24 ms·

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files bet

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.

fallat 4y ago
The most real HN comment I've seen in years.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  HN is becoming a meme, kind of like how HN used to write off Reddit.
  - westmeal 4y ago
    I like playing this game where I count the amount of tech buzzwords per top comment in a post and try to guess before clicking on it to see how close I was.
  - aldarisbm 4y ago
    here come the elitists
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Off to lobste.rs then? I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.
    - citruscomputing 4y ago
      Have tried a few times, it's not my kind of place. Would appreciate other suggestions, though.
      - gavinhoward 4y ago
        I'm trying to spin up the lobsters software on a forum. It's meant to be a pseudo comment section for my blog, as well as a place to discuss anything that is intellectually stimulating. If I succeed, do you want an invite?
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    It's so far in it's own butt that it thinks it's normal to go get 10M to raise money to build a hot dog/no hot dog AI app, or a crypto picture of a monkey.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dragontamer 4y ago
It's a public company, isn't it? So we can just point out it's strategies on it's latest 10k filing, where it's investments have been and where it's gets it's money from? https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/10481/html https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/10481/html
soared 4y ago
We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.
- mieubrisse 4y ago
  There's a thing I saw on LessWrong a while ago where he says, "Before declaring a thing impossible, ask, 'Have you put 5 minutes on the clock and just brainstormed?'" In that spirit, here's me doing this about AI at Dropbox: - Get consent from users and train a personalized AI on user files, to answer questions like, "Where is my meeting with Thiago?" - Provide built-in support for number crunching on unstructured meeting notes: "How much revenue did we make, from last quarter's notes?" - Automatically fine-tune a model using your own writing so that ChatGPT talks more like you - Apply an AI to recognize security threats in your files("Hey you might have stored a secret in plaintext in file Y. Do you want to encrypt it?")
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Even being able to train a personal model on the user’s handwriting to digitize the notes will be a big hit. I would love to have that. I’m this close to train my own Tessaract instance to do it.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    YOu forgot: * find someone that will actually want to pay extra for their subscription on that.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      And deliver it at a sufficiently better performance/utility to price ratio than Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon/Meta can, and they might price it at zero.
  - 4y ago
activitypea 4y ago
[flagged]
Hamcha 4y ago
I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI. However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, but good enough), I can see AI replicating if not even augmenting such functionalities.
- rybosworld 4y ago
  > we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
  - soneca 4y ago
    In case of NFT, I would round the number of companies that tried to pivot to it to zero. Blockchain there were a lot of hiring and experiments for sure. Actually to try to pivot a company to it after these experiments, very little.
  - palata 4y ago
    "tried to pivot", that's very different. Maybe it should read "announcing that they would try to pivot", but you get the idea. I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Which shouldn't surprise anyone in an economic environment where the money fountain dried up. Every company is desperately chasing new revenue sources over growing their existing ones right now.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      "Dipped their feet" might've been better description.
spamizbad 4y ago
Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product. To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep insight about AI that, say, a software engineer who has worked in that field might have. But hey, if in a few years Dropbox launches a popular AI-based feature I'll gladly eat my words because I'll probably be using it. They could benefit from enhancing their search functionality, for example -- but that's just a nice-to-have feature, not something revolutionary.
- xp84 4y ago
  I’m genuinely surprised/impressed both Box and Dropbox still exist since they’re single-product-line pure plays, for enterprise only (no way do enough consumers pay for either to matter), and both are competing with what is either free or very cheap to bundle alternatives from MS and GOOG (and what company doesn’t have either 365 or G Suite already?? I know Dropbox tried to make its own office suite a few years back but I’ve never heard of anyone using it. So, it’s a testament to some amazing sales guys that they’re even alive.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I think Dropbox is, like a lot of companies right now, is struggling to find new revenue with new features added to their existing product lines and is divesting themselves of new work on mature products to focus on new markets. AI just being something exciting in general that has everyone hyped. I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    You had me until that last sentence. I have no idea what you're referring to with Wi-Fi.
    - 4y ago
time_to_smile 4y ago
I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership. I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking" 14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, when money flowed easy from both investors and customers. There has been zero market pressure to put thought into building products. In the case of dropbox in particular, any long term customers (such as myself) can confirm that there has clearly not been a coherent product strategy for at least the last few years.
- rco8786 4y ago
  Super weird comment. I've worked at tech co's for ~15 years on sprint teams and directly next to the CTO and everywhere in between...and they've all had product strategies. Maybe DBX sucks at executing theirs. Maybe their strategy sucks. I don't know. I'm not claiming to. All I am claiming is that there is some strategy at the leadership level right now at DBX that appears to involve AI - and any comments beyond that are purely speculative.
- abledon 4y ago
  remember dropbox "Paper"... what was that?
ilyt 4y ago
Imagine thinking that because Big Company Does it it must be sensible and logical because they are Big Company so they don't make blunders like that.
- rco8786 4y ago
  I never said anything of the sort. DBX using AI might be a horrible flop. Nothing I said had anything to do with the [potential] success of their roadmap. Only that they have one (which, I guess, is only an assumption), and the OP doesn't know what it is but is commenting as though they do.
donohoe 4y ago
snark incoming - so you're saying that you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge?
- teolandon 4y ago
  No, GP was just saying we should give Dropbox the benefit of the doubt, because Dropbox understands the product strategy more than any of us do. Including GP.
coldtea 4y ago
>snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. Snark incoming. Imaging a society so shitty that you have to try to "understand the product strategy for a 14 year old publicly traded company" That is, one society in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold.
- okdood64 4y ago
  > in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold. Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society. "The future is now old man."
