Comment by rrdharan
2 years ago
I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
What year was this focus group?
Oh, geeze. Probably 2018? I'm sure I'm getting the titles, and possibly seniority, of the Dropbox folks there wrong. They might have just been low-level flacks. All I can tell you - hand on heart - is that I mentioned Wave at least twice in different groups, as a point of (favorable) comparison, and they disclaimed knowledge. Either they were genuinely ignorant, or had been instructed for some reason to play dumb.
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.