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I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe. Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins
by rrdharan 3y ago
I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
What year was this focus group?
- eszed 3y agoOh, geeze. Probably 2018? I'm sure I'm getting the titles, and possibly seniority, of the Dropbox folks there wrong. They might have just been low-level flacks. All I can tell you - hand on heart - is that I mentioned Wave at least twice in different groups, as a point of (favorable) comparison, and they disclaimed knowledge. Either they were genuinely ignorant, or had been instructed for some reason to play dumb. I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr. It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.