Sad, Drew had said it's not going anywhere when the acquisition was announced.
Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
101–110 of 435 posts
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gmail on mobile still doesn't have a unified inbox, and it also doesn't have features I've come to depend on such as snoozing messages. I usually use Inbox by Gmail on mobile, which also lacks a unified inbox and (bizarrely enough) support for HTML signatures but does have pretty good message snoozing, and I like how it handles bundling. Outlook (incidentally, another example of my original complaint, as it's just fo…
The new Outlook app is actually surprisingly good. I think the Sunrise guys (sunrise.am) are running that team and it shows. I laughed the first 2 times friends recommended me the app, but I tried it and now also highly recommend it.
For certain. I just gave it a try a couple of weeks ago and it's now my default client as a gmail user.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#103Wow - feels bad for those folks that got acqui-hired and now see their product being "laid off" RIP Mailbox, you were cool to play with for a few hours that one stormy day I decided to install you
I feel more badly for the people who used and loved the products.
Hard to feel bad for people who got a nice pile of money and a cushy job and probably more equity that can turn into another pile of money later...
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet that same Silicon Valley rewarded Mailbox with $100MM in an acquisition...
That's exactly my point. Silicon Valley rewards "go big or go bust", it doesn't reward "small, sustainable business". I don't for a second blame the founders of Mailbox for doing what they did. When the market creates a strong set of incentives like this you can't really expect anyone to do anything other than take the $100m. But this is the side-effect.
VC is generally designed for big bets and big payoffs (invest in 10 risky bets in the hope that 1 pays off to cover your losses on the other 9). Less risky ventures with smaller payoffs take longer to grow, and don't satisfy the payoff requirements of the VC model.
That doesn't mean they're bad companies, but there's definitely a funding gap for the type of company that will require $3M in investment up front and be worth $10M in 5 years. That's still a great return, but right now it's the domain of private equity.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#105FWIW, a friend told me Mailbox was dead (the team had been moved off the product) back in June, so this was internally known for months.
Relevant Twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/mikeisaac/status/673918795707244544
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#106Cool products coming and going doesn't really even surprise me anymore. I've become a little jaded to the whole come and go of all the different tools and apps. Anyway, if you guys haven't checked out Boxer [1] for email, it's the best. I went a little obsessive, tested every email client on iOS, and this one was without a doubt is my favorite: * Push notifications * Doesn't hijack labels with archive/to-do/completed…
Check this out http://www.getboxer.com/boxer-joins-vmware/ how likely is that they will shutter it down, rebrand it in a way that we/me will not like it.
It will be brought into Airwatch and used exclusively for that.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too? I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.
Hey there-- I work at Nylas. We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year. Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3] [1] https://nylas.com/features/ [2] https://nylas.com/n1…
I’d pay to have delete actually delete email completely (not just from my inbox, but from all as well).
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#108This is very sad news and I don't really get the decision. The thing with Mailbox is that it was truly a great product before it switched hands to Dropbox. Once they bought it, that was the end of good functions and the product only went downhill from there. There's a lot of potential with email clients that will help you work better, Mailbox was definitely one of those products that helped. With good clients for Mac…
I'm still hoping they'll sell them to someone.
Dropbox is obviously planning to go a different direction with its core product strategy, so that makes sense to me, but those products were too good to just let die. I'm sure someone would be willing to take them off of Dropbox's hands.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#109Ugh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquihired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It's 2015 and I still bounce around email clients every couple months because all of the major options have substantial flaws.
Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't. Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully sl…
HotMaiL didn't make a dent in Eudora market share. What killed Eudora was Outlook Express, bundled with the operating system for free. Incidentally, the same strategy was used against Netscape (who then proceeded to quickly kill itself when faced with that prospect).
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't. Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully sl…
> And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to? I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
I did expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way to make a decent kettle that lasts a lifetime, or a similarly decent fridge, or washing machine, or even a watch. Sadly, I was disappointed.
If you own something, you're not buying it - so the seller doesn't get the money. Software figured this out quickly - that's why everything that has not moved to cloud yet is being sold in form of licenses - a temporary grant to use some software. Rest of the world did it with planned obsolescence, and now the trend is to actually make you license hardware instead of buying it. It's sick. But that's where the money is, that's what the Market[0] says to do, therefore it's happening.
[0] - or Moloch.