(public).sospep.subjects ~ view article ~ inside-dropboxes-identity-overhaul

<h1 style="text-align: center;">inside dropboxes identity overhaul</h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
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<li>] by Scott Rosenberg @ medium.com -&nbsp;To recapture its mojo, the decacorn is expanding from your file cabinet to your office.</li>
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<h2>[WHY]</h2>
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<li>]&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
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<li><strong>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</strong></li>
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<li>]&nbsp;<a href="https://backchannel.com/inside-dropboxs-identity-overhaul-3104d184a1f7#.sdgi3kl8n" target="_blank">https://backchannel.com/inside-dropboxs-identity-overhaul-3104d184a1f7#.sdgi3kl8n</a></li>
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<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
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<li>] 2017-02-06</li>
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<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
<p><strong>Dropbox is tackling something that&rsquo;s harder to define: Instead of merely syncing files, it&rsquo;s promising to sync people?&mdash;?to keep members of workplace teams on the same page. Literally.</strong></p>
<p>That&rsquo;s the promise of Paper, the audacious new product that Dropbox launches today, after its appearance in open beta last August. It&rsquo;s part of a broader set of new features and upgrades that, the company&rsquo;s leaders promise, will lay the foundation for a new, radically simplified form of digital collaboration.</p>
<p>For Dropbox, this long-awaited expansion of its vision couldn&rsquo;t have come soon enough. The company always had an upstart vibe, but today it&rsquo;s a decade-old firm with about 1,600 employees, maze-like new headquarters near San Francisco&rsquo;s South Park, and?&mdash;?it announced last summer?&mdash;?positive cash flow. Three quarters of its users are outside the US, and there are 3.3 billion &ldquo;persistent sharing relationships&rdquo;?&mdash;?files or folders that connect users.</p>
<p>But Dropbox has also had some recent rough patches. A year ago, it shut down a photo sharing project called Carousel and an email app it had acquired called Mailbox. Not long after, two of its investors questioned the company&rsquo;s heady $10 billion valuation and wrote down the value of their investment.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In its decade of life, cloud storage&mdash;even done as slickly as Dropbox does it&mdash;has come to be seen widely as a commodity service. With Paper and the other new team-oriented changes, Houston hopes people will stop thinking of Dropbox as just &ldquo;a home for your stuff.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Houston announced that the company has now topped $1 billion in recurring annual revenue; he claims it&rsquo;s the fastest software-as-a-service firm to climb to that milestone as quickly.</p>
<p>trying to wrap my head around what is actually transformative about Paper and the company&rsquo;s other recent new initiatives. Those include Smart Sync, a nifty extension of file syncing that lets you work with remote files as if they were a part of your desktop filesystem, and team-scale Dropboxes that remodel the personal info-store service into a replacement for the old-school departmental file server.</p>
<p>Put it all together and you have, Houston says, <strong>a unique effort to unite the two realms of computing between which we hop back and forth today: &ldquo;File world,&rdquo; the drives and directories where our work products and documents live, and &ldquo;cloud world,&rdquo;</strong> the networked environment where we communicate and collaborate.</p>
<p>It will be more like a group home for you and everyone you work with. And it will be a crowded one, because everyone&rsquo;s invited to share. And sync.</p>
<p><strong>This plan is kind of abstract. It lacks the instant wow factor of tech wonders like voice-enabled digital valets or self-driving cars.</strong> Getting business software to take its next evolutionary leap turns out to be <strong>a tough problem</strong>, and <strong>the solutions remain embryonic.</strong> That&rsquo;s why, at work, we&rsquo;re all still using programs that haven&rsquo;t fundamentally changed in three decades, even as the rest of our lives are being kicked into Tomorrowland overdrive</p>
<p>&ldquo;I have the ability to search through the entirety of human knowledge in any language on my phone in one second right now. But <strong>if you ask me to search through all my company&rsquo;s information, knowledge, data, nobody&rsquo;s solved that problem. The data&rsquo;s all over the place.&rdquo;&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>Facebook and other social networks keep us in sync with our personal connections, but finding out what&rsquo;s happening with other people at work isn&rsquo;t so simple. <strong>&ldquo;Companies invent all these crazy mechanisms to solve that in pretty painful ways,&rdquo;&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>Agarwal says. Dropbox&rsquo;s new projects won&rsquo;t vault us instantaneously into a future where workplace software is as streamlined, modern, and machine-learning-driven as our after-hours apps&mdash;but that&rsquo;s where the company wants to aim long-term.</p>
<p>Office then google docs then and now Dropbox&rsquo;s developers and designers asked: What if you ditched the whole office suite and started from scratch?</p>
<p>&nbsp;At its launch state <strong>it looks like a simplified browser-based document editor with comments?</strong>&mdash;?as if <strong>Microsoft Office or Google Docs got reincarnated as the love-child of Medium and Slack.</strong> It&rsquo;s sleek, fast, and easy to use. But it does a lot less than its more mature competition, and <strong>when you first look at it, you may scratch your head and wonder what the big deal is. That was my reaction last year when I first read about its earliest versions.</strong></p>
<p>&ldquo;A lot of transformative improvements start out looking like toys,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re pretty quickly dismissed. That&rsquo;s the nature of low-end disruption.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Paper provides <strong>a fascinating hybrid of text document and cloud workspace.</strong> It&rsquo;s a kind of context generator: <strong>You use it to knit together disparate fragments of information into something shareable</strong> and lasting. <strong>You can embed almost anything, from web images and YouTube videos to Google Docs and Word files?</strong>&mdash;?just select a file or drop a URL in, and it works. (Bonus: Embedded files, unlike email attachments, will stay up-to-date as people edit the original.)</p>
<p>You can write text connecting all these items you&rsquo;re embedding. Your teammates can drop in comments and feedback. Any document can flip into a presentation mode that parcels it out in slide-size chunks. There are simple tools for assigning tasks and setting due dates, so Paper works for lightweight project management. It&rsquo;s also got rudimentary table capabilities?</p>
<p>But Dropbox does think Paper could become a sort of <strong>universal glue that connects teammates working together on updating a spreadsheet, designing a web page, reviewing code, or editing a press release.</strong> Once in place, it will<strong> save you from having to be &ldquo;an archaeologist,&rdquo;</strong> in Houston&rsquo;s phrase, putting an end to <strong>excavations of long email threads and chats, treasure hunts for the latest version of a file, and reconstructions of who said what.</strong></p>
<p>In the longer term, <strong>Dropbox can unleash machine learning code on the Paper data</strong> and see how much further it can accelerate and automate all this information cultivation.</p>
<p>All of these tools are looking for the perfect balance point between real-time communication and long-term knowledge-sharing. You can chat all you want, and of course you will, but sooner or later you actually have to do your work, whatever it may be.</p>
<p>The secret? Kavitha Radhakrishnan, Paper&rsquo;s product manager, told me that Dropbox used eight Paper documents, total, to plan the whole product launch. In the middle of the last-lap scramble before the event, everyone was noticeably?&mdash;?as promised!?&mdash;?in sync.&nbsp;</p>
<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
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<li>]</li>
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<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
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<li>] SRC = HN, comments</li>
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<h2>[RELATED]</h2>
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<li>] SRC = best-of-HN-2017-02-dd Dropbox Paper</li>
<li>]&nbsp;https://workplace.fb.com/ -&nbsp;</li>
<li>]&nbsp;https://www.box.com/notes -&nbsp;</li>
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

~ view article ~ Chapter] ch-999-index FROM [ Book] project-management IN [ libraries] technology-software