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Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#311

Post by erikpukinskis »

untog wrote: post #15
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.

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…

That's because making a big pile of money the Silicon Valley way requires two things: a product, and a moat. It's not hard to create an email product, but email moats are hard because it's an anarchist technology by design.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#312

Post by Sophistifunk »

mbesto wrote: post #66
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…

Yet that same Silicon Valley rewarded Mailbox with $100MM in an acquisition...

That went to founders and investors. Mailbox has clearly received a bullet.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#313

Post by rsp1984 »

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.

That is, a $100m acqui-"hire". And the problem is, probably even Dropbox thinks that way. Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit bonkers?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#315

Post by gadders »

Lazare wrote: post #308

Crap. I absolutely adored Mailbox; it did everything I wanted, but especially: 1) The ability to snooze emails 2) A really nice UI on both OS X and Android letting me quickly swipe emails to archive or snooze them. 3) A unified inbox that showed multiple email accounts as a single inbox. Does anyone have any suggestions for a mail client that meets these requirements? I'm quite happy to pay. Edit: Google Inbox doesn'…

I loved it too. Cloud Magic on Android comes close.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#316

Post by cognivore »

Awesome. Hey, start-up type peoples. Good luck getting me to use any of your nifty new software. Cause every time I do, and invest my time, data, and learning in you, you sell out then disappear.

There's fool me twice thing in here, but I'm not that inspired to be clever with it.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#317

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jessedhillon wrote: post #228
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God forbid anyone share abandoned code. Where I work we incinerate anything potentially useful when we're done with it. That way no dirty freeloaders can take advantage of it.

Let Pa be the probability that some piece of your open-sourced codebase reveals an important technique or strategy to your competitor, thus leveling a technological advantage you have, Let Ca be the cost of that lost advantage, Let Cb be the value of good will from the open source community In what case is Cb bigger than (Pa * Ca)?

That "formula" really isn't particularly difficult to work around.

First off, if you're open sourcing your codebase because you're getting out of a particular market, you have to ask whether revealing techniques and strategies to competitors in that market is really an issue. After all, if those techniques and strategies had given you a competitive advantage, you probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

Second: If you really are concerned about that, just use the GPL.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#318

Post by grandalf »

I've been using carousel and have switched a lot of family members to it. I was using Snapjoy before (which Dropbox acquired and killed), and had done the same thing.

I find the announcement about Carousel extremely disappointing. I'm definitely going to think twice about using Dropbox for anything other than simple file storage in the future.

Pictures are peoples' lives, their families, and their memories. This is a big part of file storage and I thought Carousel was a superb product on desktop and mobile.

Sorry to vent but I haven't been this disappointed about a product being killed (for no apparent reason) in a long time.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#319

Post by jessedhillon »

jarek wrote: post #294
jessedhillon wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let Pa be the probability that some piece of your open-sourced codebase reveals an important technique or strategy to your competitor, thus leveling a technological advantage you have, Let Ca be the cost of that lost advantage, Let Cb be the value of good will from the open source community In what case is Cb bigger than (Pa * Ca)?

When Pa == 0, so like, most of the time. It's an email app. It talks IMAP^H^H^H^Hto Gmail. It runs on iOS. How many secret, commercially important techniques do you really suppose it contains?

Suppose it writes to Dropbox using internal APIs? How many developer hours should they spend abstracting/obscuring that usage? What are they going to gain by doing that? What are they risking if that process misses something?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#320

Post by npizzolato »

vu0tran wrote: post #242
jonursenbach wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your end goal with this? Surely it must be getting acquired by one of the big email providers.

Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course). I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question. There's really thre…

> Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).

> hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die.

No offense, but it doesn't really sound like you were kidding. I have no skin in this game because I never used Mailbox and am content to continue using GMail, but if I was upset about this shutdown and in the market for a new email client that would be around long-term, your answer wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. You've basically said you're going to shut down (or get acquired and then, inevitably shut down) unless you hit the lottery ticket of a billion dollar company.

Speaking more generally, I think this sort of attitude is going to catch up with VC-backed startups sooner or later. Why would I make my workflow depend on a startup that is, in all likelihood, going to either shut down or get acquired and shut down? For anything with a high switching cost, using a product from a VC-backed startup that has this outlook is just going to cause me problems later if I get dependent on it.

I think a lot of companies would do better by their customers (and themselves) if they instead looked for a more sustainable business model. But there isn't as much of a lottery ticket in those businesses, so I can see why some founders avoid it.

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