8 ms·

A letter from Drew and Arash

97 points by andygcook 9y ago

noemit 9y ago
Dropbox just deleted 4GB of design files I needed for work. Their customer support is bewildered at why it can't be restored. Build a good product before you try to inspire me with stupid garbage. You're not a thought leader. Fire your spiritual guru. I'm so tired of tech founders thinking they are somehow philosophically relevant because they got lucky & made money.
- allannienhuis 9y ago
  Sorry you lost your files; that really sucks. However, just because something has flaws that can affect some people, doesn't mean their product is garbage and the founders know nothing of value. I don't work for dropbox, but they're clearly doing something right or they would not have been able to keep so many customers happy enough to keep giving them their money. That said, just because they were successful their opinions should not necessarily be treated as gospel or the path to riches for others. Survivorship bias is something to keep in mind: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440
Blahah 9y ago
The only other comment right now recounts a negative experience that is surely not common. I offer a balancing positive story of my recent experience. Between 2012-2016 I was studying for my PhD. I kept all my files in Dropbox (as well as some other places, but Dropbox was the one place I trusted with everything at once). I was paying for a premium account at the time, and had dozens of GB of stuff stored in my account. I stopped paying for it in 2016. Yesterday I wanted to show someone a protein model image [0] I made during my PhD. I logged into my old Dropbox account, and found all the content preserved there. I haven't paid them for two years, but they archived all my stuff and asked politely for me to reactivate the account in order to sync it again. But I can retrieve individual files if I don't pay. That's an extremely gracious and dependable service, compared to my experience of other companies. Congratulations Dropbox on your IPO, and on creating a product used seamlessly by hundreds of millions that really makes people's digital lives easier. Having experienced such high-trust service, I'm going to start paying them again. 0: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3d_model.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- balladeer 9y ago
  That's awesome. I love Dropbox too. I had created a file in the Dropbox folder and deleted by mistake and my CrashPlan failed to backup it during that period. Kinda my fault as I didn't keep the laptop open long enough for CrashPlan to index and run backup between the file was added and before it was deleted. Dropbox had a copy of it, among deleted files, when I needed it at work after some time. That's when I started paying for it upgrading from free account. Now if only they would offer client side encryption[0] - at least optional. Maybe with slower search or some missing features or an inferior experience to those customers who want this. It would just become even more awesome :) [0] https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/private-key https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/private-key
zawerf 9y ago
Sort of off topic: Linking to a dropbox file is a pretty terrible way of publishing what should have been a blog post instead. How can you tell whether this is legitimate or just some guy who set their display name to Arash? The UX design (which they are usually praised for) is pretty subpar for this page in general. The "..." button seems to be broken(on firefox on linux) and there's a useless comment pane that isn't autohidden and has a grayed out "enable comments" button for no reason. (EDIT: It seems this only happened because I am on a 4k resolution monitor so I guess it's forgivable)
- hashkb 9y ago
  What about Dropbox Paper?
  - zawerf 9y ago
    I don't use Paper, I was complaining about the UX of the page in this submission specifically. ... But I tried looking up Paper just now and saw that their register page, https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register, has broken UI too: https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png (blue text on blue background) I really don't get why Dropbox gets praised for their attention to detail.
    - desertmountain 9y ago
      What’s the ticker symbol for your $10B master-UX company?
      - aaomidi 9y ago
        How is this relevant when you're criticizing some detail? Are you saying you can't every criticize something because you're not perfect?
      - middleclick 9y ago
        What kind of a reply is this?
middleclick 9y ago
> Imagine if every minute at work were well spent—if we could focus and spend our time on the things that matter. Imagine how much more inspired we’d be. Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us. Geez. You are a file hosting service. Stop pretending like you fixed the world's hunger or something.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mythas 9y ago
  Wait are you telling me that every wasted minute you have at work isn’t due to file hosting issues? Personally I feel that if people designed digital spaces with as much care as they do physical spaces my work day would be rainbows and unicorns. /s
- labster 9y ago
  Too hyperbolic, for sure. But it's not worth nothing towards world hunger either. If we make a service that's cheaper, or overall wastes less of people's time than without it, then we make more wealth for the world. Yes it's unevenly distributed, but we hackers have to believe our work is worth something to the greater good, even if it's work for the megacorps.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Yes it's unevenly distributed, but we hackers have to believe our work is worth something to the greater good, even if it's work for the megacorps. Nah, you're just enriching someone else while building chat apps less capable than what existed 20 years ago while telling yourself you're doing good. That same effort would probably have a bigger impact somewhere else. You can tell yourself that but it's a justification for cash. "Wealth" and "progress" aren't inherently good. I know people who build stuff that people around the world use, they don't talk about how Einstein would've used their stuff or drop "enlightened" multiple times in posts. They shut their mouths and work. I know people who volunteer their time and money to make other people's lives better. None of them are billionaires. This puffy stuff associating yourself with some kind of moral and technological revolution is the worst part of tech and is the justification for the same kinds of abuses we've seen at Facebook this past week. It'd be better if people would just say "yeah, we wanted to be rich, we made a great app". The overwrought language is the stuff of parody and is tone deaf. Remember, this is a self-congratulatory post celebrating the founders becoming incredibly wealthy. This ethos of not only needing to be incredibly wealthy but also acting like you're great people because you are wealthy and needing other people to know that you're both wealthy and good is empty and vain and ultimately destructive because at the end of the day, there are lots of people who are just greedy. The cryptocurrency scams and Juicero people use the same language and are empowered by doing so. I've seen rooms of non-tech academics (whose work actually has changed the world) laugh about stuff like Juicero, the tech world often doesn't realize how they look to outsiders. It's surprising and not surprising that VC money has become so central to the hacker ethic, but it's distressing we can't just talk like people and be realistic about what we're achieving and enabling.
