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It was both the market and the leadership. Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Pa

It was both the market and the leadership. Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Passwords, Dropbox Paper, Carousel etc. As Steve Jobs warned Drew Houston, Dropbox was "a feature, not a product"

nashadelic 4mo ago
Dropbox is a $6B product, just no second act
- light_triad 4mo ago
  It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.
  - ktallett 4mo ago
    I don't see the need to become bloated like slack and a one size fits all application. They do a great job with the product they have. Is there anything wrong with just being what you are? Why does the lack of a second act need to be a bad thing if your first product is great and still extremely valuable? I would also if anything put Zoom in with Dropbox, they have a product that is by far the most enjoyable to use in that space, but any other offshoot is not worth it.
    - light_triad 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - bombcar 4mo ago
      Zoom is great, but it's hard to argue for paying $x per user when you're already paying $x per user for email/office and "teams is free".
      - ktallett 4mo ago
        Teams being free doesn't make teams good. Just like Google Drive and OneDrive being packaged in for cheap doesn't make them good. It is clear why they are lower value.
  - price 4mo ago
    And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of enterprise execution. (Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)
    - abhiyerra 4mo ago
      Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper. The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.
      - price 4mo ago
        Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service. Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)
    - iamcalledrob 4mo ago
      Another issue: Paper was tied to your Dropbox account. From Dropbox's perspective, this sounds great. Accounts become more useful and valuable. The addressable market of a Dropbox account grows! Plus, everyone has a Dropbox account already, right? Unfortunately, it turns out that business customers generally don't deploy Dropbox wall-to-wall. It's expensive. Not all employees need file sync. A Dropbox account ends up being an obstacle to adoption. And a distraction: a common account creates an irresistible urge to spend a lot of time finding ways to tie this new product into the old one.
  - afavour 4mo ago
    > They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.
    - tmp10423288442 4mo ago
      > Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that. Slack, Zoom, and Notion all argue against that. Yes, they have to compete against Google and Microsoft's integrated solutions, but they're good enough that they have held their own. Of course they would be bigger if Google and Microsoft didn't have such products.
deleted 4mo ago
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nashadelic 4mo ago

Dropbox is a $6B product, just no second act

light_triad 4mo ago
It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.
- ktallett 4mo ago
  I don't see the need to become bloated like slack and a one size fits all application. They do a great job with the product they have. Is there anything wrong with just being what you are? Why does the lack of a second act need to be a bad thing if your first product is great and still extremely valuable? I would also if anything put Zoom in with Dropbox, they have a product that is by far the most enjoyable to use in that space, but any other offshoot is not worth it.
  - light_triad 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - bombcar 4mo ago
    Zoom is great, but it's hard to argue for paying $x per user when you're already paying $x per user for email/office and "teams is free".
    - ktallett 4mo ago
      Teams being free doesn't make teams good. Just like Google Drive and OneDrive being packaged in for cheap doesn't make them good. It is clear why they are lower value.
- price 4mo ago
  And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of enterprise execution. (Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)
  - abhiyerra 4mo ago
    Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper. The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.
    - price 4mo ago
      Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service. Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)
  - iamcalledrob 4mo ago
    Another issue: Paper was tied to your Dropbox account. From Dropbox's perspective, this sounds great. Accounts become more useful and valuable. The addressable market of a Dropbox account grows! Plus, everyone has a Dropbox account already, right? Unfortunately, it turns out that business customers generally don't deploy Dropbox wall-to-wall. It's expensive. Not all employees need file sync. A Dropbox account ends up being an obstacle to adoption. And a distraction: a common account creates an irresistible urge to spend a lot of time finding ways to tie this new product into the old one.
- afavour 4mo ago
  > They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.
  - tmp10423288442 4mo ago
    > Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that. Slack, Zoom, and Notion all argue against that. Yes, they have to compete against Google and Microsoft's integrated solutions, but they're good enough that they have held their own. Of course they would be bigger if Google and Microsoft didn't have such products.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]