https://futureofcoding.org/ logo
Join Slack
Powered by
```Part of the founding legend of Dropbox is that ...
# linking-together
m
Copy code
Part of the founding legend of Dropbox is that Drew Houston told people what he wanted to do, and everyone said 'there are hundreds of these already' and he replied 'yes, but which one do you use?' That's what Zoom did - video calls are nothing new, but Zoom solved a lot of the small pieces of friction that made it fiddly to get into a call.
👍 4
d
Well, sorry to be contrary, but this lockdown has shown me time and again just how difficult it is to get into a call - for normal non-technical folk such as my family. I think people liked Zoom simply because it was more reliable in use. Not in any way a frictionless UX.
c
Also, I'm sure you've read all about it, but Zoom removed the friction by removing the security 😉 In some ways that doesn't matter though; they got the adoption they needed and fixed/fixing the security later....
👍 2
m
I'm not interested in zoom, I'm interested in these parts "'there are hundreds of these already' and he replied 'yes, but which one do you use?'" and "That's what X did - Ys are nothing new, but X solved a lot of the small pieces of friction that made it fiddly to use Y."
👍 2
and we can complain about zoom, but zoom is now a verb like google for non techy people, so if zoom is bad, I can't think how bad the others are
👍 2
c
Sure, and removing friction is really important. If I ran Zoom, I might have done the same; how many times have I stopped using a piece of software after the first 30 seconds because I was asked to click just one more time? .....
I am interested in the design decision because it is really telling - Zoom deliberately made security bad in order to make the experience easy. And more than that - the users just didn't care; they used what worked..... We are lazy, and we want things to 'just work'. At the end of the day, that's why everyone has an iPhone, even though they are more expensive.
👋 1
f
This reminds me of Adam Grant's TED talk "The surprising habits of original thinkers" (https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers#t-93287)
"First mover advantage is a myth," Grant said to the TED audience - and brought the stats to prove it. In a comprehensive business study, 47% of first mover companies would fail in their early years compared to only 8% of so-called "improvers". Great examples include Facebook and Google, dominant startups that came years, if not a decade after their predecessors. "You don't have to be first. You have to be different and better."
(https://www.inc.com/damon-brown/according-to-ted-why-first-mover-advantage-is-a-myth.html)
❤️ 2
🦄 1
z
I agree that removing friction is one of the big win things you can do to get adoption. Removing friction is a conscious choice though and takes years often, unless it is a really well timed positioning of the product
g
for the record, this sounds like something directly out of the playbook of the book “The Mom Test” (highly recommended). website: http://momtestbook.com/ podcast interview with the author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-art-of-product/id1243627144?i=1000440137442
✔️ 2
s
This is the classic HN thread posted by Houston re Dropbox in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Open in Slack
PreviousNext
Powered by