zakk 9y ago
What does this mean, besides the corporate garbage?
robotresearcher 9y ago
That's a letter from a generic marketing drone. It would have been much more interesting to hear from these people as human beings today. I guess they can't be real people in public any more. Sincerely, though: congrats on the IPO. I always liked the main product. The Linux support is a differentiator I appreciate.
sp527 9y ago
Legitimate question: how is Dropbox not effectively dead in the water? Between GDrive use driven by close integration with Gmail/GSuite and iCloud having major user capture, I don't understand where Dropbox is necessary or wanted anymore. If someone sent me a link to a Dropbox file instead of uploading to GDrive, I would find that weird and might even call them out on it. This applies to most people I know across a variety of demographics. Is there some secret massive trove of Dropbox users I'm simply not aware of? Speculation: momentum of people who were early on the cloud adoption curve who are implicitly/behaviorally entrenched by accrued data volume. That doesn't sound to me like the foundation of a solid business with growth potential (see: IBM). Those kinds of users are ultimately going to be fairly price sensitive given the substitutability of the product and therefore not marginally monetizable. They may already also perceive themselves as paying an 'inconvenience penalty' vs GDrive/iCloud. Honestly, this looks like exactly what it might very well be: rich Silicon Valley investors dump a squeezed, has-been company into the frothy public market to tap into 'dumb' liquidity. I should clarify I don't have anything against Dropbox itself. I do have a problem with pushing a dud into the public market at an irresponsible valuation to effectively defraud uninformed people and desperate institutional investors with low accountability who are facing a drought of good return opportunities (e.g. mutual fund and pension fund managers). You can hem and haw around it all you want ("oh they'll build new features", etc), but the growth expectation baked into their valuation is more or less predicated on extrapolating a pattern of success they are unlikely to be able to replicate. Cloud storage is commoditized and they're competing against monster platforms that are better positioned than them to capture new business and siphon their existing users (applies even in enterprise, arguably they lose against Box but certainly against Microsoft and now even Google). So they're being paid to try to tap into new verticals as very late contenders (e.g. Dropbox Paper)? There's no there there. It's wrong. In my opinion, it's fraud and only slightly less awful than the behavior surrounding the dotcom bust.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Google Drive is simply a terrible product compared to Dropbox. Everyone always says it’s just a feature (because Steve Jobs said that) but it’s a feature I’ve never seen anyone else get right.
- 9y ago
coding123 9y ago
Probably wasn't a great idea to shit on Groupon, Linked in and Slack...
narvind 9y ago
Fan mail induced high.
crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
I think creating the right environment for work starts with the internal/mental environment first. And this starts with developing a new design theory. Mindful design, as I define it, is a theory designed to preserve connection, respect/grow attention, responsible use emotion as an input, and be anti-addictive. It starts with human centered design (where innovation practices currently are, to my knowledge). From there, we add mindfulness, nonviolent communication, category theory, and computer science to hack our language so we can better communicate with each other. I'm tired and know I'm leaving things out here, but this is where I started researching over a year ago. I'm now working on a programming language for humans to program themselves through with the written/spoken word being the only technology required for it to work. I'm looking for help from anyone interested.
- nikki93 9y ago
  I’m interested in this and may have thoughts / want to hear what you have to say.
untangle 9y ago
> Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world...I hope some day you'll join us. And the world will be as one." - John Lennon Drew, you picked worthy source material.
tardo99 9y ago
I know I'm cruisin' for a bruisin' here karma-wise, but I just don't understand what they are trying to do with their company mission. From my perspective, Dropbox actually facilitates an old, broken way of creating and sharing documents using desktop applications from the 1990s and earlier. Google, by combining drive with docs, allows users to completely escape desktop applications, which to me is really the next generation of computing. To make this more concrete, if a company adopts Google Drive, they can issue employees much cheaper computers (lowering capex) because they don't have to be able to run heavyweight OS and application software like Windows and MacOS. Dropbox isn't even an entrant into that space, and I don't really see how they could compete. When I look at a company and find out they're using Dropbox, I always think to myself that they probably made that choice either because they've been using it for a long time, or because they didn't want to go to the effort to change their business processes to really embrace network computing. I imagine office workers running Word instead of Chrome, and that bothers me. Either way, I see Dropbox positioned as a stopgap to allow companies to avoid plowing ahead with new work paradigms while still enabling sharing of files without using things like USB keys. I don't work for either company, never have. But I remain confused about Dropbox's mission. Short of being acquired by someone, I can't see the way forward for them. But, they just raised a ton of cash, so I'm as excited as anyone to see what they try. EDIT: I want to briefly respond to the argument in this thread that it's a _good_ thing that Dropbox doesn't tie an office suite to sharing files. I simply disagree. I don't see how that is a real concrete negative to anyone unless it's for political reasons ("I don't want Google to be too powerful"). I _do_ however see how it's a problem for the vast majority of office workers who, using Dropbox, have to either keep using desktop applications or (shudder) create documents in something like Google Docs and then reupload them into Dropbox. So, at best Dropbox's independence strikes me as neutral, but for most people it seems clearly negative.
- pencilhappen 9y ago
  Dropbox's core product is trying to tack on P to CA systems. The CAP theorem explains how well this will actually work out. It's good they raised a bunch of cash, because they need to diversify their product base beyond that confused core. Time will tell if they do or not. Currently, I do not view them as a good long term investment.
aregsarkissian 9y ago
As I read this it sounded a lot like what basecamp and 37 signals have been saying and doing for a while.

