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I think with Paper, Dropbox is going more for a collaboration tool than a full suite replacement. When they were trying to do more with Carousel & Mailbox is wh

I think with Paper, Dropbox is going more for a collaboration tool than a full suite replacement. When they were trying to do more with Carousel & Mailbox is when things began to feel like they were losing site. I haven't used Paper, but based on the video it appears to be much more straight forward in team approach than Quip or GDocs. To me Gdocs feels like it's a more full featured replacement to Office and Quip is too simplistic of an approach. Paper seems to perfectly hit the middle ground.

013a 9y ago
GDocs is definitely a full office suite replacement. It could capture the same use case of Paper, but it tends to be too heavy and focuses too much on formatting. Quip is a definite competitor. It tends to do better for knowledge base style collaborations, whereas Paper is better for ephemeral collaboration. But it is lightweight and focused enough to be useful for both. As a sidenote, I really think Google is missing an opportunity here. Drive could really use a Paper-style competitor. Start with the collaboration foundations of Docs, but remove all the cruft. No font changing, no formatting beyond what's in markdown, remove all the menus, streamline the interface, add some integrations like embedding Sheets-style spreadsheets. They'd capture a lot of marketshare that has G-Suite domains, but reaches out to other tools to manage ephemeral collaborations and knowledge bases.
danieldk 9y ago
When they were trying to do more with Carousel & Mailbox is when things began to feel like they were losing site. But Carousel was really consumer-focused, whereas Paper is clearly (presented as) a business tool. I think that they realized with Carousel that most Pro users use Dropbox for work, so that is where the money is. As someone who also uses Dropbox for work, I think that they could make Dropbox even more attractive by adding some services. They should not try to compete heads-on with full office suite, but I can imagine that Paper + Calendaring + Chat could really be awesome for work.

013a 9y ago

GDocs is definitely a full office suite replacement. It could capture the same use case of Paper, but it tends to be too heavy and focuses too much on formatting. Quip is a definite competitor. It tends to do better for knowledge base style collaborations, whereas Paper is better for ephemeral collaboration. But it is lightweight and focused enough to be useful for both. As a sidenote, I really think Google is missing an opportunity here. Drive could really use a Paper-style competitor. Start with the collaboration foundations of Docs, but remove all the cruft. No font changing, no formatting beyond what's in markdown, remove all the menus, streamline the interface, add some integrations like embedding Sheets-style spreadsheets. They'd capture a lot of marketshare that has G-Suite domains, but reaches out to other tools to manage ephemeral collaborations and knowledge bases.

danieldk 9y ago

When they were trying to do more with Carousel & Mailbox is when things began to feel like they were losing site. But Carousel was really consumer-focused, whereas Paper is clearly (presented as) a business tool. I think that they realized with Carousel that most Pro users use Dropbox for work, so that is where the money is. As someone who also uses Dropbox for work, I think that they could make Dropbox even more attractive by adding some services. They should not try to compete heads-on with full office suite, but I can imagine that Paper + Calendaring + Chat could really be awesome for work.