Dropbox is tackling something that’s harder to define: Instead of merely syncing files, it’s promising to sync people?—?to keep members of workplace teams on the same page. Literally.
That’s the promise of Paper, the audacious new product that Dropbox launches today, after its appearance in open beta last August. It’s part of a broader set of new features and upgrades that, the company’s leaders promise, will lay the foundation for a new, radically simplified form of digital collaboration.
For Dropbox, this long-awaited expansion of its vision couldn’t have come soon enough. The company always had an upstart vibe, but today it’s a decade-old firm with about 1,600 employees, maze-like new headquarters near San Francisco’s South Park, and?—?it announced last summer?—?positive cash flow. Three quarters of its users are outside the US, and there are 3.3 billion “persistent sharing relationships”?—?files or folders that connect users.
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’s heady $10 billion valuation and wrote down the value of their investment.
In its decade of life, cloud storage—even done as slickly as Dropbox does it—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 “a home for your stuff.”
Houston announced that the company has now topped $1 billion in recurring annual revenue; he claims it’s the fastest software-as-a-service firm to climb to that milestone as quickly.
trying to wrap my head around what is actually transformative about Paper and the company’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.
Put it all together and you have, Houston says, a unique effort to unite the two realms of computing between which we hop back and forth today: “File world,” the drives and directories where our work products and documents live, and “cloud world,” the networked environment where we communicate and collaborate.
It will be more like a group home for you and everyone you work with. And it will be a crowded one, because everyone’s invited to share. And sync.
This plan is kind of abstract. It lacks the instant wow factor of tech wonders like voice-enabled digital valets or self-driving cars. Getting business software to take its next evolutionary leap turns out to be a tough problem, and the solutions remain embryonic. That’s why, at work, we’re all still using programs that haven’t fundamentally changed in three decades, even as the rest of our lives are being kicked into Tomorrowland overdrive
“I have the ability to search through the entirety of human knowledge in any language on my phone in one second right now. But if you ask me to search through all my company’s information, knowledge, data, nobody’s solved that problem. The data’s all over the place.”
Facebook and other social networks keep us in sync with our personal connections, but finding out what’s happening with other people at work isn’t so simple. “Companies invent all these crazy mechanisms to solve that in pretty painful ways,”
Agarwal says. Dropbox’s new projects won’t vault us instantaneously into a future where workplace software is as streamlined, modern, and machine-learning-driven as our after-hours apps—but that’s where the company wants to aim long-term.
Office then google docs then and now Dropbox’s developers and designers asked: What if you ditched the whole office suite and started from scratch?
At its launch state it looks like a simplified browser-based document editor with comments?—?as if Microsoft Office or Google Docs got reincarnated as the love-child of Medium and Slack. It’s sleek, fast, and easy to use. But it does a lot less than its more mature competition, and 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.
“A lot of transformative improvements start out looking like toys,” he says. “They’re pretty quickly dismissed. That’s the nature of low-end disruption.
Paper provides a fascinating hybrid of text document and cloud workspace. It’s a kind of context generator: You use it to knit together disparate fragments of information into something shareable and lasting. You can embed almost anything, from web images and YouTube videos to Google Docs and Word files?—?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.)
You can write text connecting all these items you’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’s also got rudimentary table capabilities?
But Dropbox does think Paper could become a sort of universal glue that connects teammates working together on updating a spreadsheet, designing a web page, reviewing code, or editing a press release. Once in place, it will save you from having to be “an archaeologist,” in Houston’s phrase, putting an end to excavations of long email threads and chats, treasure hunts for the latest version of a file, and reconstructions of who said what.
In the longer term, Dropbox can unleash machine learning code on the Paper data and see how much further it can accelerate and automate all this information cultivation.
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.
The secret? Kavitha Radhakrishnan, Paper’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?—?as promised!?—?in sync.
ID: 5589
NAME: inside-dropboxes-identity-overhaul
DESCRIPTION: [SUMMARY] inside dropboxes identity overhaul ] by Scott Rosenberg @ medium.com - To recapture its mojo, the decacorn is expanding from your file cabinet to your office.
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