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SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool

by Dwolb 7y ago

SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user’s workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers. We’re going to see this more frequently and it’ll look weird coming from different tools trying to level up and pull this off (i.e. what will email look like with this?). One issue is as incumbents partner/buddy-up and competition heats up, we’ll see a bunch of bundling, increasing consumer costs while locking out newcomers.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
Agreed. The beauty of Dropbox used to be their utter invisibility. They just seamlessly synced my files in the background. If they're now going to insist on being "in my face," I'll take my business elsewhere. And whichever Dropbox vice president tried to make his bones with this project can pound sand.
- andrewjrhill 7y ago
  I audibly "ughed" when they introduced that stupid dropbox floating action button in Office 365.
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  Yeah. That was the attraction. It was invisible and got the job done. Recently, the notifications about their new products inside Dropbox is simply spammy.
pbowyer 7y ago
And it's not like it's not been tried before. ODrive does it [1], and has revised their offering as (from the outside it seems) people didn't pay what they expected for the convenience. 1. https://www.odrive.com/ https://www.odrive.com/
drstewart 7y ago
>(i.e. what will email look like with this?). Take a look at Front (a YC company I believe) for an example of a place trying to do this
TheRealDunkirk 7y ago
> SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. Love this quote. BUT... I know my group is trying to address exactly what Dropbox seems to be aiming at here. How do you find all the hundreds and thousands of pieces of information that are being generated in just a small group of people? Sharepoint is Microsoft's current attempt, and even though my megacorp uses it, my group has asked me to create an alternative, because it sucks (and hard, given our implementation). There needs to be just ONE BOX that searches EVERYTHING. I just finished a prototype of a search tool for firmware dumps, based on Elasticsearch. It works even better than I hoped. It only takes a few seconds to search across thousands of images for combinations of hundreds of yes/no questions. (Albeit quite a bit longer to marshal the actual values.) My current though is to create an index to dump all Office documents into, and let Elasticsearch do its thing. I can create a taskbar app to drag files into, and a spotlight-like search box to dig up anything dumped into it. Tell me there's a better way. I don't really want to write this app. This is an obvious problem for an organization of ANY size now. (It's a problem for my church's staff of 10!) I, for one, am glad to see Dropbox taking a stab at it.
dudus 7y ago
Oh no god forbid a company slightly change any of their offerings and add more features that will appeal to most of their audience. Then go around and try to advertise this on Hacker News, which we like to think is a community of visionary and entrepreneur geniuses but we really are a bunch of self-entitled and change averse edge case users that know better. \s Also, required "fuck Google" quote at the end.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's not change aversion and edge case circlejerk - it's a reaction to Dropbox pulling an user-hostile move, damaging their core product in a most likely vain attempt at trying to become the platform for office data management. My problem with such moves is that you have a bunch of companies making their product worse trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, and whoever eventually wins will be the platform that further screws users by taking more and more ownership and control of data and computation away from them.
shostack 7y ago
Sidebar, since I suspect you were commenting more on consumer email services, but this sort of "moving up the food chain for owning customers and lock-in" has been happening for a while in the ESP (email service provider) space that companies use to manage their customer-facing emails. For a bit now all the big email players have been getting acquired as part of some larger "marketing cloud" that attempts to fully integrate that as the hub for an audience platform that then ties in with other external touchpoints and such. One of the aims seems to be that owning the audience and performance data has inherent lock-in, and thus forced stickiness. Really interesting to see in context of recent BI tool acquisitions.

by Dwolb 7y ago

dreamcompiler 7y ago

Agreed. The beauty of Dropbox used to be their utter invisibility. They just seamlessly synced my files in the background. If they're now going to insist on being "in my face," I'll take my business elsewhere. And whichever Dropbox vice president tried to make his bones with this project can pound sand.

andrewjrhill 7y ago
I audibly "ughed" when they introduced that stupid dropbox floating action button in Office 365.
iscrewyou 7y ago
Yeah. That was the attraction. It was invisible and got the job done. Recently, the notifications about their new products inside Dropbox is simply spammy.

pbowyer 7y ago

And it's not like it's not been tried before. ODrive does it [1], and has revised their offering as (from the outside it seems) people didn't pay what they expected for the convenience. 1. https://www.odrive.com/ https://www.odrive.com/

drstewart 7y ago

>(i.e. what will email look like with this?). Take a look at Front (a YC company I believe) for an example of a place trying to do this

TheRealDunkirk 7y ago

> SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. Love this quote. BUT... I know my group is trying to address exactly what Dropbox seems to be aiming at here. How do you find all the hundreds and thousands of pieces of information that are being generated in just a small group of people? Sharepoint is Microsoft's current attempt, and even though my megacorp uses it, my group has asked me to create an alternative, because it sucks (and hard, given our implementation). There needs to be just ONE BOX that searches EVERYTHING. I just finished a prototype of a search tool for firmware dumps, based on Elasticsearch. It works even better than I hoped. It only takes a few seconds to search across thousands of images for combinations of hundreds of yes/no questions. (Albeit quite a bit longer to marshal the actual values.) My current though is to create an index to dump all Office documents into, and let Elasticsearch do its thing. I can create a taskbar app to drag files into, and a spotlight-like search box to dig up anything dumped into it. Tell me there's a better way. I don't really want to write this app. This is an obvious problem for an organization of ANY size now. (It's a problem for my church's staff of 10!) I, for one, am glad to see Dropbox taking a stab at it.

dudus 7y ago

Oh no god forbid a company slightly change any of their offerings and add more features that will appeal to most of their audience. Then go around and try to advertise this on Hacker News, which we like to think is a community of visionary and entrepreneur geniuses but we really are a bunch of self-entitled and change averse edge case users that know better. \s Also, required "fuck Google" quote at the end.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's not change aversion and edge case circlejerk - it's a reaction to Dropbox pulling an user-hostile move, damaging their core product in a most likely vain attempt at trying to become the platform for office data management. My problem with such moves is that you have a bunch of companies making their product worse trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, and whoever eventually wins will be the platform that further screws users by taking more and more ownership and control of data and computation away from them.

shostack 7y ago

Sidebar, since I suspect you were commenting more on consumer email services, but this sort of "moving up the food chain for owning customers and lock-in" has been happening for a while in the ESP (email service provider) space that companies use to manage their customer-facing emails. For a bit now all the big email players have been getting acquired as part of some larger "marketing cloud" that attempts to fully integrate that as the hub for an audience platform that then ties in with other external touchpoints and such. One of the aims seems to be that owning the audience and performance data has inherent lock-in, and thus forced stickiness. Really interesting to see in context of recent BI tool acquisitions.