7 ms·

Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could jus

Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don’t see the integration working in that direction. Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it’s available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integration with MS Office makes sense — where Office is aware when you’re working on files that are stored in Dropbox. This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy...

SamuelAdams 7y ago
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding. In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.
- asdkhadsj 7y ago
  > In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. On a related but perhaps off topic note; Is that wrong? I agree with everything you've said. Yet, I do wonder, is that business decision wrong? I've not spent much effort on the business side in my life, but from the outside I feel like I agree with their statement. Maybe not so much as in the "left behind" mantra, but more specifically I feel once a business reaches "success" (however you want to define that), your next objective should be maintaining/expanding the core product, and diversifying entirely. It seems to me that being a one product company runs a risk of another company choking you out in various ways. As an end user I of course love my products to say solely focused on the thing I want. I want Spotify to be my music app, nothing more. But I can sympathize with the decisions to diversify a companies offerings even if unrelated to the original core product. Thoughts?
  - yankeehue 7y ago
    > It seems to me that being a one product company runs a risk of another company choking you out in various ways. One possible solution then is to change your company to be a multi-product company, instead of adding new-product features into your one product.
  - iguy 7y ago
    I agree. I know why humans must diversify, to avoid having all their eggs in one basket, but why is it obvious that companies should? Their owners should invest in other things, but maybe it's better to admit that a given company is a bet on a particular niche, and if it dies, it dies. In fact I'd go a bit further, and say that if every company seems to become a conglomerate, that's a sign that something is broken in how a country works. If it's advantageous for two companies doing completely different things to be under one name, one roof, then it's likely that their real skill is in something else, like political connections, not in making whatever products it is they make. And that's unhealthy.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      I agree in the frictionless vacuum sense, but I think you're missing an element of how firms work. Just spitballing, but it's incredibly non-trivial to both aggregate skilled labor and organize them into an effective entity. Being eager about tearing down and spinning up these organizations to keep each entity single-purpose seems like it would be a lot less efficient (and competitive) than taking advantage of an existing well-run organization to do things that are somewhat related.
- m_fayer 7y ago
  > As long as software is tied to a company... I hope you're wrong, or at least wrong enough to leave room for a few "small is beautiful" outliers.
thinkharderdev 7y ago
They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.
- jacobcohen11 7y ago
  Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people
  - asdkhadsj 7y ago
    I'd be curious if they simply couldn't compete, and they recognized that. Ie, their competition is heavily Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc which offer competing products as part of their suite. Yet, Google/etc doesn't really care about file sharing/storage. It's just one component in a much larger model. I'd be curious if, due to cloud prices/etc, Dropbox didn't feel they could actually sustain a competitive price and become profitable. So they're trying to expand to other avenues and find something that works.
  - andrewjrhill 7y ago
    It's a lack of focus on increasing sales throughput. They should have looked to resolve bottlenecks between when a lead first hits their website and when a sale is finalised. There's always something along that process that is poor and holding back the rest of the process. An increase in throughput = increased sales.
    - arkitaip 7y ago
      You don't think their funnel is optimized already? The truth is that Google and Microsoft have the mind shares and products that integrate well with their respective eco systems already. Google Drive and OneDrive just work and are highly affordable already.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Who provides dropboxes actual storage? That provider could just keep squeezing dropbox until the provider creates a copy of dropbox or has them bent over just to the point of them switching to another provider. Maybe dropbox should have been building their own data centers in the mean time, cutting their overhead. That idea of restraining growth in favor of long term stability probably wouldn't sit so well with the shareholders who want their pie tomorrow.
ajross 7y ago
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? Investor demands for growth. Dropbox already did one thing well. But they took money on the promise that they'd do more things and make more money than they could with that one thing they did well.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  I wish more companies would take the Craigstlist model. There are very few posts they charge for and it's enough to keep the company totally doing. Even when Backpage was around to compete with them, they still were able to do that one thing well and keep going. The constant demand for growth is not a good thing. You can only sell so many eyePhones or Intel CPUs before people just would rather keep old things working longer or recycle or not consume things and save their money for travel/experiences.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    Stock market doesn’t work that way. You are legally required to grow, forever until the end of time (or your business). I think it’s one of the most toxic forces that leads to pollution, over-consolidation, etc.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      Where are you legally required to do that? What law is that?
      - azinman2 7y ago
        Fiduciary duty to shareholders
        skinnymuch 7y ago
        I don’t think that’s actually true. Your original statement. The duty is just to behave how a reasonable or prudent person would behave. I doubt there would be a lawsuit case against Craigslist that would win if Craigslist was a public company.
maxxxxx 7y ago
They need to hit their growth numbers. Either they come up with something new ( which is really hard) or they keep expanding their current main product. The latter is much easier. In my view a lot of products could be frozen once they are mature . MS Office could have stopped most development a decade or more ago, Gmail could have stopped years ago. Windows could have stopped UI changes with XP or 7. But what are all these people supposed to do if not tweaking their product?
- mmckelvy 7y ago
  Such a good point. I think MS Office peaked with Office 2003. Most changes since have made the product slightly worse in my opinion.
solatic 7y ago
