341–350 of 435 posts
Ultimately, I am beginning to think that Dropbox simply does not have the product DNA =/
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 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)…
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I’d pay to have delete actually delete email completely (not just from my inbox, but from all as well).
@softawre: He's asking for it to delete on the receivers side too. I think certain enterprise-y email solutions have this, but there's no way to have that happen in the distributed email ecosystem unless all your messages were just links to a website that could delete the content centrally, or similarly, jpg's of rendered text that were somehow forced to be remotely fetched each time.
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 t…
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Outlook (I assume you're referring to the mobile app, not the desktop client) puts all of your emails on MS's servers, so that's a no go for lots of people. Last I checked, the gmail app only worked with gmail accounts.
The Gmail app actually allows 3rd-party IMAP connections.
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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.
"you can generally take that team and throw them at a problem with a reasonable expectation they'll accomplish something" For about 6 months to a year, after which time most of them have left, or have gone into "waiting for the golden handcuffs to come off" zombie-worker mode on a project they have no inherent interest in. Totally anecdotal but the couple of acquihires I've seen from the inside have gone like this an…
I thought Carousel looked really cool, eagerly installed it on release. Then I discovered that when Carousel is installed, the Dropbox app stops automatically uploading photos from your phone. You have to now open Carousel to do so. Broke my existing upload process, and due to iOS permissions for the new app or not launching it frequently or something the new Carousel upload process wasn't reliable. Discovered this b…
I had the same experience. I really liked Carousel. It was a great way to organize my photos, but like you said it totally disables auto-sync.
Carousel's "Flashback -- Discover This Day in the Past Year" feature strikes me as a very clever social workaround since it gets you to open the app at least once a week.
The Dropbox iOS app has the same limitation. Presumably you opened it more to do unrelated tasks, so it makes a lot of sense to bundle them.
Google Photos has the same limitation as well on iOS. I find Carousel's syncing and Google Photos' syncing seem to be roughly on par with each other.
Is this a sign the Dropbox's diversification strategy into a full collaboration product failed? In other words, Dropbox can't move away from being a feature?
Is this Dropbox cleaning up their balance sheet in an attempt to IPO? There's a pretty loud rumor floating around, heck it was reported on CNBC today, that Dropbox can't come close to IPOing anywhere near its $10 Billion dollar valuation. Though Fidelity did mark them up slightly at the end of November! And for better or worse, they are going to be closely compared to Box, which has been a pretty big disaster since I…
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.
It's such a shitty, disrespectful, dangerous pattern to buy and shutdown products. The community knows it and bemoans it every time. Blogs have been set up just to highlight how shitty it is. Countless words written about how shitty it is. This isn't like giving away free cookies and then stopping, it's like standing someone up on a date.
"—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love..." but it's just business move, and business only leverages emotions and feelings when it's profitable for us.