According to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, 80% of the product 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 functionality out of the OS and into its own dedicated app, it 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 to this whole thing.
But Dropbox… one of its differentiating characteristics is really that when we built this utility, this &magic folder&, it kind of went everywhere.