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Comment by anvisha | Hacker News Reader

Former dbx employee here— they always wanted to do it but it is technically challenging to build a fully functional product here accounting for things like formatting/comments/etc. when you have such a large enterprise user base there are often trade offs - ship a basic prototype and risk customer confusion/complaints or invest lots of resources and draw away from other projects

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This is such a non-argument. They could've easily just started with text-diffs, then photo diffs. And later do doc diffs. Perhaps with some disclaimers. Heck, they don't do that for their main product, so why would they even do that for such a product. It's probably in the terms somewhere.

The reason they're not doing it is because they want a piece of the productivity pie.

They're not getting it from me. Ever.

It is challenging, very much so, but it can can be done. I built a prototype for Word files based on Git (can also use the GitHub API, so making it work with the Dropbox API should be doable). I implemented sort of a blame function as well: Jump to the previous version of a paragraph with just one click.

As OP said, it took a lot of effort to get the UI ok. Probably takes even more effort to create a great UI, but I guess Dropbox has some resources, right? Shameless plug: Landing page at https://julesdocs.com

If anyone is interested in pushing this forward, I'd love to hear from you (mail address on the landing page)!

They could have released it to personal accounts? At the rate they have embraced and catastrophically abandoned other vastly more fundamental features (packrat? Photos?) This seems far more easier to roll out slowly. Seems more like they've lost their way.

And I will never ever forgive y'all for what you did with mailbox! (Like seriously what did they do?)

> They could have released it to personal accounts?

Enterprise customers pay more money to have more features with checkboxes in the feature matrix. Telling them they don't get a feature because their needs are too complicated is a tough sell. (something, something, opens up opportunities for low-end disruption, something, something)

Google does it all the time with GSuite. I doubt customers want buggy features. Beta testing new functionality on your free/personal user accounts before rolling it out to larger business customers is pretty standard.

At Syncplicity I built something like this in a hackathon. Right-click on a file and diff it with a different version.

Sadly, we never developed it.

But, yes, I totally agree with your rationale. This is the kind of rabbit hole that can quickly turn into a distraction.

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