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Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?

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Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?

#11

TFA 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…

Dropbox and Evernote are more than five-year-old and I don't think they're shutting their products down any time soon. So it doesn't apply here. Large companies also pivot (Apple, HP, Intel, Motorola...), so some will ride more than one wave.

Anyway, where there is demand, there should be supply, and conversely. The car manufacturing market boomed a couple of times. Ditto for bicycles. Home appliances as well. The PC market peaked in the 2000's, now there is no point in keeping supplying these clunky metal boxes. Today the mobile apps market is very saturated, only 7 years after the App Store launched. Once customers buy a product, they won't be on the market for some time, until the product gets amortized or dies, a big innovation occurs, or what have you. When 80% of customers already bought the product, the market is mature and concentration occurs, that's always been the case. Maybe innovation getting faster is what is happening, so companies will be more shortlived. But the pace is bound by the customer's income, so the bright side is there is a feedback loop.

I think an honest founder should at least try to find employees that understand the risks and pay them accordingly. Obviously, there will be many bad players, but prospective employees will also get wiser from the Webvans, Zyngas and Groupons.

Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?

#12
post #6
post #5

People 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…

I am guessing there real problem is that they don't have any productivity suite attached to their cloud service. Google has Google Docs(which is why I went with it over Dropbox for my small business), which is the best free Office Competitor, and OneDrive has all the might of MS Office.

I think they just allowed commenting and editing Word docs through their webapps recently.

Evernote has the note market cornered. Google Keep looks like yet another silly google experiment that they might one day pull the plug on (like Reader :-( ), and Apple Notes, like icloud, only really works on Apple devices. OneNote just got free, and has got some great features and comes with Windows 10, but I don't think most non-Office365 subscribers even know it exists.

Re: Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?

#13

What'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…

I too am a happy Evernote user, for text-only note-taking. Prior to Evernote, I used Xnippet, a mac-app which wasn't well supported. Evernote is a big part of my work flow, and I'd hate to see it go away. I find all the other features (web-clipping, image-editing) superfluous, and it feels like they are concentrating too much on the fluff features. Every time there is an update, it feels like they are adding more features I don't need.
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