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society. You'd be surprised. >"The future is now old man." Well, September 4, 476 AD was also "the future" of much better pasts for Romans.
- rco8786 4y ago
  I don't really understand what you are saying. That companies shouldn't have product roadmaps? That product roadmaps are mutually exclusive to sustainable growth or healthy profit? That companies using new tech are only doing so to prop up stock prices? Something else?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    What I'm saying is obvious: 1. that companies should have specific product areas and focus, and not pivot all over the place, as mere profit-seeking machines. 2. that companies embrace all kinds of BS trends, hyped technologies, and empty vacuum BS solutions looking for a problem (from NFT, web3, metaverse, blockchain) 3. that companies (as in this case) also embrace valid technologies (like LLMs) that have no real application to their products, and will just retrofit them in some ugly BS way nobody asked for, just to send the signal "we're still cool, we're getting on the next bandwaggon, buy our stock" 4. that the current behavior (actually, for decades now) is not about "sustainable growth and healthy profit" but about stock market games, and about endless unsustainable growth that destroys their core offerings and alienates customers
ipaddr 4y ago
Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do? Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited? Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph? Understanding product strategies are part of many users day to day lives. Don't dismiss everyone and put them on your level of understanding.
- rco8786 4y ago
  > Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do? My message is that OP doesn't know DBX's product strategy. I don't either. I never claimed to. > Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited? Sorry, where did I do that? > Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph? No, I do not. I never claimed to.
deeviant 4y ago
Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals. > It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. What could go wrong in dropbox invading their customer's privacy to scrap out a few pennies mining their data?
- rco8786 4y ago
  > Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals. I have no idea what their strategy is. Neither do you. Neither does OP. That is all i said.
vidarh 4y ago
Especially because they've already at least partially solved one of the big challenges: People already trust them with their data. As long as they do nothing to betray that trust (such as e.g. training models on the private data and making them accessible outside the organisation) they have a massive starting advantage over organisations that will need to convince customers that it's ok to upload sensitive information to somewhere new.
carlmr 4y ago
>DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. Snark incoming - if somebody at Dropbox reads this they might have an AI strategy now. I think your idea is amazing. But I think that a lot of publicly traded companies are now "doing something with AI" like a headless chicken without any deeper though on why. But your idea is good!
- rco8786 4y ago
  Yea I don't understand all these responses. I'm not commenting on the quality or viability of DBX's AI strategy. Because I don't know what it is! I am commenting on the OP, who is acting like they know what it is.
johnfn 4y ago
> Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. I worked at a similarly sized company to Dropbox, and when I questioned product decisions I would often receive similarly smug put downs. How could you possibly think you know more than the CEO? And then I watched over the next few years as the product strategy floundered, reorging many times without shipping anything concrete. I suppose what I’m saying is that while your comment shuts down conversation quite effectively, it can still be wrong. Sometimes - quite frequently, in fact! - there is no man behind the curtain. Sometimes, when product decisions seem questionable, they really are questionable. (Sorry if I have an annoyed tone; I think I'm subconsciously venting against all the times I've heard this from others in the past.)
- rco8786 4y ago
  The difference is that you worked there. You knew the company. You knew the industry. You knew what the actual current strategy was! This is just some rando internet person making reductive statements about a company whose current offerings they are unaware of and future product roadmap they have never seen.
stcroixx 4y ago
As a customer, I don’t care much what their strategy is as long as my file storage keeps working. I do care if the company that I’m using for file storage is going to start treating that as a ‘legacy’ business while they chase something unrelated in an attempt to expand their market, none of which helps me. Also, the hint that a service like this is even considering reading my stored data and training AI on that would be a huge red flag. Sounds like executives chasing investors at the expense of customers again.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Meta showed us that business pivots don't have to make sense to anyone but the CEO...
RoyGBivCap 4y ago
>It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. They were also non-E2E encrypted for like most or all of those years. It was the main reason I didn't use it for personal backups. I use SpiderOakONE (paid) instead, which is. So yeah, they have a fuckton of other people's documents. 100% chance. Even I admittedly use one of their free documents as a simple todo list at work. That's probably really nice data for them too. If they aren't doing some ML based on that data, somebody at the company is not doing their job.
jzb 4y ago
It's not invalid to ask whether companies are making real, strategic and well-thought moves or just jumping on a bandwagon. Many of us have worked for long-standing public companies with thousands of employees that have embarked on product strategies that were not particularly valid. Facebook comes to mind, for example, and its Metaverse boondoggle. Or Google and half a dozen things. Evernote, though it's not a public company, also comes to mind... Did anybody need "insider knowledge" to know Google's Stadia was DOA? For that matter, Dropbox has tried pivoting to mail and apps (Carousel + Mailbox) in the past, and I don't know whether insider knowledge was needed to predict that failure. I can imagine use cases for AI + Dropbox. Whether they are urgent use cases where customers see a real problem they're willing to throw money at is another question entirely.
kerkeslager 4y ago
> Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. Imagine I'm a shareholder and the product strategy is either bad or being communicated to me unclearly. > It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. It's also not much of a reach to imagine the same breathless magical thinking about AI which is happening everywhere taking over the management at Dropbox. So far I've seen a lot of potential and exactly 0 effective applications of AI at scale. So I know which my money is on. I'm definitely betting on AI, but the way I'm betting on AI is betting on AI companies building better AIs. I'm not betting on companies whose only involvement in AI is that they suddenly have to have it because it's the latest buzzword.
- culopatin 4y ago
  Wouldn’t you be in a shareholder meeting instead of a HN post? I mean, if you are a substantial shareholder, or this are only for private equity? Honest question.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Yeah I mean who else is going to extract all the data stored in customer drop boxes and feed it into a generative AI for drop boxes benefit? First you gotta fire everyone who sees a conflict of interest and a problem with invasively scraping all their customers private data entrusted with you.
burglins 4y ago
They're a *backup* service.

