Premium

Dropbox Enters Worker Collaboration Space

The world of software is starting to converge, well, kind of. Dropbox, the online file storage and organization solution made ubiquitous over the last decade, recently announced its platform launch which allows users to access many other software tools while within Dropbox. According to co-founder Drew Houston users were switching between applications which caused too much friction in the overall user experience.

With the revamped Dropbox, users can seamlessly leverage the tools they are already using such as Slack, G Suite and Microsoft office, without having to leave the Dropbox interface.

Houston explains in greater detail how the method of working today is cumbersome, “When we talk to our customers and we watch how they work, they’re toggling between dozens of different apps. They have to move across different ecosystems, and there’s all kinds of friction in the experience of working with their team. And in a lot of ways, our industry is just adding more stuff to the pile without making the existing stuff work well together.”

The revamp comes at a time when collaboration solutions are all the rage. Workers across the globe have a passion for figuring out more efficient ways to work where they want when they want. Software companies such as Atlassian for software development, or Zoho, Asana, and Trello are all capitalizing on the modern day worker’s desire to be more organized and communicate more efficiently with their team.

While the new solution is separate and distinct from the solutions it syncs with, it’s obviously encroaching on those same solutions and over time could mean Dropbox becoming a more dominant player in the collaboration space ecosystem. Houston, however, states “Even with this new change, you’re not going to stop using Slack because you’re using Dropbox, and you’re not going to stop using Dropbox because you’re using Slack.” And as the Company’s CTO Quentin Clark highlights, there are other major companies like Microsoft and Google, who even though they are competitors with Dropbox on some fronts, they still partner with Dropbox for the benefit of their customers having a seamless experience. Clark states, “We have shown that what we want is to help them keep their users deeply engaged.”