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow. Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice. You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you. You're doing things well, but it no longer really feels well, because your success in the marketplace no longer correlates with the maturity and quality of the product you're offering. You may have an incredibly mature and well-supported product, but it feels stale. It turns out that customers appreciate qualities like "refreshing" and "modern" that your product seemingly lacks. As you start to lose customers, your declining revenue forces you to lay off employees and your stock starts to decline. Without a big change, you go out of business and shutter your doors for good. The executives are forced to sell the IP for pennies on the dollar to some patent troll as part of the company's bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings, and might open-source the IP if no buyer can be found.
- Majromax 7y ago
  > You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you. ... so you're saying the first-mover begins coasting and fails to invest in its product, while the plucky upstart puts in novel research and development. That might be common, but it hardly seems inevitable. If anything the 'old guard' should have a relative advantage from better know-how, including knowledge of what pitfalls to avoid. The true underlying issue might be the false assumption that market position is durable, rather than purchased with a depreciating investment in tooling, process, and technology.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    > That might be common, but it hardly seems inevitable. You have circularized the discussion. Solatic's post is not suggesting that it is inevitable, as it is a response to the question "what's wrong with doing one thing well?"
passthejoe 7y ago
For me, the "killer" feature of Google Docs/Sheets is the ability of multiple users to be in the document at the same time, all making changes, and all those changes being seen by all in real time. I don't think that shared Dropbox files can replicate this same functionality, so maybe apps on their side is the way to bridge the gap.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  This is also possible with Sharepoint from Microsoft, but you can open them all up in the desktop versions of those apps which I prefer.
  - s1mon 7y ago
    Kinda sorta. Yes the MS applications are more powerful, but the collaboration tools still are not as real-time as Google. My work was forced to switch from Google to MS, so I have years of experience with both. People often have to reopen files to see other people’s edits or there’s a huge lag that we never had with Google. We’re in SF, CA with a fast fiber connection. There’s also not exact parity between the desktop versions and the web versions of the applications. It’s easy to start to try to do something only to discover that, for instance, you can’t group objects in web PPT. Granted, with Google, while it’s pretty much always the same experience, but there are the long tail features which are missing.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      My experience has been with Excel and it wasn't all that slow, but I have not used it extensively as you have. I am over in Maitland, FL not sure what our speed is tbh.
    - MrPea 7y ago
      What's amazing is that Google has had this functionality for a little under a decade. No other company matches the real-time editing still
archagon 7y ago
This is the problem with VC funding: any simple utility will inevitably become a confusing tangle of services that nobody wants. Dropbox became ubiquitous because it was a dead-simple folder that automatically synced, but that just doesn't rake in the big bucks. So they're forced to glob on pointless features until the whole thing collapses like a flan.
ori_b 7y ago
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? Turns out that it dies if you try to grow it near walled gardens. The soil doesn't suit it.
jpalomaki 7y ago
“do one thing and do it well” - I've liked that approach, but being on the buying side and as the number of solutions needed keeps on increasing, I'm getting second thoughts. Like what you might end up with with this approach and selecting best of breed: Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Office 365 desktop, Google Apps (email), Some CRM solution, Github, client security solution, VPN solution, Jira, Confluence (wiki), Zendesk (helpdesk). If you want things like single-sign-on and some additional security and management capabilities then you typically need to pick some higher pricing tier for each service. The price per user per month adds up. And as a added bonus, you also need to spend time managing all these and handle the monthly invoices/receipts. What Dropbox is now doing is of course not solution to my problem. The only solution to the issue I'm having is consolidation of the services or smaller players teaming up and giving me unified package (like Dropbox+Slack+Zoom). Fully integrated packages like Microsoft 365 are quite tempting, even though I know the individual pieces are not "best of breed".
coldtea 7y ago
>Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? It was seldom the thing users wanted and could use, and ended up being relegated to the dev-oriented UNIX userland.
derefr 7y ago
> gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. Do you ever right-click a file on your desktop and expect to be able to do an “Open With” action to open it in a Zoom meeting? Dropbox is trying to recreate/recapitulate that functionality—the functionality of OS file-explorer GUIs, and how they act as a launchpad for feeding files to third-party intent providers.
T-hawk 7y ago
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? This relies on composability, integrating together several such components into a coherent whole. Users don't understand composability or want to do it. They want the integration to already exist and just work.
- goobynight 7y ago
  Right. Imagine teaching most people to pipe "ls" into "grep", even without any flags. You've already lost double digit percentages of people.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  to be fair not every developer likes it either. Not to start the traditional flamewar but I've always been a much bigger fan of emacs than of vim precisely because it gives me a powerful, integrated environment rather than a set of distinct tools. You could also compare wechat to traditional isolated apps, and in my opinion well integrated platforms trump collections of tools almost always.
rodgerd 7y ago
> This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy... I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run it through voice recognition, and turn it into a OneNote transcript to sit alongside your repo of project docs for the same meeting. Sometimes well-integrated solutions are more than the sum of their parts, and that's the problem Dropbox is facing.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Well-integrated solutions were simple until SaaS companies purposefully broke it. There's nothing in software that would make it impossible to have an arbitrary calendar app work well with arbitrary file browser, file syncer, text editor, document editor, etc. A bit of system-level tools (that's kind of what the OS is for), a bit of common protocols. But when each of the above became redone as SaaS, interoperability became a matter of service providers signing agreements with each other, and not something end-users could set up.
miguelmota 7y ago
I agree with the sentiment that dropbox is doing too many things that don't make the most sense but sometimes the company doesn't have a choice but to try new things to extend the userbase into different markets because that's what VCs are demanding and expecting them to do. VCs want a 10x return and not a 2x return on a lifestyle business.
icelancer 7y ago
>> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? VC Money.

