INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
According to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, 80% of the product’s users rely on it, at least partially, for work.It makes sense, then, that the
company is refocusing to try and cement its spot in the workplace; to shed its image as “just” a file storage company (in a time when
just about every big company has its own cloud storage offering) and evolve into something more immutably core to daily operations.Earlier
this week, Dropbox announced that the “new Dropbox” would be rolling out to all users
It takes the simple, shared folders that Dropbox is known for and turns them into what the company calls “Spaces” — little mini
collaboration hubs for your team, complete with comment streams, AI for highlighting files you might need mid-meeting, and integrations into
things like Slack, Trello and G Suite
With an overhauled interface that brings much of Dropbox’s functionality out of the OS and into its own dedicated app, it’s by far the
biggest user-facing change the product has seen since launching 12 years ago.Shortly after the announcement, I sat down with Dropbox VP of
Product Adam Nash and CTO Quentin Clark
We chatted about why the company is changing things up, why they’re building this on top of the existing Dropbox product, and the things
they know they just can’t change.You can find these interviews below, edited for brevity and clarity.Greg Kumparak: Can you explain the
new focus a bit?Adam Nash: Sure! I think you know this already, but I run products and growth, so I’m gonna have a bit of a product bias
But Dropbox… one of its differentiating characteristics is really that when we built this utility, this “magic folder”, it kind of
