Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
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Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#2IIRC, back in the early 1900's, it was commonly known that tech companies should pay higher dividends than longstanding blue chip companies. Why? Because they were much more likely to have short lifespans. The newer the company, the more active the sector, the more turnover in the sector, the more likely the company will get replaced by something else. Somehow people seem to have forgotten this lesson. We now have tech companies like Sun or Groupon that go their entire lifecyle without paying out profits to investors.
That said, the strategy of not paying out profits makes sense for the investors and the founders. The founders will make more money by talking up how much long-term potential the company has, how it is going to be the next 100-year company. Then when they get the $10 billion valuation, the founder can take some money off the table. That is probably a better deal for the founder than getting a $1 billion valuation and just paying out dividends.
The question is, who will end up holding the bag. As much as I loved Dropbox when it came out, I switched off of it recently. I'm not sure what the future is for it in five, ten years. If you are techie, you want something with end-to-end encryption. If you are a normal user, you'll just go with whatever is bundled with your operating system or bundled with applications you use (iCloud, one drive, google drive).
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#3IIRC, back in the early 1900's, it was commonly known that tech companies should pay higher dividends than longstanding blue chip companies. Why? Because they were much more likely to have short lifespans. The newer the company, the more active the sector, the more turnover in the sector, the more likely the company will get replaced by something else. Somehow people seem to have forgotten this lesson. We now have te…
"If you are a normal user, you'll just go with whatever is bundled with your operating system or bundled with applications you use (iCloud, one drive, google drive)."
This sounds right maybe five years ago, but seriously flawed in this age where people have multiple devices based on different kinds of OS. When you have multiple smartphone, tablet, laptop, and desktop computers, and replace / upgrade those devices every 6 months or so, you will find one of the best "features" of Evernote / Dropbox is that they are not Google/Microsoft/Apple. This OS / System independent nature of these products is especially important when you need to have access (also choose not to have access) your data from all sorts of devices.
Just imagine when you want to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, at that time, you will wish your contacts and all other personal data is NOT integrated in the OS's platform.
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#4IIRC, back in the early 1900's, it was commonly known that tech companies should pay higher dividends than longstanding blue chip companies. Why? Because they were much more likely to have short lifespans. The newer the company, the more active the sector, the more turnover in the sector, the more likely the company will get replaced by something else. Somehow people seem to have forgotten this lesson. We now have te…
> The question is, who will end up holding the bag.
The founders and employees (mostly the employees), it seems like. The VCs and growth capital funds have downside protection, and the public markets are no longer receptive to such blatantly unfavorable business models.
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#5People have been saying this about Dropbox since iCloud came out, but what has changed? Have usage statistics changed? Have Google Drive and One Drive come close in feature set? Has Office dropped support for them?
I mean the linked article suggests that this is the case without ever showing us the bases for the assumptions. As far as I know, if we are looking at major players in the field, iCloud should worry the most, since it is something that nobody uses.
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#6People have been saying this about Dropbox since iCloud came out, but what has changed? Have usage statistics changed? Have Google Drive and One Drive come close in feature set? Has Office dropped support for them? I mean the linked article suggests that this is the case without ever showing us the bases for the assumptions. As far as I know, if we are looking at major players in the field, iCloud should worry the mo…
I think many people see the Box performance: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/box/interactive-chart?timeframe... and they see how challenging it is for Box to hold its 1+ billion valuation in the public markets, and look at the $1.1B DropBox has raised, and think "hmm, its getting close to being unable to even meet liquidation preferences."
I know Box and DropBox are different, but for a lot of people they have the word "box" in their name, they provide cloud storage, and that is the extent of their understanding of the offerings.
So the question is, what will be the 2016 news from DropBox? And yes, there are doubters who have put them in the deadpool.
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#7TFA seems to come close to arguing that certain businesses should plan to provide value, then fold within a few years. The idea had never occurred to me. It seems to have some difficult implications. If you're the founder of a business and your mission statement involves having "failed" within five years, do you tell your employees that? Or do you pretend to want permanent growth and let them buy houses close to work?
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#8TFA seems to come close to arguing that certain businesses should plan to provide value, then fold within a few years. The idea had never occurred to me. It seems to have some difficult implications. If you're the founder of a business and your mission statement involves having "failed" within five years, do you tell your employees that? Or do you pretend to want permanent growth and let them buy houses close to work…
Well, if you're planning to provide value for only 5 years, then it's not a failure to shut your doors after 5 years. One example of this is the technology consulting firms that help companies maintain and transition off old technology such as Token Ring networks, FORTRAN, Y2K, etc. The companies know they won't be able to do it forever, but they don't have to do it forever.
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#9What's the problem with evernote, I was not aware it is dying.
Been happily using it for years, and it does everything I need. Admittedly I just need it for usually text only storage of notes and todo stuff.
After reading this article I tested OneNote (on windows desktop). It seems to have lots of features but seemed difficult to use for plain text editing. You could move the text boxes around and paint in the note etc but that was just annoying for my use case.
And the screen capture tool just grabs a portion of the screen? No nice annotation of the image like in skitch? And easy drag and drop of the annotated image into another program like a chat window? Yes you could annotate the image in one note of course but no easy way I could find to then drag the image + annotations to another application.
Maybe I just don't know how to use it but that is just the strength of evernote and skitch, dead simple to use.
And skitch's annotation graphics are way nicer than the pixelated lines of onenote.
Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?
#10What's the problem with evernote, I was not aware it is dying. Been happily using it for years, and it does everything I need. Admittedly I just need it for usually text only storage of notes and todo stuff. After reading this article I tested OneNote (on windows desktop). It seems to have lots of features but seemed difficult to use for plain text editing. You could move the text boxes around and paint in the note e…
One thing though about Evernote I wonder. Where are they spending all of their hundreds on millions of dollars? I haven't noticed the software changing basically at all during my using it... Well don't fix it if it isn't broken...