SamuelAdams 7y ago

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding. In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.

asdkhadsj 7y ago
> In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. On a related but perhaps off topic note; Is that wrong? I agree with everything you've said. Yet, I do wonder, is that business decision wrong? I've not spent much effort on the business side in my life, but from the outside I feel like I agree with their statement. Maybe not so much as in the "left behind" mantra, but more specifically I feel once a business reaches "success" (however you want to define that), your next objective should be maintaining/expanding the core product, and diversifying entirely. It seems to me that being a one product company runs a risk of another company choking you out in various ways. As an end user I of course love my products to say solely focused on the thing I want. I want Spotify to be my music app, nothing more. But I can sympathize with the decisions to diversify a companies offerings even if unrelated to the original core product. Thoughts?
- yankeehue 7y ago
  > It seems to me that being a one product company runs a risk of another company choking you out in various ways. One possible solution then is to change your company to be a multi-product company, instead of adding new-product features into your one product.
- iguy 7y ago
  I agree. I know why humans must diversify, to avoid having all their eggs in one basket, but why is it obvious that companies should? Their owners should invest in other things, but maybe it's better to admit that a given company is a bet on a particular niche, and if it dies, it dies. In fact I'd go a bit further, and say that if every company seems to become a conglomerate, that's a sign that something is broken in how a country works. If it's advantageous for two companies doing completely different things to be under one name, one roof, then it's likely that their real skill is in something else, like political connections, not in making whatever products it is they make. And that's unhealthy.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I agree in the frictionless vacuum sense, but I think you're missing an element of how firms work. Just spitballing, but it's incredibly non-trivial to both aggregate skilled labor and organize them into an effective entity. Being eager about tearing down and spinning up these organizations to keep each entity single-purpose seems like it would be a lot less efficient (and competitive) than taking advantage of an existing well-run organization to do things that are somewhat related.
m_fayer 7y ago
> As long as software is tied to a company... I hope you're wrong, or at least wrong enough to leave room for a few "small is beautiful" outliers.

