241–250 of 413 posts
Drew Houston needs to step down. The company has been aimless for a decade. The 'collaborative workspace' was an obviously bad idea that they sunk years of company-wide resources on (ask me how I know!)
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> we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
Well Meta tried to make its own crypto currency on the block chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collec...
> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatg…
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You’re not the target customer. A lot of people do use those tools, although most of them are outside of the tech world. You’d probably be better off using a different service if it bothers you so much.
I stopped using Dropbox a long time ago (though switching cloud storage services is not trivial!). My point is a more general one, that today's tech companies can't just be , they must expand and expand. To butcher a quote from Grandpa Simpson: “I used to be ‘the target customer’, but then they changed what ‘the target customer’ was. Now I’m not ‘the target customer’ anymore and ‘the target customer’ seems weird and…
Isn't it in the nature of tech industry though? If a company "just is", it doesn't need to do any R&D work, so it's not a tech company any more.
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Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product. To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep…
I think Dropbox is, like a lot of companies right now, is struggling to find new revenue with new features added to their existing product lines and is divesting themselves of new work on mature products to focus on new markets. AI just being something exciting in general that has everyone hyped. I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
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Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product. To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep…
> look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product That’s only because it failed (and the jury is still out on that). If it works they’ll conquer an entirely new market right from the start. Certainly a much better long term strategy than hoping they can keep up their advertising revenue.
The "metaverse" is ironically set up to be Facebook's walled garden. It has no other use, it cannot be repurposed or made modular in any way. It's not a standalone product that say, integrates with Google Ads, something that they could try to offload to some other company.
It's Zuck's baby, and in the middle of slow and protracted crib death.
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I'll add my 2c because I'm getting a little annoyed that folks who only have familiarity with Dropbox's consumer offering seem to think they have any idea what they're talking about. In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in par…
> There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.
> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatg…
> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…
I worked at a similarly sized company to Dropbox, and when I questioned product decisions I would often receive similarly smug put downs. How could you possibly think you know more than the CEO?
And then I watched over the next few years as the product strategy floundered, reorging many times without shipping anything concrete.
I suppose what I’m saying is that while your comment shuts down conversation quite effectively, it can still be wrong. Sometimes - quite frequently, in fact! - there is no man behind the curtain. Sometimes, when product decisions seem questionable, they really are questionable.
(Sorry if I have an annoyed tone; I think I'm subconsciously venting against all the times I've heard this from others in the past.)
> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatg…
Compared to my mindset a decade ago I've become so cynical about the whole SV tech scene. There's value there, of course: Dropbox was a fantastic service when it first came out. But these companies are incentivized to keep expanding until they occupy the entire universe. Now Dropbox wants to be my word processor. Next it wants to use AI to touch up my photos or whatever the hell because AI is the New Hot Thing tech c…
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I'll add my 2c because I'm getting a little annoyed that folks who only have familiarity with Dropbox's consumer offering seem to think they have any idea what they're talking about. In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in par…
How does AI tooling help with that? "The AI tool said I could grant this user access this way" is not something that would pass compliance.