fallat 4y ago

The most real HN comment I've seen in years.

bamboozled 4y ago
HN is becoming a meme, kind of like how HN used to write off Reddit.
- westmeal 4y ago
  I like playing this game where I count the amount of tech buzzwords per top comment in a post and try to guess before clicking on it to see how close I was.
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  here come the elitists
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Off to lobste.rs then? I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.
  - citruscomputing 4y ago
    Have tried a few times, it's not my kind of place. Would appreciate other suggestions, though.
    - gavinhoward 4y ago
      I'm trying to spin up the lobsters software on a forum. It's meant to be a pseudo comment section for my blog, as well as a place to discuss anything that is intellectually stimulating. If I succeed, do you want an invite?
- brianwawok 4y ago
  It's so far in it's own butt that it thinks it's normal to go get 10M to raise money to build a hot dog/no hot dog AI app, or a crypto picture of a monkey.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dragontamer 4y ago

It's a public company, isn't it? So we can just point out it's strategies on it's latest 10k filing, where it's investments have been and where it's gets it's money from? https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/10481/html https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/10481/html

soared 4y ago

We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.

mieubrisse 4y ago
There's a thing I saw on LessWrong a while ago where he says, "Before declaring a thing impossible, ask, 'Have you put 5 minutes on the clock and just brainstormed?'" In that spirit, here's me doing this about AI at Dropbox: - Get consent from users and train a personalized AI on user files, to answer questions like, "Where is my meeting with Thiago?" - Provide built-in support for number crunching on unstructured meeting notes: "How much revenue did we make, from last quarter's notes?" - Automatically fine-tune a model using your own writing so that ChatGPT talks more like you - Apply an AI to recognize security threats in your files("Hey you might have stored a secret in plaintext in file Y. Do you want to encrypt it?")
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Even being able to train a personal model on the user’s handwriting to digitize the notes will be a big hit. I would love to have that. I’m this close to train my own Tessaract instance to do it.
- ilyt 4y ago
  YOu forgot: * find someone that will actually want to pay extra for their subscription on that.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    And deliver it at a sufficiently better performance/utility to price ratio than Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon/Meta can, and they might price it at zero.
- 4y ago

activitypea 4y ago

[flagged]

Hamcha 4y ago

I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI. However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, but good enough), I can see AI replicating if not even augmenting such functionalities.

