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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#161

Post by tim333 »

azinman2 wrote: post #142
tvararu wrote: post #138

I felt this coming given my experience using the Mailbox desktop app since it launched: - Good experience, fairly regular releases, stability increasing with each one. - Stagnation in releases, but app is in a fairly good working state. - Out of the blue, big update comes in, application changes completely. For the worse, as it loses a bunch of features and is sporting a far less polished look and finish. I believe t…

I just don't think they had the numbers on Carousel, and maybe not enough growth in Mailbox either. If they were getting users like mad, of course Dropbox would focus its attention on expanding them.

>I just don't think they had the numbers on Carousel

My friends experience matched what they said on their blog that people just want their photos in their Dropbox

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#162

Post by arm »

schneidmaster wrote: post #71
cbhl wrote: post #50

Earlier 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 think the guy behind MailMate¹ has done just that. It’s definitely the most powerful mail client on OS X. I ended up buying it, at least!

――――――

¹ — http://freron.com/

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#163

Post by georgespencer »

minimaxir wrote: post #14
orliesaurus wrote: post #6

Wow - 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

Mailbox/Orchestra was not an acquihire for pennies; it was a normal acquisition for $100 million : http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/mailbox-cost-dropbox-around...

Mainly stock. They acquired the engineers for a tiny fraction of Dropbox's valuation. (Today: $10bn.)

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#164

Post by exelius »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #127
exelius wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VCs themselves aren't the problem. Big bets are fine. The problem is acquihiring. It's: - good for founders - they get a big fat paycheck and a chance for a job in a big company - good for VCs - a payoff, even if small, is better than no payoff at all, so they want their 9 not-so-good startups to be bought - good for the buying company - they can literally just kill the competition by throwing money at them, + they g…

VCs are totally the problem here. It's not that VCs are bad people who want to screw over users, but their business model requires them to get payback on their bets, even if it's small. It can be hard to know up front if an idea is viable as a hockey-stick software company or if customer acquisition is much, much harder - often because you don't know who your target customer will be specifically until you've iterated a few times.

And many times, there's no other exit option for the VCs. Does it suck for users? Absolutely - which is why companies often have lots of apprehension about being early adopters of a startup's technology. It's why B2B startups are really hard, and why they tend not to hockey-stick because the customer acquisition costs are high and don't shrink with scale.

It's up to the founders to convince their VCs to pass on the acquihire because they think the company still has hockey-stick potential. Zuckerberg did this a number of times - it was still really arrogant, but it paid off for Facebook and shows why founders need a bit of arrogance to be successful. It's a lot harder to do this if you're running a startup that doesn't have a lot of market traction.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#165

Post by brazzledazzle »

untog wrote: post #156
mattmanser wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only came out 6 months ago or so, I honestly thought I was doing him a favour letting him know about the new functionality. Instead I get downvoted. Gee, thanks. Since when has downvote come to mean disagree on HN?

Well, I didn't down vote you so I can't say for sure. But "Gmail on mobile does have a unified inbox" isn't a true statement if you are an iOS user.

It wasn't said with ill intent. A reply explaining would have been much better than a downvote.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#166

Post by robbyking »

schneidmaster wrote: post #3

Ugh. 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.

> I still bounce around email clients every couple months

Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#167

Post by microtonal »

nikolay wrote: post #47
TheBiv wrote: post #5

Here is more detail about Dropbox Paper: http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/dropbox-paper-team-collab...

They will focus on Paper... until they decide to axe that, too , when they see they can't compete with Google. I think the axe-happy mentality sends the wrong signals when considering products. I'm not gonna use Paper, really, I'm gonna phase off Dropbox as well. I'm not happy they killed Carousel. It was a small simple product - maybe they need a couple of developers to keep it going. It doesn't have to be fancy. I…

They will focus on Paper... until they decide to axe that, too , when they see they can't compete with Google.

And that will be even worse... Carousel used photos that were stored in Dropbox. Mailbox used an existing mailbox. As far as I could see Paper data is just locked up in their cloud and can only be exported as PDF.

No thanks.

All these acquisitions and axed products have made one thing clear to me: I want plain-old files that I can download. Preferably in some open standard.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#168

Post by webjprgm »

bdotdub wrote: post #38
untog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup. Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards. EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have ev…

> there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.

Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me.

To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#170

Post by teaneedz »

LeeUmm wrote: post #72
nathan_f77 wrote: post #36

I only recently switched to Mailbox because I got tired of an annoying UI bug in Sparrow that was never going to be fixed. I was just starting to get used to Mailbox. What mail app should I be using now?

I switched back to Airmail on OS X last week as it was pretty obvious Mailbox was dead as there were 2 critical bugs regarding switch and images not loading that hadn't been fixed in months. It's a shame but that's life. I have to manually setup the rules/filters for now but reading through some other clients in the app store they seem to be buggy. I used Airmail years ago before Mailbox and it was stable and has bee…

The AirMail UI needs work but I use it for its support of Markdown - one of the areas that really needs polishing.
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