The new Dropbox

That's the issue with taking too much funding or going public. You become beholden to the profit margin and the quality of the product is completely irrelevant if it still prints money. You turn your company into a metastasis, demanding exponential growth, market share, and profit as the only metrics of success.

What ever happened to just doing well enough to pay the bills, your employees, and a touch saved for a rainy day? Thousands of companies operate like this: restaurants, shops, trades, nothing you'd find on the NYSE of course. Why do you need to double in value every few years? Expand exponentially like a cancer? As your company grows and you wrangle more engineering talent into your directionless product, how much innovation are you stifling in the process? These engineers could be founding their own private companies instead of working for your public monstrosity, they could be working on products that are good on merit and bad on profit. We could be years ahead if corporatism didn't invade engineering and silo the best talent into contracts of secrecy, shattering open communication on technology in the process.

Take self driving cars. Quite a few companies are working on the same goal, repeating the same work. In an ideal world these engineers would all be in the same building, sharing notes, running joint experiments, and the end product would be sponsored by all the companies funding the endeavor. But instead we live in a world that values getting there first and 'beating' your colleagues in other companies, even if it takes longer than if everyone was collaborating. We value the dollar more than the technology.

What a disaster. The entire initial premise of Dropbox was to sync files reliably. Then I can use real, native apps to edit them. The new Dropbox approach on the other hand inherently requires everything to be in the cloud--I already hate that, but even if I didn't, others already do this and do it better.

I feel like Microsoft actually has the balance right. OneDrive still behaves just like a normal sync client. But to do certain kinds of real-time collaboration you can just point native, desktop Office apps to the cloud version of the file. But when you're offline you still have the same kinds of access you need.

Who ever asked for Dropbox OS?

Fiduciary duty to shareholders

I might not be fully understanding your point but I would disagree with the idea that just because many companies have tried to integrate tools together and failed that it must point to some inherent flaw in the idea itself. Instead it should just point to inherent difficulties in executing the idea.

All of our tools having silos of data and only having difficult to implement one-to-one integrations seems broken- it does not feel like it has to be this way as part of the nature of the software.

Here are two reasons we have not yet seen this executed well:

1) If you're Atlassian or Microsoft it's likely perceived that it's not in the best interest of your business model to spend a non-trivial amount of resources on deep integrations with 100's of popular 3rd-party apps but instead it's much easier to see how it is in their best interest to just clone those popular apps and deeply integrate them into your suite. This way they keep users using their software and are able to charge for the new app (or eventually charge more for the suite).

2) So then there's space left for a software solution to enter the market that does world-class deep integrations with the 100's of popular SaaS api's and a great UI/UX that makes working across all of these apps intuitive- potentially an entirely new level of usability in modern productivity workflows. But as a startup idea this actually does tend to fail and I think it's primarily because it's a non-trivial engineering problem to build these integrations and a startup, with scarce engineering resources, is forced to choose ~1-3 integrations to start with as their initial customer-facing version. This then results in a product that is not compelling and just seems like yet another one-to-one integration solution.

It seems that if a new level of software interoperability enabling a new level of user experience is to happen the startup would have to be very well funded with a decent "stealth mode" runway. Or a large software company would have to throw a decent chunk of resources at the idea (not PM's convincing the business case for an integration piecemeal).

And then there's one other way this could happen:

If you look at Android and iOS you see that they already have thousands of productivity apps integrating deeply with their native API's. And already this has enabled things like iOS Actions Extension API where you can send something like a pdf to any app you have installed that registers its ability to handle pdf's. On Android features like Slices allow an app developer to put a "slice" of their UI into other apps based on the intent or action happening on the other app. I can see a future where Apple and Google increasingly push their mobile operating systems to the desktop-size screen and the productivity user base. While it may seem unlikely now it may be that iOS and Android are best positioned to introduce a new level of software interoperability to the modern enterprise productivity market in the form of a better desktop experience.

I don't need 2TB either, but I do need a cross-platform solution where the incentives of the company are aligned more or less with mine in providing the service.

iCloud will always primarily be about Apple devices, which I like well enough and have several of, but maybe won't always. Microsoft's offering will probably be the same from the PC side of things. Google will offer me the world for free but data mine the hell out of it.

Dropbox seems to really care about cross-platform experience. Except in rare cases, it just works. It's just folders from my POV. And so... I pay them about $100 a year and they provide this service. Seems to have worked out pretty well for me.