Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

blogs.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 435 posts

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#381

Post by Meekro »

dmbaggett wrote: post #223
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 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)…

Fascinating! I'd love to read more about the challenges involved in both airfare pricing, and email! Can you link to any posts that go into greater technical detail?

Also, regarding Inky-- I just spent a few minutes browsing your site, and it didn't answer my first question: why should I switch to your product from gmail?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#382

Post by segphault »

grinich wrote: post #76
jordigh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too? I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.

Hey there-- I work at Nylas. We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year. Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3] [1] https://nylas.com/features/ [2] https://nylas.com/n1…

This is the first I've heard of N1. It looks appealing, but after following the links and looking at it on GitHub, it seems like installing the sync server for self hosting is still non-trivial.

I went to the "releases" tab on GitHub and it looks like the last one was in 2014. I see things in the GitHub repo that suggest there are Dockerfiles and Debian packages, but I don't see an actual Debian package repository or an entry on the Docker Hub. Is the recommended way to use it today just cloning the git repo? Or is there a stable release of the sync server that's tested/known to work with the binaries of the client?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#383

Post by nikolay »

gcr wrote: post #351
nikolay wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It was a small simple product. Dropbox itself is just a folder that syncs. Small and simple, right? Carousel is just a camera roll that syncs. Small and simple, right? There is an amazing amount of engineering and planning that goes into both products though.

Well, compared to Mailbox and Paper, Carousel is simple. Dropbox is not as simple as Carousel itself. There are much more complex apps developed by single developers than Carousel, for example, and many are not even developed for profit. There's very little investment that Dropbox has to do to keep Carousel running, but they decided not to and compromise a lot more than they expect!

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#384

Post by grinich »

segphault wrote: post #382
grinich wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there-- I work at Nylas. We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year. Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3] [1] https://nylas.com/features/ [2] https://nylas.com/n1…

This is the first I've heard of N1. It looks appealing, but after following the links and looking at it on GitHub, it seems like installing the sync server for self hosting is still non-trivial. I went to the "releases" tab on GitHub and it looks like the last one was in 2014. I see things in the GitHub repo that suggest there are Dockerfiles and Debian packages, but I don't see an actual Debian package repository or…

Yep, just clone the git repo and set up on Debian (like Ubuntu 12.04) and run setup.sh. Most developers run it in a VM.

We don't have "releases" because we are constantly releasing to production. Check out the `production` branch on GitHub for what we're running right now. Usually it's just a handful of hours behind master (at most).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#385

Post by grinich »

jordigh wrote: post #216
grinich wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're two totally different projects. We focus on a lot of stuff in addition to privacy (like great design).

I understand what Mailpile is. It's a self-hosted email web client. What is Nylas? The website doesn't seem to be written for me, but for PHBs. Apparently you have great business, design, and APIs, but what is it that those things do? Are you an email client? A server? A webmail service? What makes you different from Gmail or from Mailpile?

Nylas is two things:

1. APIs for developers that replace IMAP/SMTP/Exchange. Use this to build any app that integrates with a user's mailbox, calendar, or address book.

2. A new extensible email app, built on web technologies (Chromium+NodeJS). This is called N1 and was released about 2 months ago.

We sell the APIs as an infrastructure business (like AWS).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#386

Post by dvcrn »

That is very sad. Carousel was a essential part of my photo editing and backup workflow. Maybe need to investigate switching back to drive. The problem with them was though that photos backed up with "Google Photos" didn't appear inside drive and vice-versa. Did they fix that by now?

Mailbox never worked fine for me and had bugs in every corner.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#387

Post by potatolicious »

igorgue wrote: post #273
potatolicious wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Clearly Dropbox thought there was at least a $100MM opportunity" The opportunity was the team, not the product they were producing. Say you had a room full of math prodigies, but all they were doing was watching TV all day. You hire these math prodigies for $X and put them to work solving math problems - this doesn't mean that watching TV is worth $X, in fact it likely means the opposite, that their value is under…

Yeah but that's ridiculous, they had only 13 employees that's 7.6MM per employee over the span of 2.5 years, some of them I'm sure they left already... You tell me when this starts making sense because it just doesn't right now. Too much money! I don't care how big of a genius you are you're not worth that as a developer of an email client, and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit. The UI was do…

> " I don't care how big of a genius you are you're not worth that as a developer of an email client, and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit. The UI was dope"

But that's the key isn't it? I think you're looking at this from too narrow a point of view.

Yeah, email clients aren't worth much money, so its development isn't worth much either (when's the last time anyone you know paid for an email client?).

The point isn't to acquire a "developer of email clients" it's to acquire a "developer of top-of-class mobile apps", which is considerably valuable. Think of the average quality of a mobile app you use on your phone, the bar is pretty low. Producing truly amazing mobile apps (like you said, the UI was dope) is hard, and requires the flawless, cohesive operation of a lot of facets from engineering to UX design.

Truly excellent mobile teams are very rare, and worth a lot of money. To the tune of $7.6MM over 2 years? Beats me, but it doesn't seem completely out of the question.

Talented developers are worth a lot of money - teams of talented developers, designers, and product people who have a track record of producing stellar work together are worth a multiple of their individual values.

> " and honestly to write an Email client is not genius level shit."

It's not genius level shit, but it's a surprisingly rare skill, and by that I mean writing very, very good frontends. Most people here can write a functional email client if they had to, but how many of them can write a really fucking good one, so good and so easy to use that people - and not just the technorati - sing its praises from the rooftops and get their friends and family to download it?

The Mailbox team was operating at a level well above nearly all mobile app teams, and the quality of their work was easily an order of magnitude better than the industry norm of its time. This may not justify their acquisition price, but I think you're selling them short a bit. They're a team of people known for exceptional quality work, and command a high price for it.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#388

Post by smt88 »

jessedhillon wrote: post #319
jarek wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There' no such thing as an "internal API", assuming the API works over HTTP.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#389

Post by austenallred »

smt88 wrote: post #388
jessedhillon wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There' no such thing as an "internal API", assuming the API works over HTTP.

Undocumented API then?
Post reply on HN