We (the HN community) need to stop regurgitating and reswallowing our own mythology like this.
Like, yes, when Dropbox first posted their idea on HN some people were like “just setup an SMB share”. But when I got to college in 2008 my friends (CS and non-CS-majors alike) were all using Dropbox to share pirated music and group project files, and it was clear to all of us how useful it was. I know I wasn’t alone in this.
It is not the case that “everyone thinks good ideas are stupid”.
All of those were things that already existed, in some capacity. Dropbox did it better, AirBnB had better advertising (which, by the network effect, meant their offering was better). and Uber must be some kind of money laundering scheme: a multinational taxi service that underpays its drivers (often to the point of abusiveness[0]) that is still haemorrhaging billions of dollars a year.
This is a weird list. Competitors of first two already existed which means there was a proven market, and Uber solved a problem that everyone knew existed and could be solved technically, just that it was hard.
Uber also had a proven market. Taxis existed for about 400 years before Uber was created. Gig jobs also existed before and mostly seemed to suffer supply issues (not a lot of flexible work available), leading to lots of scams in the area. Like Dropbox and AirBnB, Uber brought some improvements for customers, but demand was well established.
isn't it a meme on here that when dropbox was announced it got panned as a concept on here? Smth "I could just set this up using FTP and a unix box for free so why would I want to pay for it?" smth?
Not exactly[1]. First comment said that they could do this using some command then after some explanation by the founder, the commenter said: "You are correct that this presents a very good, easy-to-install piece". The second comment said "This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it". Even just by quantity most commentators said it was great. Just first comment is taken as fact that it was panned by HN.
On the other hand, for 'business' cases it was way, way easier to deal with than FTP, at least at the time.
When dropbox was coming into vogue, I was working as a 'drafter' that happened to spend more than half of his time coding AutoLISP routines and doing larger automation/tooling efforts via VBA and C#. (Ironically, I didn't really do VBA for Excel but did do some C# for it[0])
But outside of all that, I was working in an environment with a lot of 'construction' folks. The 'Ask them to open internet explorer and they click on their AOL icon'[1] types. To say nothing of an IT department that required a lot of ceremony and wait-time to open up IP addresses for FTP use.
Dropbox was a godsend. The UX was easy enough for the contractors to use, the IT department was overall fairly accepting of it, and frankly I thought it was great even if I made similar comments to my father about it when he asked me about "the cloud".
All of that said, I do think it did get enshittified at some point, but I don't remember when or what it was.
[0] - Bentley was, to my understanding, one of the few (only?) non-microsoft companies to have VBA support for their application. While the first things I wrote for it were in VBA (because I wasn't allowed to have VS at first,) after a certain point I was down to just a couple routines that were somehow faster to do in VBA than via the C# COM wrapper. Versus Excel, everything was VSTO.
Uber didn't solve logistics, if they had, they would have used their money to actually be a logistics provider, or one of the big ones would have bought them out.
As it stands, last I was aware their current business model was fairly unsustainable without continued exploitation of drivers. Legal shenanigans aren't 'innovative' unless you're SBF.
Prior to Uber, call-to-order taxi services were largely operated by human dispatchers. The exploitation of drivers and legal practices of Uber are valid criticism of Uber, the company, but not valid criticisms of their product imo.
Whereas if he had done some of his "million dollar" ideas, he'd be much better off, both financially and in a position to create a unicorn.