thinkharderdev 7y ago

They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

jacobcohen11 7y ago
Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people
- asdkhadsj 7y ago
  I'd be curious if they simply couldn't compete, and they recognized that. Ie, their competition is heavily Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc which offer competing products as part of their suite. Yet, Google/etc doesn't really care about file sharing/storage. It's just one component in a much larger model. I'd be curious if, due to cloud prices/etc, Dropbox didn't feel they could actually sustain a competitive price and become profitable. So they're trying to expand to other avenues and find something that works.
- andrewjrhill 7y ago
  It's a lack of focus on increasing sales throughput. They should have looked to resolve bottlenecks between when a lead first hits their website and when a sale is finalised. There's always something along that process that is poor and holding back the rest of the process. An increase in throughput = increased sales.
  - arkitaip 7y ago
    You don't think their funnel is optimized already? The truth is that Google and Microsoft have the mind shares and products that integrate well with their respective eco systems already. Google Drive and OneDrive just work and are highly affordable already.
- asdff 7y ago
  Who provides dropboxes actual storage? That provider could just keep squeezing dropbox until the provider creates a copy of dropbox or has them bent over just to the point of them switching to another provider. Maybe dropbox should have been building their own data centers in the mean time, cutting their overhead. That idea of restraining growth in favor of long term stability probably wouldn't sit so well with the shareholders who want their pie tomorrow.

ajross 7y ago

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? Investor demands for growth. Dropbox already did one thing well. But they took money on the promise that they'd do more things and make more money than they could with that one thing they did well.

djsumdog 7y ago
I wish more companies would take the Craigstlist model. There are very few posts they charge for and it's enough to keep the company totally doing. Even when Backpage was around to compete with them, they still were able to do that one thing well and keep going. The constant demand for growth is not a good thing. You can only sell so many eyePhones or Intel CPUs before people just would rather keep old things working longer or recycle or not consume things and save their money for travel/experiences.
- azinman2 7y ago
  Stock market doesn’t work that way. You are legally required to grow, forever until the end of time (or your business). I think it’s one of the most toxic forces that leads to pollution, over-consolidation, etc.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Where are you legally required to do that? What law is that?
    - azinman2 7y ago
      Fiduciary duty to shareholders
      - skinnymuch 7y ago
        I don’t think that’s actually true. Your original statement. The duty is just to behave how a reasonable or prudent person would behave. I doubt there would be a lawsuit case against Craigslist that would win if Craigslist was a public company.

maxxxxx 7y ago

They need to hit their growth numbers. Either they come up with something new ( which is really hard) or they keep expanding their current main product. The latter is much easier. In my view a lot of products could be frozen once they are mature . MS Office could have stopped most development a decade or more ago, Gmail could have stopped years ago. Windows could have stopped UI changes with XP or 7. But what are all these people supposed to do if not tweaking their product?

mmckelvy 7y ago
Such a good point. I think MS Office peaked with Office 2003. Most changes since have made the product slightly worse in my opinion.

solatic 7y ago

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow. Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice. You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you. You're doing things well, but it no longer really feels well, because your success in the marketplace no longer correlates with the maturity and quality of the product you're offering. You may have an incredibly mature and well-supported product, but it feels stale. It turns out that customers appreciate qualities like "refreshing" and "modern" that your product seemingly lacks. As you start to lose customers, your declining revenue forces you to lay off employees and your stock starts to decline. Without a big change, you go out of business and shutter your doors for good. The executives are forced to sell the IP for pennies on the dollar to some patent troll as part of the company's bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings, and might open-source the IP if no buyer can be found.

Majromax 7y ago
> You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you. ... so you're saying the first-mover begins coasting and fails to invest in its product, while the plucky upstart puts in novel research and development. That might be common, but it hardly seems inevitable. If anything the 'old guard' should have a relative advantage from better know-how, including knowledge of what pitfalls to avoid. The true underlying issue might be the false assumption that market position is durable, rather than purchased with a depreciating investment in tooling, process, and technology.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  > That might be common, but it hardly seems inevitable. You have circularized the discussion. Solatic's post is not suggesting that it is inevitable, as it is a response to the question "what's wrong with doing one thing well?"

