Dropbox Launches ‘Smart Workspaces’
Drew Houston repositions the company and wants to ‘quiet the noise’
A few months ago Dropbox released what it called the ‘new dropbox’, a release that hinted at new big ideas and raised more questions than it answered. At the time, it felt like Dropbox had dropped the first shoe, and we were waiting for the last shoe to drop. I wrote at that time,
Dropbox has released an early version of a ‘New Dropbox’, one that will reposition Dropbox from a file sync-and-share appliance — a product space that is rapidly being commoditized — and instead shifting toward a new center of gravity, as a content-centric work management utility. They build on the design of the virtual file system from the old Dropbox, and extend it with ideas derived from Dropbox Paper, in the form of a formatted text description area at the head of each folder, with text styling, lists, and — most critically — tasks. Files can be commented on in the new Dropbox folders (currently only through the new desktop app), and @mentioning of other users is also supported (currently only through the new desktop app).
Below, you see a screenshot of what Dropbox is now calling a ‘smart workspace’, different from the earlier Dropbox folder principally because of the description area at the top of the folder, above the files.
