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I had a chance to join a machine learning team at Dropbox a few years ago. Ultimately what made me decline was this feeling that everyone in the office was sort

by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I had a chance to join a machine learning team at Dropbox a few years ago. Ultimately what made me decline was this feeling that everyone in the office was sort of a zombie on autopilot. Nobody was excited about anything, all the use cases being kicked around for machine learning were extremely contrived recommendation and automation features that seemed like they had no real product research or stakeholder support to pursue them. It was like everyone was just resigned to raking in money on top of an extremely boring storage platform and clearly nobody was going to risk generous salary or equity coming in so they could rock the boat with an ambitious project. All to say it doesn’t surprise me that there was some lapse of quality checking or oversight on some feature of Paper integrating with Dropbox. The whole place reminded me of this quote by TS Eliot, “Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.”

AznHisoka 7y ago
Dropbox to me seems like a one-trick pony trying desperately to expand their market. It's a cloud storage system. Ideally for consumers, not enterprises (who already have Google Drive, or AWS if you're storing web objects). I know they acquired HelloSign awhile back, but who the heck would want to use both DropBox and HelloSign together?
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I believe their goal is to expand to enterprise customers who would use Dropbox as a replacement for something like Google Drive. They seem to hypothesize that the way to win market share is through collaboration intelligence features and coordination features. I think it’s a bad hypothesis and really if they have a way to win market share it’s purely by being a cheaper / more basic option, then maybe start-ups or small businesses would choose it. But this goes against the premium pricing and branding they have created for consumer storage plans, and I think hamstrings them from doing anything else really. And at the end of the day, if Google is worried you’re underpricing them, they have way more levers to pull on to retain or win back customers, and more cushion to absorb losses. Just seems like a bad business strategy by Dropbox all around. Probably should just focus on how to deliver consumer storage accounts with lower and lower prices instead.
  - dual_basis 7y ago
    Your last two sentences seem contradictory.

AznHisoka 7y ago

Dropbox to me seems like a one-trick pony trying desperately to expand their market. It's a cloud storage system. Ideally for consumers, not enterprises (who already have Google Drive, or AWS if you're storing web objects). I know they acquired HelloSign awhile back, but who the heck would want to use both DropBox and HelloSign together?

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I believe their goal is to expand to enterprise customers who would use Dropbox as a replacement for something like Google Drive. They seem to hypothesize that the way to win market share is through collaboration intelligence features and coordination features. I think it’s a bad hypothesis and really if they have a way to win market share it’s purely by being a cheaper / more basic option, then maybe start-ups or small businesses would choose it. But this goes against the premium pricing and branding they have created for consumer storage plans, and I think hamstrings them from doing anything else really. And at the end of the day, if Google is worried you’re underpricing them, they have way more levers to pull on to retain or win back customers, and more cushion to absorb losses. Just seems like a bad business strategy by Dropbox all around. Probably should just focus on how to deliver consumer storage accounts with lower and lower prices instead.
- dual_basis 7y ago
  Your last two sentences seem contradictory.