97 points by andygcook 9y ago

Dropbox just deleted 4GB of design files I needed for work. Their customer support is bewildered at why it can't be restored. Build a good product before you try to inspire me with stupid garbage. You're not a thought leader. Fire your spiritual guru. I'm so tired of tech founders thinking they are somehow philosophically relevant because they got lucky & made money.

allannienhuis 9y ago
Sorry you lost your files; that really sucks. However, just because something has flaws that can affect some people, doesn't mean their product is garbage and the founders know nothing of value. I don't work for dropbox, but they're clearly doing something right or they would not have been able to keep so many customers happy enough to keep giving them their money. That said, just because they were successful their opinions should not necessarily be treated as gospel or the path to riches for others. Survivorship bias is something to keep in mind: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440

Blahah 9y ago

The only other comment right now recounts a negative experience that is surely not common. I offer a balancing positive story of my recent experience. Between 2012-2016 I was studying for my PhD. I kept all my files in Dropbox (as well as some other places, but Dropbox was the one place I trusted with everything at once). I was paying for a premium account at the time, and had dozens of GB of stuff stored in my account. I stopped paying for it in 2016. Yesterday I wanted to show someone a protein model image [0] I made during my PhD. I logged into my old Dropbox account, and found all the content preserved there. I haven't paid them for two years, but they archived all my stuff and asked politely for me to reactivate the account in order to sync it again. But I can retrieve individual files if I don't pay. That's an extremely gracious and dependable service, compared to my experience of other companies. Congratulations Dropbox on your IPO, and on creating a product used seamlessly by hundreds of millions that really makes people's digital lives easier. Having experienced such high-trust service, I'm going to start paying them again. 0: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3d_model.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
balladeer 9y ago
That's awesome. I love Dropbox too. I had created a file in the Dropbox folder and deleted by mistake and my CrashPlan failed to backup it during that period. Kinda my fault as I didn't keep the laptop open long enough for CrashPlan to index and run backup between the file was added and before it was deleted. Dropbox had a copy of it, among deleted files, when I needed it at work after some time. That's when I started paying for it upgrading from free account. Now if only they would offer client side encryption[0] - at least optional. Maybe with slower search or some missing features or an inferior experience to those customers who want this. It would just become even more awesome :) [0] https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/private-key https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/private-key

