Sad, Drew had said it's not going anywhere when the acquisition was announced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572
To be fair, that was 3 years ago. A lot can change in that amount of time.
Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
111–120 of 435 posts
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine Mailbox has a heavy server component, which would be non-trivial to get set up and running on your own.
If you're looking for an alternative, we built one at Nylas. :) https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine
Nylas looks awesome. Has anyone built a plugin for it that allows for "message snoozing"? That was the real ingenuity with Mailbox IMO.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine Mailbox has a heavy server component, which would be non-trivial to get set up and running on your own.
That's hardly a reason to not open-source. You're not required to provide support just because you release your source code. Even a dump of their repositories would be useful for people who are interested in Mailbox.
No; but often the server components are heavily tied to some other proprietary libraries that they're not ready to open source. They could remove all proprietary code from their codebase, but that costs money - likely more than they were willing to spend on this product.
Unless open source is part of your marketing strategy (which means the effort would have a budget), it's really difficult to open source an existing commercial application.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#114Sad, Drew had said it's not going anywhere when the acquisition was announced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572
Executive promises at the time of an acquisition mean absolutely nothing, their main goal is to reduce break-off risk (both of users and employees) due to change of control.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#115Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#116This 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.
That would be the rational thing to do. I don't believe it will happen though. If it was going to happen it would before they announced they're shutting it down.
I just don't get how you can spend 100m$ on something and just let it die. What did Dropbox get out of this deal?
SV is depressing sometimes.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#117This 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.
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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#118That's abrupt. It wasn't that long ago I was bribed into downloading Mailbox by some notification in the Dropbox app. Bummer too, because I really like it. They're not even going to leave it and let it slowly decay until time takes it's toll and nature wins like with Sparrow. "As you evaluate alternatives, you might consider the stock apps like iOS Mail (Apple) and Gmail (Android)" I guess they didn't have much time…
Inbox is a very close alternative, and that's even by Google. They didn't think that through at all.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#119It used to be when the company went out of business, their software still worked...
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#120Don't use anything that's not open source. Period.