Dropbox tells Mailbox and Carousel users to get their affairs in order Dropbox is going to be nixing the Mailbox and Carousel services early next year. The file-sharing specialist said that it will be killing off its Mailbox email system on February 26, and the Carousel picture sharing service will have its last go-round on March 31. Dropbox said the decision to kill both products so quickly …
Then it must (presumably) have had a big enough user base to justify the price.
Have they lost all their users? If not, why not sell it back to the original developers? If they get $20m this should be better than $0.
Unless of course they've lost (or subsumed) all the developers.
Moral - if your popular and useful service gets taken over by big money this is very rarely a good thing.
Even more moral: If your startup gets bought for 100 million, woohoo you've got 100 million. Who cares what happens to it afterwards?
The business plan for many startups is to cash out by getting bought by someone big. Why the hell would they want to buy it back?
Which is exactly why I love it when this happens. The more it happens, the more people will get burnt by cloud storage and the more they'll shy away from it. Which in turn will render it a passing fad rather than a long-term IT trend.
Hopefully the ransom-rentism model pervading the IT world will go the same way, once people realise that paying for your software over and over is akin to buying a book from the bookstore and having to pay the store a monthly fee to keep it. In any other industry this would be considered extortion. In IT however it seems to be par for the course.
Except...
...businesses prefer leasing over ownership. It makes budgeting easier - you're paying fixed, known sum of money every month / year, and upgrades are included for free - and has numerous tax advantages. Even office space is usually leased, rather than purchased outright. Dropbox basically outsources your back-end fileservers and backups for you, which makes it ideal for SMEs who can't be arsed to do all that stuff in-house. This is clearly what "The Cloud" means to Dropbox, Inc.
The reasons for ditching Mailbox and Carousel are simple: they're primarily consumer products with plenty of more successful rivals that people have actually heard of.
For businesses and professionals, "The Cloud" is just the fashionable new term for "leasing" with regard to software and / or services. Accountants understood this instinctively and were more than happy to adopt the new terminology, which was clearly the same as the old terminology, only with different letters.
Tried Carousel, couldn't be arsed.
Two further issues with Dropbox remain: its Board includes an avowed proponent of privacy-shredding "surveillance everywhere" ideology, and the app thrashes the hell out of my laptop's hard drive.
See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/10/dropbox_condoleezza_rice_board/ for reaction to the Board appointment -- as well as an announcement of a new service called... "Carousel".
I'd be just as happy to see the whole business vanish.
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