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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed with Dropbox before their IPO. It felt like an old company that everyone is coasting. I wonder how young companies get to that point so quickly?

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They stop growing. The ambitious people leave first when they realize growth is slowing. Ultimately, only the less ambitious are left.

By not innovating in new products would be my guess.

Dropbox is their product and? There's "Corporate Dropbox" and that's it?

They should have gone all in on Dropbox Paper and building out an office suite to compete with GSuite and O365. Didn't happen.

Why? It's almost impossible to keep up with Microsoft (as LibreOffice shows), it's definitely impossible to write one from scratch.

This is a steep hill to climb. Microsoft is deeply entrenched in enterprises with .Net, Active Directory, SQL server, all that jazz (witness how fast Teams sped past Slack usage). It's easier for Microsoft to roll out storage than it is for Dropbox to become Microsoft or Google.

Jobs was right, Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

https://www.notion.so/ is a thing, so there's probably a market, but it would be extremely hard to pull off.

It doesn't have to be another clone. For example Quip was acquired by Sales and there are tons of modern collaboration software tools like Airtable, Notion, Slack, etc. They could've created a suite that was tailored around that while leveraging their existing integrations with Office.

Also people forget Box.com exists and does an even better job with corporate storage than Dropbox with much better features and UX.

I wish they kept their Mailbox app as well - I really enjoyed using it (https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...)

Dropbox Paper itself was an acquisition.

I feel like a lot of the companies are the same way though. I mean AirBnB pretty much only ever has had 1 product.

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