

Ask HN: Opportunities in the Cloud - will_brown

Seeking HN insight (what features would you want not currently available) or just plain old guesses into what the community believes are opportunities for start-ups to exploit to gain a foothold against the likes of DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, ect...<p>For example KIMDOTCOM and the idea of an encryption key.<p>Just looking to get my brain going...
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PaulHoule
I'd say that the pendulum has swung too far in the "cloud" direction and the
interesting opportunities could be elsewhere.

For instance, I worked at a place that used Google docs for everything and I
hated it. I couldn't make presentations in anywhere near the quality I could
make with Powerpoint and this made it harder for me to maintain the
professional image I wanted to maintain.

Similarly, people are so trained to use Google, Gmail and such that we've all
given up on having desktop or small office search or having a local mail
client which is workable at all. With email dominated by zombie products like
Gmail and Outlook, it's no wonder that it's 2013 and we still get forged mail
from visa.com.

The funniest one is that Duck Duck Go is trying to distinguish itself from
Google and Bing by not having personalization, but on the other hand, Google
and Bing do not have any real personalization. They do some simple parlor
tricks that confuse SEOs without hurting the rankings, but they are stuck with
P@1 at .70 by the fact that neither one can or will (because of business
model, expense, laws in the EU, not knowing how to evaluate personalized
search results, etc.) deliver a system that uses a user model to make the
system more useful to the user.

There could be a real role for a system that lets you have your own
"intelligent agent" that works for you and could do things that can't be done
by companies that are trying to sell you as a product. Such an agent will be
an enemy of the "API economy" but so what...

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aespinoza
I agree. I think there is too much smoke in the Cloud Computing Arena. I think
there are still opportunities, but they are clouded. Too many players, and too
many directions.

If you really want to innovate in the Cloud Computing industry, take your time
to figure out a useful problem to fix. It might help to not think about Cloud
Computing itself.

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ScottWhigham
_...opportunities for start-ups to exploit to gain a foothold against the
likes of DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, ect..._

One could almost read your wording to have said, "...opportunities for start-
ups to do something that the likes of DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, ect
wouldn't allow you do and likely won't ever allow you to do." The problems of
going against these behemoths is that no company will trust you over them,
which means you'll have to fight for B2C. Which is fine, except that Google
and the others are marketing the crap out of that to their email customers all
day long. That's the 'wrong row to hoe' as they say.

So back to the "interpretation" of what you said - the only opportunities that
I can see are serving content that the big guys won't touch: porn, piracy,
encryption, etc. But that puts you square in the middle of two groups:
aggressive law enforcement types and "unethical" groups of others. That's just
not a place I'd want to be.

