An Engineer

I got a message from Dropbox today announcing a new feature.  (I’m a happy customer). They now have the ability to detect when another user is simultaneously editing the same shared file. That way you can coordinate your edits and avoid conflicts. Here is snippet from the email:

Huh? I thought with Dropbox I could easily share files already? Well, you can, as long as you don’t allow multiple people to edit those files. Because when you edit a file within a local application on the computer, merging those edits is very difficult programmatically. Engineers deal with this type of fine-grained conflict resolution all the time when merging code changes using version control systems, but they do it on files that are text-only. And even then, it’s often a manual process involving looking at two files line by line, side by side, and deciding which pieces of each one to keep.

Having to coordinate your edits is one of the primary problems when you expose the file system to an end user, and dealing with it is beyond the interest of consumers. I wrote about this in 2009 and it’s still true today.  I’m a dropbox user, but I use it mainly for self-collaboration, where the possibility of conflicts is low or for sharing something read-only with someone else.

This is where Google Apps shines. When I work on spreadsheets or documents in Google apps, we can easily have multiple people in the document at the same time. We can see each other type, and unless we are literally editing the same cell or the same word, Google can resolve any conflicts. They have turned documents, spreadsheets, and presentations into a service. The only downside is that connectivity is required for use for the most part.

For Dropbox, this is a big problem, because to move beyond being a tool for knowledge workers, they need to provide experiences that don’t expose the file system at all. And the problem is going to get worse because as time goes on, consumers are going to be less and less aware that files even exist on their computer. They are going to be an implementation detail. This is Dropbox’s primary impediment to growth. In the long run, only engineers will deal with files. Even most knowledge workers will interact only with cloud-based apps that seamlessly communicate data in the background.