rybosworld 4y ago
> we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
- soneca 4y ago
  In case of NFT, I would round the number of companies that tried to pivot to it to zero. Blockchain there were a lot of hiring and experiments for sure. Actually to try to pivot a company to it after these experiments, very little.
- palata 4y ago
  "tried to pivot", that's very different. Maybe it should read "announcing that they would try to pivot", but you get the idea. I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Which shouldn't surprise anyone in an economic environment where the money fountain dried up. Every company is desperately chasing new revenue sources over growing their existing ones right now.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    "Dipped their feet" might've been better description.

spamizbad 4y ago

Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product. To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep insight about AI that, say, a software engineer who has worked in that field might have. But hey, if in a few years Dropbox launches a popular AI-based feature I'll gladly eat my words because I'll probably be using it. They could benefit from enhancing their search functionality, for example -- but that's just a nice-to-have feature, not something revolutionary.

xp84 4y ago
I’m genuinely surprised/impressed both Box and Dropbox still exist since they’re single-product-line pure plays, for enterprise only (no way do enough consumers pay for either to matter), and both are competing with what is either free or very cheap to bundle alternatives from MS and GOOG (and what company doesn’t have either 365 or G Suite already?? I know Dropbox tried to make its own office suite a few years back but I’ve never heard of anyone using it. So, it’s a testament to some amazing sales guys that they’re even alive.
Spivak 4y ago
I think Dropbox is, like a lot of companies right now, is struggling to find new revenue with new features added to their existing product lines and is divesting themselves of new work on mature products to focus on new markets. AI just being something exciting in general that has everyone hyped. I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
- rexreed 4y ago
  You had me until that last sentence. I have no idea what you're referring to with Wi-Fi.
  - 4y ago

time_to_smile 4y ago

I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership. I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking" 14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, when money flowed easy from both investors and customers. There has been zero market pressure to put thought into building products. In the case of dropbox in particular, any long term customers (such as myself) can confirm that there has clearly not been a coherent product strategy for at least the last few years.

rco8786 4y ago
Super weird comment. I've worked at tech co's for ~15 years on sprint teams and directly next to the CTO and everywhere in between...and they've all had product strategies. Maybe DBX sucks at executing theirs. Maybe their strategy sucks. I don't know. I'm not claiming to. All I am claiming is that there is some strategy at the leadership level right now at DBX that appears to involve AI - and any comments beyond that are purely speculative.
abledon 4y ago
remember dropbox "Paper"... what was that?

ilyt 4y ago

Imagine thinking that because Big Company Does it it must be sensible and logical because they are Big Company so they don't make blunders like that.

rco8786 4y ago
I never said anything of the sort. DBX using AI might be a horrible flop. Nothing I said had anything to do with the [potential] success of their roadmap. Only that they have one (which, I guess, is only an assumption), and the OP doesn't know what it is but is commenting as though they do.

donohoe 4y ago

snark incoming - so you're saying that you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge?

teolandon 4y ago
No, GP was just saying we should give Dropbox the benefit of the doubt, because Dropbox understands the product strategy more than any of us do. Including GP.

coldtea 4y ago

>snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. Snark incoming. Imaging a society so shitty that you have to try to "understand the product strategy for a 14 year old publicly traded company" That is, one society in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold.

okdood64 4y ago
> in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold. Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society. "The future is now old man."
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society. You'd be surprised. >"The future is now old man." Well, September 4, 476 AD was also "the future" of much better pasts for Romans.
rco8786 4y ago
I don't really understand what you are saying. That companies shouldn't have product roadmaps? That product roadmaps are mutually exclusive to sustainable growth or healthy profit? That companies using new tech are only doing so to prop up stock prices? Something else?
- coldtea 4y ago
  What I'm saying is obvious: 1. that companies should have specific product areas and focus, and not pivot all over the place, as mere profit-seeking machines. 2. that companies embrace all kinds of BS trends, hyped technologies, and empty vacuum BS solutions looking for a problem (from NFT, web3, metaverse, blockchain) 3. that companies (as in this case) also embrace valid technologies (like LLMs) that have no real application to their products, and will just retrofit them in some ugly BS way nobody asked for, just to send the signal "we're still cool, we're getting on the next bandwaggon, buy our stock" 4. that the current behavior (actually, for decades now) is not about "sustainable growth and healthy profit" but about stock market games, and about endless unsustainable growth that destroys their core offerings and alienates customers

ipaddr 4y ago

Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do? Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited? Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph? Understanding product strategies are part of many users day to day lives. Don't dismiss everyone and put them on your level of understanding.