zawerf 9y ago

Sort of off topic: Linking to a dropbox file is a pretty terrible way of publishing what should have been a blog post instead. How can you tell whether this is legitimate or just some guy who set their display name to Arash? The UX design (which they are usually praised for) is pretty subpar for this page in general. The "..." button seems to be broken(on firefox on linux) and there's a useless comment pane that isn't autohidden and has a grayed out "enable comments" button for no reason. (EDIT: It seems this only happened because I am on a 4k resolution monitor so I guess it's forgivable)

hashkb 9y ago
What about Dropbox Paper?
- zawerf 9y ago
  I don't use Paper, I was complaining about the UX of the page in this submission specifically. ... But I tried looking up Paper just now and saw that their register page, https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register, has broken UI too: https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png (blue text on blue background) I really don't get why Dropbox gets praised for their attention to detail.
  - desertmountain 9y ago
    What’s the ticker symbol for your $10B master-UX company?
    - aaomidi 9y ago
      How is this relevant when you're criticizing some detail? Are you saying you can't every criticize something because you're not perfect?
    - middleclick 9y ago
      What kind of a reply is this?

middleclick 9y ago

> Imagine if every minute at work were well spent—if we could focus and spend our time on the things that matter. Imagine how much more inspired we’d be. Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us. Geez. You are a file hosting service. Stop pretending like you fixed the world's hunger or something.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mythas 9y ago
Wait are you telling me that every wasted minute you have at work isn’t due to file hosting issues? Personally I feel that if people designed digital spaces with as much care as they do physical spaces my work day would be rainbows and unicorns. /s
labster 9y ago
Too hyperbolic, for sure. But it's not worth nothing towards world hunger either. If we make a service that's cheaper, or overall wastes less of people's time than without it, then we make more wealth for the world. Yes it's unevenly distributed, but we hackers have to believe our work is worth something to the greater good, even if it's work for the megacorps.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Yes it's unevenly distributed, but we hackers have to believe our work is worth something to the greater good, even if it's work for the megacorps. Nah, you're just enriching someone else while building chat apps less capable than what existed 20 years ago while telling yourself you're doing good. That same effort would probably have a bigger impact somewhere else. You can tell yourself that but it's a justification for cash. "Wealth" and "progress" aren't inherently good. I know people who build stuff that people around the world use, they don't talk about how Einstein would've used their stuff or drop "enlightened" multiple times in posts. They shut their mouths and work. I know people who volunteer their time and money to make other people's lives better. None of them are billionaires. This puffy stuff associating yourself with some kind of moral and technological revolution is the worst part of tech and is the justification for the same kinds of abuses we've seen at Facebook this past week. It'd be better if people would just say "yeah, we wanted to be rich, we made a great app". The overwrought language is the stuff of parody and is tone deaf. Remember, this is a self-congratulatory post celebrating the founders becoming incredibly wealthy. This ethos of not only needing to be incredibly wealthy but also acting like you're great people because you are wealthy and needing other people to know that you're both wealthy and good is empty and vain and ultimately destructive because at the end of the day, there are lots of people who are just greedy. The cryptocurrency scams and Juicero people use the same language and are empowered by doing so. I've seen rooms of non-tech academics (whose work actually has changed the world) laugh about stuff like Juicero, the tech world often doesn't realize how they look to outsiders. It's surprising and not surprising that VC money has become so central to the hacker ethic, but it's distressing we can't just talk like people and be realistic about what we're achieving and enabling.

zakk 9y ago

What does this mean, besides the corporate garbage?

robotresearcher 9y ago

That's a letter from a generic marketing drone. It would have been much more interesting to hear from these people as human beings today. I guess they can't be real people in public any more. Sincerely, though: congrats on the IPO. I always liked the main product. The Linux support is a differentiator I appreciate.

