Dropbox Ignores The Noise
Farhad Manjoo for the New York Times:
“Sentiment about companies goes in cycles,” Drew Houston, Dropbox’s co-founder and chief executive, told me in an email. “Google, Apple, Facebook all went through multiple rounds of this. First, you can do no wrong, then you can do no right. Then people are like, ‘Actually this is a pretty good company,’ and around it goes.”
I’ve written about Dropbox before in “As The Cost of Cloud Storage Approaches Zero, How Will Dropbox Compete?”:
What Dropbox hopes, is that this dependence will continue to rise and people will amass loads of valuable data to the point that they’d want to use one service to take care of it all, and that they will choose Dropbox because they provide the best cross-platform experience, with simplicity and design tailored to consumers, and it’s already in the apps they use for everyday utility.
If this is the case, Dropbox needs to leverage this control in the consumer and small-to-medium-business markets further, introducing more valuable applications of their own and integrating in the apps that people can’t live without (as with the Office example) to create a worthy central hub of information, and not just merely a place for cloud storage which has become a commodity.
We’re still yet to see the trajectory leaded to this but perhaps closing down email app Mailbox and photo app Carousel and launching Paper helps them focus towards their mission to “get the world working together on Dropbox.”
Seems like everything is humming along just fine at Dropbox at a steady pace. I still have faith in the company despite my own worries, and have become a Pro user myself in addition to being a Business user by way of the startup I work for (version control saves lives).
This line from Houston is sage advice when building anything, whether it’s a small product, or a business valued at $10B:
So you have to ignore the noise and stay focused on building great products and making customers happy. The rest will take care of itself.
Love it.