Dropbox (Paper) invading Altassian (Confluence) territory

Inside Dropbox’s Identity Overhaul

The title of the article embedded above should have (well, IMO) been ‘Dropbox invading Altassian Confluence’s territory’. But unfortunately, there is not even a mention of Confluence in it (There are mentions of Wikis but Confluence is much more than that, no?!)

Here are some notable insights from the article and my thoughts on them:

• “A simplified browser-based document editor with comments — as if Microsoft Office or Google Docs got reincarnated as the love-child of Medium and Slack” — Neat. We do need a thing like this. Though Confluence exists, it lacks the polish of Medium. Regarding ‘Slack’, I wonder how is that related, that is a pure ‘communication’ channel
• “You can write text connecting all these items you’re embedding. Your teammates can drop in comments and feedback” — Confluence does these
• “Any document can flip into a presentation mode that parcels it out in slide-size chunks” — This looks neat. AFA I know, Confluence does not do this
• “We know that 100 percent of our customers are going to be either an Office 365 customer or a Google Apps customer,” Houston says. “No one’s going to stop using Excel because they use Paper.” — Great that the team understands this. Wonder why/how they did not see Confluence as competition
• “Slack and similar messaging platforms aim to keep teams on a similar track, too, and plenty of businesses swear by them. You can chat all you want, and of course you will, but sooner or later you actually have to do your work, whatever it may be.” — 100% agree with this
• “There’s the longstanding geeks vs. suits problem. In many organizations, Dropbox included, engineers and product people have gravitated toward putting all their notes and documentation on wikis — those venerable programs (Wikipedia is built on one) that let users easily build a link-heavy website — because they’re ad hoc and easy to start. But non-engineers have a hard time with them. Meanwhile, businesspeople are typically more comfortable working in Word and Excel and Sharepoint — but technical people often disdain them for their overhead and rigidity.” — Great thing. If Paper can indeed bridge this divide, nothing like it. Confluence does not bridge this divide. In all places I have seen, Confluence is only between Product/Engineering. When it goes to Business, it is always PPT/DOC.
• “That’s where Smart Sync comes in. It routes around these problems by making all the files in your group Dropbox, no matter how gigantic it gets, accessible through your computer’s file-system interface. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have enough space on your local drive.” — This problem is for a minority of users and do not think is a needle mover for most.

What I have written above might indicate I am a Confluence fan boy, which I am not. I have not seen a worthy competitor to it yet and my first thought on reading this article was that.

While for the ‘communication’ aspect, Hipchat has gotten good enough / better competitors in Slack, the new MS Teams and the newer FB Workspace, Confluence has not had serious competition.

Let Paper be that.