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After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create
by ungzd 10y ago
After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create, review, organize" — but even Quake level editor is about creating, reviewing and organizing.
- OedipusRex 10y agoI would describe it as a feature for a target audience. /s They took a ton of screen real estate just to show us pictures of people typing into non-descriptive text-editors and people use laptops.
- joshbert 10y agoMy immediate thought was "another Dropbox project that'll be sunset in a year's time, huh?"
- OedipusRex 10y agoThey Google'd it.
- desireco42 10y agoNice jab!
- brianpgordon 10y agoGoogle Wave is exactly what I thought of. Like Wave, this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist. People are going to ooh and aah over it, and then keep using Slack and Google Docs. s/Wave/Paper in this Wave obituary from 2010: > Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. ... Despite its prodigious sophistication under the hood, the service never resonated with its target audience. Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface. https://arstechnica.com/business/2010/08/wave-cancellation-google-gives-up-on-next-gen-messaging/ https://arstechnica.com/business/2010/08/wave-cancellation-g...
- Angostura 10y agoI used Wave extensively with an international team for project management and we found it extremely useful. The main problem was i) Yes, you had to get around a new way of working that merbed previously seperate paradigms - ii) (the killer) performance in the browser was completely horrendous. It was the cumbersome Web interface that was the main problem, rather (the execution) rather than the concept.
- Scriptor 10y agoThe functionality was polished and sexy. The UI was clunky and the epitome of what happens when programmers design. Everything was jam packed into the screen so that it was immediately obvious what kinds of things you could do or how to go about what you wanted to do. It introduced a lot of concepts all at once, causing an unnecessary learning curve.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y agoHeh, I had the reverse thought—if they let anyone who used the product near it they'd find SOMETHING that works!
- grinich 10y agoThe comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave. It's a small world. :)
- coldtea 10y ago>The comparison to Wave is actually kind of funny here, since Dropbox Paper came from the acquisition of Hackpad, which was a fork of Etherpad, which was a startup that Google acquired to integrate with Google Wave. As a long time user of hackpad, it's nothing more than a glorified document editor, and very simple at that, with meagre "shared editing" capabilities that we've had for decades, even in desktop apps. (The main reason I stuck with it is it's faster to load than Google Docs, and I only care about basic editing).
- wodenokoto 10y agoIt's Google docs but instead of being aimed at producing documents for prints, it is aimed at producing document for online consumption (multimedia) These documents can be used for notes about ideas, documentation, business plans, etc., etc. Kinda like webpages, but with an easy-to-write interface, collaborative chat, and easy user access management. Honestly, I thought the landing page showed that quite well. It did leave me questions about if documents are interlinked like a wiki, and where and how they drew data for the graphs.
- Osmium 10y ago> It's Google docs but instead of being aimed at producing documents for prints, it is aimed at producing document for online consumption (multimedia) Honestly, not a bad idea when you think about it. It seems strange that we're still use word processors/pdfs in an increasingly post-paper world. The web, I think, solves a different problem, and in any case not everybody should have to be a web designer to be able to produce a good document for designed for computer-first consumption.
- aembleton 10y agoThis does feel like Google Wave. I hope they succeed at it, rather than drop it.
- nvr219 10y agoMy thoughts exactly
- master5o1 10y ago>It's Google docs but instead of being aimed at producing documents for prints, it is aimed at producing document for online consumption (multimedia) Pretty weird to name it after a printed medium if it is not primarily meant for printed media.
- toomim 10y agoHahaha.
- sandebert 10y agoAll of a sudden I want a Quake Office Suite.
- dylanz 10y agoSeriously. I landed on the page, watched the intro, and the little animated wizard created a rainbow. I actually sat there waiting for the damn wizard to deliver me an "aha" moment, but he just kept creating rainbows. Hah! I scrolled down and still don't get it. I actually like the wizard, but @#$%^... why can't landing pages actually explain to me what the @#%^&ing product is, or does.
- PerfectElement 10y ago> why can't landing pages actually explain to me what the @#%^&ing product is, or does. I like landing pages with lots of screenshots, showing how a problem is solved in a few steps. However, I tried to do that for my company and conversion rates dropped. So I had to give in to the marketing guy who was telling me to just focus on the benefits of using the product and not on how it solves it. Now our landing page has no screenshots and the conversion rates are great. Go figure.
- danieltillett 10y agoIf you are not the customer for your product don't sell it the way you would like to be sold to. I fall into this trap all the time.
- samstave 10y agoHow savvy is your market? screenshots mean nothing. Solve X with Y feature seems, to me, at least, to be best method to get people to convert. Does anyone know the demographics of conversion-rates by age (within the same field) for their customers; I.E. if your a an [engineer] - how old are those that convert to [product] by [age]?
- dylanz 10y agoHah! Great anecdote. Sometimes you have to follow the numbers. Go figure indeed!
- mesozoic 10y agoI think it's actual paper. Though April 1 isn't soon...
- dumindunuwan 10y agofor me it looks like, Medium + Google Docs + Slack
- ata_aman 10y agoexactly what I was thinking
- e12e 10y agoIn other words - Google Wave?
- ata_aman 10y agoliterally first time I'm hearing about Google Wave
- throwaway40483 10y agoWhich explains why Google Wave is no longer with us.
- dumindunuwan 10y agohttps://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=455 https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=455
- e12e 10y agoI'm not sure if it's really still alive, but it actually got opened up, not just killed: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ - rare for a Google product that gets the axe.
- dumindunuwan 10y agono. Google wave = (Ether pad + Gtalk) + plugins :D
- lphnull 10y agoAt first glance, I just assumed that dropbox was creating their own competitor to trello, but with dropbox built in. How is this any different than trello?
- ryanisnan 10y agoThe use-cases that I see between something like Trello and Paper seem quite different. I'm using Paper so far to create an itinerary for an upcoming trip. It seems to be working quite well thus far. Displays on mobile nicely. Image layouts seem to be a bit clunky, but, to their credit doing it nicely is no easy task. I would never use Trello for something like that.
- bassman9000 10y agoHaha, exactly my thoughts! Document-driven workflow management? Enriched-Wave-like collaboration tool? BTW, why every. single. pitch. video. today has to have this huggy-feely-casual voice over?
- RachelF 10y agoIt's a hard landing page to understand. Took quite a bit of effort to understand what it is. Dropbox used to be good at simplifying things. If the landing page is this confused it doesn't bode too well Dropbox Paper.
- tlogan 10y ago> After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. It is really really hard to promote a basic text editor as something revolutionary.
- partisan 10y agoThe problem is they are trying to use a name which has a widely understood meaning - Paper - and then attempting to redefine it but doing so by using it in sentences where the common meaning almost makes sense, leaving you in a state of partial confusion.
- mirimir 10y agoIt makes more sense if you've read Stephenson's Diamond Age ;)
- partisan 10y agoThe problem is they are trying to use a name which has a widely understood meaning - Paper - and then attempting to redefine it but doing so by using it in sentences where the common meaning almost makes sense, leaving you in a state of partial confusion.
- Waterluvian 10y agoDangit. I came here to get an explanation of what this is. It looked like a joke page making fun of designers.
- avip 10y agoboxy mcdropface for hipsters?
- jmkni 10y agoAfter seeing the picture where they are literally using paper, my initial assumption was that this is was an old April fools joke.