2.0

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston explains why they built Dropbox.

The Dropbox culture impacts elsewhere as we gravitate to easy, accessible and affordable. Some try to dumb down easy as a loss or a reduction. Even if it was a reduction or loss then market forces would refine or remove.

But it isn’t a reduction. It is a huge gain that can expose how we are doing things wrong or at least the chance to do things better. For me, that is what innovation is; better.

And we validate the Dropbox culture as vendors by building what we want or, worse, what we think people want. Sometimes we design what we want and it is right…but that is rare. We compound this by shoe horning and twisting of our products, what people essentially don’t want.

You end up with an ultimately doomed model built on people tolerating what you do because they have to as opposed to connecting with what you do because they want to.

Dropbox has exploited that by being open and presenting simple and then, critically, letting us decide. They are about vision but they are also about conviction and execution because vision is not enough. And they did it fast, exponentially..getting the digital deck chairs sorted before Microsoft, Google, even Apple were up and moving. That alone gives us all hope.

I am not sure it is about building solutions anymore. I think it is more about understanding problems. That is where I think design begins.