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Dropbox pulled the plug on so many good apps. They should have built the full office suite in the browser and eventually slapped an email service on it. As a co

Dropbox pulled the plug on so many good apps. They should have built the full office suite in the browser and eventually slapped an email service on it. As a competitor to Google Workspace, they would have a real chance. Storage as a Service is too little of a moat in the cloud age.

dgoldstein0 1mo ago
Out of curiosity which apps do you miss the most?
- wizcaps 1mo ago
  Mailbox, Paper and whatever the photos one was called (Carousel?). I agree. I was hyping them up as the next gsuite and they just dismantled all those apps and the momentum they built along with them.
  - tmp10423288442 1mo ago
    I’m guessing their “momentum” wasn’t on the path of building a sustainable business, particularly given the existence of Microsoft. From a market position standpoint, Paper could have become what Notion is now. Notion even released at around the same time as Paper. Was it that Notion from early on supported Markdown compatibility, which is a distinguishing feature when selling to software startups? Was Paper too aggressively coupled to Dropbox storage, when Google, Microsoft, and Box already had a large share of that market?
  - dgoldstein0 1mo ago
    Paper still exists - Drew refused to kill it. Been heavily underfunded for years and saddled with a codebase that assumed it would be >50 people forever, so still digging out of that hole - hence the apparent freeze on feature development for multiple years and separate mobile/desktop apps disappearing. Yes, the photos one was Carousel. I'm still sad about that, in some ways it was better than even what Google Photos offers now. The big problem there was Dropbox chicken'ed out about picking a fight with Google Photos - since Google were giving away for free(ish) a comparable product to the whole Android install base, doing the same freemium model as always would've been a challenge with heavy competition for the free users. Mailbox... was a botched acquisition. Ideologically they aligned, but no real plan for how to keep momentum and turn it into making money, and no real story about how Mailbox was better as part of Dropbox than separate. Even under the hood the infrastructure was all separate (except eventually for login). A big missing piece of the story: Dropbox tried to be a multi-product company long before building the infrastructure for that. Which I think self-sabotaged many of these new products.
- perks_12 1mo ago
  Mailbox and Paper. With just those and a Google Sheets alternative they would have had all the tools ready for the pandemic boom.
  - dgoldstein0 1mo ago
    Paper still exists, though has definitely spent quite a while stagnant due to underinvestment.

dgoldstein0 1mo ago

Out of curiosity which apps do you miss the most?

wizcaps 1mo ago
Mailbox, Paper and whatever the photos one was called (Carousel?). I agree. I was hyping them up as the next gsuite and they just dismantled all those apps and the momentum they built along with them.
- tmp10423288442 1mo ago
  I’m guessing their “momentum” wasn’t on the path of building a sustainable business, particularly given the existence of Microsoft. From a market position standpoint, Paper could have become what Notion is now. Notion even released at around the same time as Paper. Was it that Notion from early on supported Markdown compatibility, which is a distinguishing feature when selling to software startups? Was Paper too aggressively coupled to Dropbox storage, when Google, Microsoft, and Box already had a large share of that market?
- dgoldstein0 1mo ago
  Paper still exists - Drew refused to kill it. Been heavily underfunded for years and saddled with a codebase that assumed it would be >50 people forever, so still digging out of that hole - hence the apparent freeze on feature development for multiple years and separate mobile/desktop apps disappearing. Yes, the photos one was Carousel. I'm still sad about that, in some ways it was better than even what Google Photos offers now. The big problem there was Dropbox chicken'ed out about picking a fight with Google Photos - since Google were giving away for free(ish) a comparable product to the whole Android install base, doing the same freemium model as always would've been a challenge with heavy competition for the free users. Mailbox... was a botched acquisition. Ideologically they aligned, but no real plan for how to keep momentum and turn it into making money, and no real story about how Mailbox was better as part of Dropbox than separate. Even under the hood the infrastructure was all separate (except eventually for login). A big missing piece of the story: Dropbox tried to be a multi-product company long before building the infrastructure for that. Which I think self-sabotaged many of these new products.
perks_12 1mo ago
Mailbox and Paper. With just those and a Google Sheets alternative they would have had all the tools ready for the pandemic boom.
- dgoldstein0 1mo ago
  Paper still exists, though has definitely spent quite a while stagnant due to underinvestment.