://matchist.com/talent). You create milestones for your client and they prefund each milestone before you start working on it. Once you're done, we release the payment to you.
> Yahoo! Mail is still the #3 most used mail service in the world with Hotmail and Gmail in front of it.
I'd love to see numbers of how many people ACTIVELY use these services and not just total email addresses. Many, many people I know of use Yahoo and Hotmail for spam traps, or set an email address there up long ago and then long ago abandoned it.
Claiming "most used mail service" is either very misleading, or sloppy writing.
I think this is one of those tech bubble things- everyone we know uses Gmail. But outside of tech circles a great many people still use Hotmail and Yahoo mail. Like my parents.
While most of the people I know use gmail, Yahoo mail is a fairly close second. It tends to be among the less technically sophisticated, but they really use it.
I like how you ask for data to verify it (which is totally valid) and then make a definitive statement (or options). Yahoo could definitely be #3 in active use, just like AOL still has tons of users and XP has a large install base. I know of many small businesses that use Yahoo for stores and web hosting (though it is generally an awful experience) because they have business processes around them, and changing those processes is hard and expensive.
Almost nothing wrong with Windows XP, which is more than can be said for the current version of Windows.
On the other hand I am not sure that Yahoo is particularly awful - I use it as a garbage account for trashy site registering, and my father uses it for his main email for which it works perfectly well.
Better than this hideous new interface hotmail has foisted on me, and which is the main reason I am actually going to make the switch to Gmail.
From UK mailing lists run off a system I manage, for us Hotmail makes up about 50%, with Gmail and Yahoo fighting for the second spot, based on a (self-selected) sample of 1.5 million+ subscribers across the lists.
And yes, these are mostly active users - we see no statistically significant difference in engagement levels between the major webmail services.
Gmail only thoroughly dominates amongst techies. Regular users largely either don't care, or very often active prefer the "Outlook style" interface of Hotmail or Yahoo.
Pretty common in BigCorp land. The problem is that many of these IP Agreements are very badly worded. The spirit is that you should not take work you do for your employer and turn around and create a product that directly or indirectly competes with them in the same industry.
I'm not sure how enforceable these agreements are. Like anything with our legal system in the US, they're used often to bully people into submission with the threat of legal action, regardless of the company's actual intent. In California, there's a wide range of employee protection laws in place that would make these difficult, if not impossible to enforce. Not sure about elsewhere in the country. (standard IANAL disclaimer applies)
One place I worked at had a pretty boilerplate IP Agreement. I worked with them to change some of the wording so it was less vague. There is often a section on these things where you can provide "prior inventions" that are excluded from the agreement. I took the opportunity to list every idea (as vaguely as possible) I might want to pursue in during the expected course of my employment.
However, they raised another round? Why?