Geez. You are a file hosting service. Stop pretending like you fixed the world's hunger or something.
And in tech, if you don't keep moving forward, you get killed.
The features are all there (that I notice), but the performance has horrible. If Dropbox is about user friendliness, they can render the HTML on their server.
The hype has to be perpetuated, lest this fact become reality: the OS vendors can wipe this business out with a single update.
Nah, you're just enriching someone else while building chat apps less capable than what existed 20 years ago while telling yourself you're doing good. That same effort would probably have a bigger impact somewhere else. You can tell yourself that but it's a justification for cash. "Wealth" and "progress" aren't inherently good.
I know people who build stuff that people around the world use, they don't talk about how Einstein would've used their stuff or drop "enlightened" multiple times in posts. They shut their mouths and work. I know people who volunteer their time and money to make other people's lives better. None of them are billionaires.
This puffy stuff associating yourself with some kind of moral and technological revolution is the worst part of tech and is the justification for the same kinds of abuses we've seen at Facebook this past week. It'd be better if people would just say "yeah, we wanted to be rich, we made a great app". The overwrought language is the stuff of parody and is tone deaf.
Remember, this is a self-congratulatory post celebrating the founders becoming incredibly wealthy. This ethos of not only needing to be incredibly wealthy but also acting like you're great people because you are wealthy and needing other people to know that you're both wealthy and good is empty and vain and ultimately destructive because at the end of the day, there are lots of people who are just greedy. The cryptocurrency scams and Juicero people use the same language and are empowered by doing so. I've seen rooms of non-tech academics (whose work actually has changed the world) laugh about stuff like Juicero, the tech world often doesn't realize how they look to outsiders.
It's surprising and not surprising that VC money has become so central to the hacker ethic, but it's distressing we can't just talk like people and be realistic about what we're achieving and enabling.
I tend to share similar sentiment in general, but this is a bit rich, talking about Dropbox, whose biggest feature is that it does one (useful) thing and does it well better than anyone else in 2012, and better than anyone else now. And they've made a huge impact worldwide - by covering something almost every computer user needs with a solution that's easy and reliable.
I actually liked their letter, because it suggests they'd like to build something other than bullshit-but-shiny, acquihire-ready web apps. I applaud everyone who tries that way instead of the typical startup playbook.
In the context of this conversation, the poster was justifying working at megacorps and "having to believe" that they were making the world a better place. Some of those megacorps are not doing that, so forcing yourself into belief is the step towards delusion and unreality.
I actually liked their letter, because it suggests they'd like to build something other than bullshit-but-shiny, acquihire-ready web apps. I applaud everyone who tries that way instead of the typical startup playbook.
Is it too much to just underpromise and overdeliver? By couching their goals in those terms, Dropbox is not just trying to make a better product, they're seeking some kind of enlightenment, something which is utopian. It's unachievable. It's the same kind of speech you'd give to soldiers before they're going to go off to battle to die in some pointless war.
I'd rather see people say specifically what they aim to achieve, be realistic about it, and then do it. The tech world likes to talk about itself too much (I know, that's rich), but the people I personally respect don't talk about how great they are, they're just great, and everyone knows it.
Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king.
Yeah. That fragment irked me the wrong way, too.
> I'd rather see people say specifically what they aim to achieve, be realistic about it, and then do it.
I'd rather see that, too. I guess, with so much phonies in our industry, I'm willing to cut some slack for people actually doing something useful when they go too pompous with their marketing copy.
Best of luck to you.
Yet it took off and two years ago played a large role in deciding the world's current political situation.
So as a service's sphere of influence grows, so must their company vision, in order to ultimately maximize growth and profit for their stakeholders.
I'm sure Dropbox started as a solution to an annoying problem. But today its userbase is massive, so their business strategy must adapt to that as well.