sp527 9y ago

Legitimate question: how is Dropbox not effectively dead in the water? Between GDrive use driven by close integration with Gmail/GSuite and iCloud having major user capture, I don't understand where Dropbox is necessary or wanted anymore. If someone sent me a link to a Dropbox file instead of uploading to GDrive, I would find that weird and might even call them out on it. This applies to most people I know across a variety of demographics. Is there some secret massive trove of Dropbox users I'm simply not aware of? Speculation: momentum of people who were early on the cloud adoption curve who are implicitly/behaviorally entrenched by accrued data volume. That doesn't sound to me like the foundation of a solid business with growth potential (see: IBM). Those kinds of users are ultimately going to be fairly price sensitive given the substitutability of the product and therefore not marginally monetizable. They may already also perceive themselves as paying an 'inconvenience penalty' vs GDrive/iCloud. Honestly, this looks like exactly what it might very well be: rich Silicon Valley investors dump a squeezed, has-been company into the frothy public market to tap into 'dumb' liquidity. I should clarify I don't have anything against Dropbox itself. I do have a problem with pushing a dud into the public market at an irresponsible valuation to effectively defraud uninformed people and desperate institutional investors with low accountability who are facing a drought of good return opportunities (e.g. mutual fund and pension fund managers). You can hem and haw around it all you want ("oh they'll build new features", etc), but the growth expectation baked into their valuation is more or less predicated on extrapolating a pattern of success they are unlikely to be able to replicate. Cloud storage is commoditized and they're competing against monster platforms that are better positioned than them to capture new business and siphon their existing users (applies even in enterprise, arguably they lose against Box but certainly against Microsoft and now even Google). So they're being paid to try to tap into new verticals as very late contenders (e.g. Dropbox Paper)? There's no there there. It's wrong. In my opinion, it's fraud and only slightly less awful than the behavior surrounding the dotcom bust.

draw_down 9y ago
Google Drive is simply a terrible product compared to Dropbox. Everyone always says it’s just a feature (because Steve Jobs said that) but it’s a feature I’ve never seen anyone else get right.
9y ago

coding123 9y ago

Probably wasn't a great idea to shit on Groupon, Linked in and Slack...

narvind 9y ago

Fan mail induced high.

crawfordcomeaux 9y ago

I think creating the right environment for work starts with the internal/mental environment first. And this starts with developing a new design theory. Mindful design, as I define it, is a theory designed to preserve connection, respect/grow attention, responsible use emotion as an input, and be anti-addictive. It starts with human centered design (where innovation practices currently are, to my knowledge). From there, we add mindfulness, nonviolent communication, category theory, and computer science to hack our language so we can better communicate with each other. I'm tired and know I'm leaving things out here, but this is where I started researching over a year ago. I'm now working on a programming language for humans to program themselves through with the written/spoken word being the only technology required for it to work. I'm looking for help from anyone interested.

nikki93 9y ago
I’m interested in this and may have thoughts / want to hear what you have to say.

untangle 9y ago

> Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world...I hope some day you'll join us. And the world will be as one." - John Lennon Drew, you picked worthy source material.

tardo99 9y ago

I know I'm cruisin' for a bruisin' here karma-wise, but I just don't understand what they are trying to do with their company mission. From my perspective, Dropbox actually facilitates an old, broken way of creating and sharing documents using desktop applications from the 1990s and earlier. Google, by combining drive with docs, allows users to completely escape desktop applications, which to me is really the next generation of computing. To make this more concrete, if a company adopts Google Drive, they can issue employees much cheaper computers (lowering capex) because they don't have to be able to run heavyweight OS and application software like Windows and MacOS. Dropbox isn't even an entrant into that space, and I don't really see how they could compete. When I look at a company and find out they're using Dropbox, I always think to myself that they probably made that choice either because they've been using it for a long time, or because they didn't want to go to the effort to change their business processes to really embrace network computing. I imagine office workers running Word instead of Chrome, and that bothers me. Either way, I see Dropbox positioned as a stopgap to allow companies to avoid plowing ahead with new work paradigms while still enabling sharing of files without using things like USB keys. I don't work for either company, never have. But I remain confused about Dropbox's mission. Short of being acquired by someone, I can't see the way forward for them. But, they just raised a ton of cash, so I'm as excited as anyone to see what they try. EDIT: I want to briefly respond to the argument in this thread that it's a _good_ thing that Dropbox doesn't tie an office suite to sharing files. I simply disagree. I don't see how that is a real concrete negative to anyone unless it's for political reasons ("I don't want Google to be too powerful"). I _do_ however see how it's a problem for the vast majority of office workers who, using Dropbox, have to either keep using desktop applications or (shudder) create documents in something like Google Docs and then reupload them into Dropbox. So, at best Dropbox's independence strikes me as neutral, but for most people it seems clearly negative.

pencilhappen 9y ago
Dropbox's core product is trying to tack on P to CA systems. The CAP theorem explains how well this will actually work out. It's good they raised a bunch of cash, because they need to diversify their product base beyond that confused core. Time will tell if they do or not. Currently, I do not view them as a good long term investment.

aregsarkissian 9y ago

As I read this it sounded a lot like what basecamp and 37 signals have been saying and doing for a while.