passthejoe 7y ago

For me, the "killer" feature of Google Docs/Sheets is the ability of multiple users to be in the document at the same time, all making changes, and all those changes being seen by all in real time. I don't think that shared Dropbox files can replicate this same functionality, so maybe apps on their side is the way to bridge the gap.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
This is also possible with Sharepoint from Microsoft, but you can open them all up in the desktop versions of those apps which I prefer.
- s1mon 7y ago
  Kinda sorta. Yes the MS applications are more powerful, but the collaboration tools still are not as real-time as Google. My work was forced to switch from Google to MS, so I have years of experience with both. People often have to reopen files to see other people’s edits or there’s a huge lag that we never had with Google. We’re in SF, CA with a fast fiber connection. There’s also not exact parity between the desktop versions and the web versions of the applications. It’s easy to start to try to do something only to discover that, for instance, you can’t group objects in web PPT. Granted, with Google, while it’s pretty much always the same experience, but there are the long tail features which are missing.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    My experience has been with Excel and it wasn't all that slow, but I have not used it extensively as you have. I am over in Maitland, FL not sure what our speed is tbh.
  - MrPea 7y ago
    What's amazing is that Google has had this functionality for a little under a decade. No other company matches the real-time editing still

archagon 7y ago

This is the problem with VC funding: any simple utility will inevitably become a confusing tangle of services that nobody wants. Dropbox became ubiquitous because it was a dead-simple folder that automatically synced, but that just doesn't rake in the big bucks. So they're forced to glob on pointless features until the whole thing collapses like a flan.

ori_b 7y ago

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? Turns out that it dies if you try to grow it near walled gardens. The soil doesn't suit it.

jpalomaki 7y ago

“do one thing and do it well” - I've liked that approach, but being on the buying side and as the number of solutions needed keeps on increasing, I'm getting second thoughts. Like what you might end up with with this approach and selecting best of breed: Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Office 365 desktop, Google Apps (email), Some CRM solution, Github, client security solution, VPN solution, Jira, Confluence (wiki), Zendesk (helpdesk). If you want things like single-sign-on and some additional security and management capabilities then you typically need to pick some higher pricing tier for each service. The price per user per month adds up. And as a added bonus, you also need to spend time managing all these and handle the monthly invoices/receipts. What Dropbox is now doing is of course not solution to my problem. The only solution to the issue I'm having is consolidation of the services or smaller players teaming up and giving me unified package (like Dropbox+Slack+Zoom). Fully integrated packages like Microsoft 365 are quite tempting, even though I know the individual pieces are not "best of breed".

coldtea 7y ago

>Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? It was seldom the thing users wanted and could use, and ended up being relegated to the dev-oriented UNIX userland.

derefr 7y ago

> gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. Do you ever right-click a file on your desktop and expect to be able to do an “Open With” action to open it in a Zoom meeting? Dropbox is trying to recreate/recapitulate that functionality—the functionality of OS file-explorer GUIs, and how they act as a launchpad for feeding files to third-party intent providers.

T-hawk 7y ago

> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? This relies on composability, integrating together several such components into a coherent whole. Users don't understand composability or want to do it. They want the integration to already exist and just work.

goobynight 7y ago
Right. Imagine teaching most people to pipe "ls" into "grep", even without any flags. You've already lost double digit percentages of people.
Barrin92 7y ago
to be fair not every developer likes it either. Not to start the traditional flamewar but I've always been a much bigger fan of emacs than of vim precisely because it gives me a powerful, integrated environment rather than a set of distinct tools. You could also compare wechat to traditional isolated apps, and in my opinion well integrated platforms trump collections of tools almost always.

rodgerd 7y ago

> This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy... I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run it through voice recognition, and turn it into a OneNote transcript to sit alongside your repo of project docs for the same meeting. Sometimes well-integrated solutions are more than the sum of their parts, and that's the problem Dropbox is facing.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Well-integrated solutions were simple until SaaS companies purposefully broke it. There's nothing in software that would make it impossible to have an arbitrary calendar app work well with arbitrary file browser, file syncer, text editor, document editor, etc. A bit of system-level tools (that's kind of what the OS is for), a bit of common protocols. But when each of the above became redone as SaaS, interoperability became a matter of service providers signing agreements with each other, and not something end-users could set up.

miguelmota 7y ago

I agree with the sentiment that dropbox is doing too many things that don't make the most sense but sometimes the company doesn't have a choice but to try new things to extend the userbase into different markets because that's what VCs are demanding and expecting them to do. VCs want a 10x return and not a 2x return on a lifestyle business.

icelancer 7y ago

>> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? VC Money.