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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I've worked for a major Dropbox competitor for almost a decade. Shenanigans like this don't surprise me.

This happens because product managers, developers, designers, ect, like to get creative. They think that they need to invent something new; AND, we (in the industry) see how a certain group of users is constantly confused by the files and folders concept.

Usually, cooler heads prevail and remind everyone why our customers use our products: They just want basic file synchronization, sharing, and backup. That's it!

Fortunately, in our case, we have very vocal major customers, so it's "easy" for us to plan features and changes that they will like.

That being said: An important subset of users is extremely confused by files and folders. Figuring out a UI that works for everyone, (power users, normal users, and non-savy users,) is a bit of a holy grail, and a very important problem to solve.

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Can you expand slightly on the confusion, perhaps give a typical support question or similar?

My guess is people don't organise their folders well and then struggle to navigate and search properly. Which shouldn't mean the rest should get punished, but here we are.

Which effectively mean that a modern iPhone probably has 100x the computing power of a 10 year old laptop and a 100th of the utility, because it’s based on this limited philosophy.

What a waste.

Yup. We've all seen someone navigate a desktop with hundreds of icons spanning pictures, powerpoints, web links, applications, etc...

I have a friend who is in his 70s who is otherwise quite competent but he cannot comprehend the fact that the Finder represents a tree. Some nodes (files and applications) are leaves; others (folders) are not. That's on him. The other thing he has trouble with is that Save and Open dialog boxes in applications present a different view of the tree than the Finder does. That's on Apple for not defaulting the Save and Open dialogs to the last window you opened in the Finder, and vice-versa.

The upshot is that he can never find anything on his computer, and if I'm not around he just drags everything to the desktop, because at least there he can find it.

Nai e me, but it seems an extension scheme, in which additional features can optionally be added (for $) as desired is way to go.

> This happens because product managers, developers, designers, ect, like to get creative. They think that they need to invent something new

Capitalism is supposed to be about efficient allocation of resources. Cutting down the fat. Taking away materiel and capital from people who squander it and giving it to people who can put it to good work.

How come that those product managers, developers, designers, etc. all have jobs? Why weren't they trimmed away as the fat they are? Why does this keep happening to almost every SaaS company out there?

Modern capitalism is arguably more about growth than efficiency - the latter is often sacrificed in favor of the former.

Capitalism's prime directive is growth. Efficiency matters only when two conditions are met:

1. There is sufficient competition

2. There is resource scarcity

In the current context, the first condition holds true for Dropbox, but the second does not. There was a commenter here on HN a few months ago who works in VC, and he/she was saying that VCs currently have too much money and they are desperately looking for things to throw that money at. That is the opposite of resource scarcity.

Make no mistake though: if and when we get the next economic crash, I think we will see a drastic shift in how tech companies operate. I suspect that a _lot_ of fat will be cut, then.

Reddit had 20 designers to do their redesign, really makes one think [1].

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/?mbid=synd_digg

The world is not planned like you think. All this is emergent behavior, motivated by the views and interests of the many players.

If you're a developer, you might try implementing a new feature. If you're a manager, you might encourage the developer because of his initiative and put it in. Some managers try to differentiate themselves think stuff up and have their folks do it. Marketing folks might come up with some hidden reason (learn more about our customers) and implement something extra just to collect more usage data.

The only place I've seen that discourages wild features is defense contractors. They strictly develop specifications for what will be created, then have requirement documents, then design documents tracking the requirements, then these are followed all the way through to delivery.

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