Re:Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
by wpietri on Monday March 14, 2016 @02:18PM
(#11284475)
I would be especially interested to hear how a focus on actual customer experience was maintained during all of this deep technology work.
One of the ways tech companies wrong is by putting the tech first and the users second. I think Dropbox's early competitive advantage was putting the user experience first. Everybody else had weird, complex systems; you folks just had a magic folder that was always correct. User focus like that is easier to pull off when it's just a few people. But once you break the customer problem up into enough pieces that hundreds of engineers can get involved, sometimes the tail starts wagging the dog and technically-oriented decisions start harming the user experience.
One of the ways tech companies wrong is by putting the tech first and the users second. I think Dropbox's early competitive advantage was putting the user experience first. Everybody else had weird, complex systems; you folks just had a magic folder that was always correct. User focus like that is easier to pull off when it's just a few people. But once you break the customer problem up into enough pieces that hundreds of engineers can get involved, sometimes the tail starts wagging the dog and technically-oriented decisions start harming the user experience.
How did you folks avoid that?