It’s depressing how the tech ecosystem works as a self-reinforcing cartel against workers for statusquo preservation. Yes, it’s rational from the tech industry as a whole’s POV, there’s little to no chance a single individual can really stand against such machinery
Yes, indeed: the rich and poor alike have freedom from being allowed to sleep under bridges.
Come on; there are such obvious imbalances of power here that "each side has incredible freedom" is blatantly misleading.
On the one hand, you have each individual software engineer (because heaven forbid we should ever join unions! Those are for people who aren't A+ 10x alpha coders and negotiators, amirite?), every one of whom needs a salary so they can afford food, clothing, shelter, etc.
On the other hand, you have a group of the most wealthy and powerful countries the world has ever seen, who openly work together, have the ear of the flagrantly-corrupt president, and could coast on their cash reserves for, in some cases, many years even if every single customer decided to boycott them all at once.
And you think that "each side has incredible freedom" is a meaningful statement here...?
I think this is a salient point people are missing. This incredible freedom is equal on both sides, just as how companies are able to spread that risk around with multiple employees, it is common these days to have multiple jobs just in case of a layoff or other notable event where your job is lost.
I am doing a double take reading your comment and the parent comment of yours. They’re just so wildly corporate-biased.
I’m really not sure how we can conclude that the freedom is symmetrical.
The fact that this story made national news says everything about how rare it is for an employer to win a case like this. In most cases you just get fired for any reason with no notice or off-ramp. The employer is just always correct by default and you can easily be denied unemployment insurance because the company cooked up some official looking documents showing that you were fired with cause.
A corporation can spread risk by having 1,000 employees. I can’t have 1,000 jobs. It’s just not equal on both sides.
I mean, “incredible freedom is equal on both sides,” in the only developed country where there’s no mandatory paid parental leave and basic healthcare access depends on employment? Spare me.
My comments are not "corporate-biased", they are business owner biased, which includes small businesses.
Employment is an free arrangement between two entities, not a modern day serfdom where the employers are now responsible for their serfs housing, food, etc.
The power balance is tilted heavily towards employers though, no? If I quit you still have things like income and health care. If you fire me, not so much.
We can’t exactly say this isn’t a serfdom in a country where the majority of people depend on employer benefits to get access to affordable healthcare.
Small businesses definitely feel a squeeze that bigger companies don’t, but they’re not saints to be put on a pedestal, either.
In that regard, small businesses get a ton of carve-outs. For example, they don’t have to pay healthcare benefits to full time employees. They are exempt from a slew of regulations targeted at larger businesses.
I don’t really have the same reverence for small businesses that a lot of people do. They’re just companies. Some are good, some are bad. When you work for one, there’s still a power distance between you and the owner.
I find that many small business owners are taking things way too personally. Their business is their baby and therefore any employee that doesn’t have a grindset like them is taking advantage of them.
The small businesses I respect are the ones that move toward employee ownership. Employees who own the company care about the company and don’t try to screw it over. Problem solved.
It takes your instructions, write a versioned spec, then generates a hybrid workflow of code+LLM calls and protects it with tests/evals
The result is that the agents run much faster (90% of it is code), cheaper (LLM steps are scoped tightly and uses smaller models) and reliably (specs get turned into coded state-machine)
The only real way to see this if you have consistent evals for common usecases in your B2B SAAS product and see if the tricky usecases are being solved. You'd then go down to the cheapest model that can solve the evals.
Dropbox has deep integration ecosystems, runs your company's data, I think its a no-brainer for it to become the agentic memory for your company if done right with it syncing data across all company services.
It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.
And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of enterprise execution.
(Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)
Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.
The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.
Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service.
Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)
Another issue: Paper was tied to your Dropbox account.
From Dropbox's perspective, this sounds great. Accounts become more useful and valuable. The addressable market of a Dropbox account grows! Plus, everyone has a Dropbox account already, right?
Unfortunately, it turns out that business customers generally don't deploy Dropbox wall-to-wall. It's expensive. Not all employees need file sync.
A Dropbox account ends up being an obstacle to adoption.
And a distraction: a common account creates an irresistible urge to spend a lot of time finding ways to tie this new product into the old one.
I'm not sure I ultimately buy that Dropbox is expensive - for one thing, Notion now charges basically the same as Dropbox, and you don't even get file sync in the deal.
I can definitely believe that that was an objection customers had, though. I just suspect that what it really meant was another way of expressing that there wasn't PMF - if the PMF were there, they'd have willingly paid, just like they do now for Notion or Slab or what have you.
And yeah, there was definitely some energy going into trying to tie the products together more (putting Paper docs in your Dropbox folders) - and when that finally shipped it sadly made the Paper experience worse, not better.
I don't see the need to become bloated like slack and a one size fits all application. They do a great job with the product they have. Is there anything wrong with just being what you are? Why does the lack of a second act need to be a bad thing if your first product is great and still extremely valuable?
I would also if anything put Zoom in with Dropbox, they have a product that is by far the most enjoyable to use in that space, but any other offshoot is not worth it.
Teams being free doesn't make teams good. Just like Google Drive and OneDrive being packaged in for cheap doesn't make them good. It is clear why they are lower value.
> They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft
Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.
> Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.
Slack, Zoom, and Notion all argue against that. Yes, they have to compete against Google and Microsoft's integrated solutions, but they're good enough that they have held their own. Of course they would be bigger if Google and Microsoft didn't have such products.
