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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#251

Post by dmbaggett »

g4k wrote: post #248
dmbaggett wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I co-founded ITA Software and have been using some of the proceeds from the sale to Google to fund an email startup. ( http://inky.com ) The challenges outlined in this thread are all accurate. If you're thinking about putting effort (or money) behind an email startup, think again. I simply don't believe it's doable for a normal startup (i.e., one without a crazy rich guy plowing money into it until it's good enough)…

Do you plan to add PGP support?

Maybe, but not any time soon. S/MIME solves the same problem and is what enterprises and governments want. It's incredibly complicated and difficult to implement properly, but it does include solutions to some security-related issues that PGP doesn't (e.g., security labeling).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#252

Post by nostrademons »

exelius wrote: post #164
TeMPOraL wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think most VCs would rather see the company stick it out and go for the hockey-stick & IPO. An acquihire is a blip on their returns; it's basically worthless. They're usually arranged as a courtesy to founders, so that if you work your butt off for 3 years, do everything right, and still don't find success, you don't leave with hard feelings toward the other people you worked with.

You get acquihires when the assumptions behind the company's business model have been proven false and there's basically no way to solve it other than rebooting the company. Arguably this is an argument to not take VC until you've got the hockey-stick trajectory, so you can pivot & reboot at will without dissolving an existing organization. But even this sucks for customers, if you have any.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#253

Post by smackfu »

rifung wrote: post #98

Can anyone explain to me, someone who's more than happy with GMail, what these apps offer that aren't being offered by Google/Microsoft? It seems like Mailbox had a loyal following but I guess my email use is just not sophisticated enough to understand.

It's related to a productivity strategy called "inbox zero" where you immediately deal with every email in your inbox when you check your mail. "Deal with" might be to delete it if it's junk, respond immediately if you can, or defer it to later. A lot of these clients are aimed at making this process as fast and efficient as possible. So taking actions on an email are often just a swipe, and there are facilities to defer an email to a particular time, or adding it to a to-do list.

It's mainly intended at people who get too much email.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#254

Post by joeblau »

calgoo wrote: post #39

I wish they could open source Mailbox at least... That way it might survive. [1] "Will Mailbox be open-sourced? Unfortunately not. We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, but this is ultimately not something we will support." [1] https://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/

Someone started a petition in an effort to lobby dropbox to do just that:

https://www.change.org/p/dropbox-open-source-mailbox-app?rec...

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#255

Post by codemac »

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.

Proprietary tools just aren't worth the turnover for me.

It's untenable to depend on developer tools that a company owns. I love free software, but in all honesty the reason I incorporate it is more selfish. My workstation is exclusively free software so I don't have to be abreast of business news to get my job done.

I've basically settled on my emacs + notmuch + offlineimap solution not because I think it's better than all email clients -- but it's the one that if all parties involved quit, I could probably use it for another 10-ish years.

For example - offlineimap right now still has this old bug where sometime it uses all my cpu (and a bunch of memory) in some sync case. Ok, I don't have time to debug this. I set limits and have it be killed when that state occurs. Annoying? Sure. Have to configure whole new mail client? Nope!

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#257

Post by exelius »

snewman wrote: post #192
TeMPOraL wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This may be a contrarian view, but: I'm not convinced it's good for the buying company. Good engineers are hard to find, but this is an awfully expensive way to hire; you may not keep the good people for very long; and if you're the kind of company that has a really hard time hiring good people, you may not also be very good at getting engagement and productivity out of the people you acquihired. My view on acquihire…

Acquihires are more about hiring functioning teams composed of engineers and executives who are used to working with each other. That's a lot more expensive to build than just the salaries; and you can generally take that team and throw them at a problem with a reasonable expectation they'll accomplish something.

Also, there's generally some amount of IP and customer data involved as well.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#259

Post by staunch »

jacquesm wrote: post #114
aashaykumar92 wrote: post #101

Sad, 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.

It's far more likely that he was overly optimistic about Mailbox's chances of success at Dropbox. Founders are notoriously delusional about this kind of thing.

Dropbox wasn't worried about maintaining the small existing Mailbox userbase, they were betting they could grow it by millions of users. When it didn't work, it messed up their plans (and promises).

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#260

Post by free2rhyme214 »

coldtea wrote: post #243

The message from this: outside of backup, Dropbox can't/won't sustain a small scale but profitable business for the long term (e.g. Basecamp style). So don't even consider adopting and trusting their new "Paper" collaboration offering.

Yeah. Dropbox Paper is like Box Notes. It's nifty but why switch from Google docs?
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