rco8786 4y ago
> Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do? My message is that OP doesn't know DBX's product strategy. I don't either. I never claimed to. > Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited? Sorry, where did I do that? > Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph? No, I do not. I never claimed to.

deeviant 4y ago

Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals. > It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. What could go wrong in dropbox invading their customer's privacy to scrap out a few pennies mining their data?

rco8786 4y ago
> Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals. I have no idea what their strategy is. Neither do you. Neither does OP. That is all i said.

vidarh 4y ago

Especially because they've already at least partially solved one of the big challenges: People already trust them with their data. As long as they do nothing to betray that trust (such as e.g. training models on the private data and making them accessible outside the organisation) they have a massive starting advantage over organisations that will need to convince customers that it's ok to upload sensitive information to somewhere new.

carlmr 4y ago

>DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. Snark incoming - if somebody at Dropbox reads this they might have an AI strategy now. I think your idea is amazing. But I think that a lot of publicly traded companies are now "doing something with AI" like a headless chicken without any deeper though on why. But your idea is good!

rco8786 4y ago
Yea I don't understand all these responses. I'm not commenting on the quality or viability of DBX's AI strategy. Because I don't know what it is! I am commenting on the OP, who is acting like they know what it is.

johnfn 4y ago

> Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. I worked at a similarly sized company to Dropbox, and when I questioned product decisions I would often receive similarly smug put downs. How could you possibly think you know more than the CEO? And then I watched over the next few years as the product strategy floundered, reorging many times without shipping anything concrete. I suppose what I’m saying is that while your comment shuts down conversation quite effectively, it can still be wrong. Sometimes - quite frequently, in fact! - there is no man behind the curtain. Sometimes, when product decisions seem questionable, they really are questionable. (Sorry if I have an annoyed tone; I think I'm subconsciously venting against all the times I've heard this from others in the past.)

rco8786 4y ago
The difference is that you worked there. You knew the company. You knew the industry. You knew what the actual current strategy was! This is just some rando internet person making reductive statements about a company whose current offerings they are unaware of and future product roadmap they have never seen.

stcroixx 4y ago

As a customer, I don’t care much what their strategy is as long as my file storage keeps working. I do care if the company that I’m using for file storage is going to start treating that as a ‘legacy’ business while they chase something unrelated in an attempt to expand their market, none of which helps me. Also, the hint that a service like this is even considering reading my stored data and training AI on that would be a huge red flag. Sounds like executives chasing investors at the expense of customers again.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

Meta showed us that business pivots don't have to make sense to anyone but the CEO...

RoyGBivCap 4y ago

>It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. They were also non-E2E encrypted for like most or all of those years. It was the main reason I didn't use it for personal backups. I use SpiderOakONE (paid) instead, which is. So yeah, they have a fuckton of other people's documents. 100% chance. Even I admittedly use one of their free documents as a simple todo list at work. That's probably really nice data for them too. If they aren't doing some ML based on that data, somebody at the company is not doing their job.

jzb 4y ago

It's not invalid to ask whether companies are making real, strategic and well-thought moves or just jumping on a bandwagon. Many of us have worked for long-standing public companies with thousands of employees that have embarked on product strategies that were not particularly valid. Facebook comes to mind, for example, and its Metaverse boondoggle. Or Google and half a dozen things. Evernote, though it's not a public company, also comes to mind... Did anybody need "insider knowledge" to know Google's Stadia was DOA? For that matter, Dropbox has tried pivoting to mail and apps (Carousel + Mailbox) in the past, and I don't know whether insider knowledge was needed to predict that failure. I can imagine use cases for AI + Dropbox. Whether they are urgent use cases where customers see a real problem they're willing to throw money at is another question entirely.

kerkeslager 4y ago

> Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. Imagine I'm a shareholder and the product strategy is either bad or being communicated to me unclearly. > It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. It's also not much of a reach to imagine the same breathless magical thinking about AI which is happening everywhere taking over the management at Dropbox. So far I've seen a lot of potential and exactly 0 effective applications of AI at scale. So I know which my money is on. I'm definitely betting on AI, but the way I'm betting on AI is betting on AI companies building better AIs. I'm not betting on companies whose only involvement in AI is that they suddenly have to have it because it's the latest buzzword.

culopatin 4y ago
Wouldn’t you be in a shareholder meeting instead of a HN post? I mean, if you are a substantial shareholder, or this are only for private equity? Honest question.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Yeah I mean who else is going to extract all the data stored in customer drop boxes and feed it into a generative AI for drop boxes benefit? First you gotta fire everyone who sees a conflict of interest and a problem with invasively scraping all their customers private data entrusted with you.

burglins 4y ago

They're a *backup* service.