Did Dropbox and Evernote Heed the Lessons of Flip?

IIRC, back in the early 1900's, it was commonly known that tech companies should pay higher dividends than longstanding blue chip companies. Why? Because they were much more likely to have short lifespans. The newer the company, the more active the sector, the more turnover in the sector, the more likely the company will get replaced by something else. Somehow people seem to have forgotten this lesson. We now have tech companies like Sun or Groupon that go their entire lifecyle without paying out profits to investors.

That said, the strategy of not paying out profits makes sense for the investors and the founders. The founders will make more money by talking up how much long-term potential the company has, how it is going to be the next 100-year company. Then when they get the $10 billion valuation, the founder can take some money off the table. That is probably a better deal for the founder than getting a $1 billion valuation and just paying out dividends.

The question is, who will end up holding the bag. As much as I loved Dropbox when it came out, I switched off of it recently. I'm not sure what the future is for it in five, ten years. If you are techie, you want something with end-to-end encryption. If you are a normal user, you'll just go with whatever is bundled with your operating system or bundled with applications you use (iCloud, one drive, google drive).

TFA seems to come close to arguing that certain businesses should plan to provide value, then fold within a few years. The idea had never occurred to me. It seems to have some difficult implications. If you're the founder of a business and your mission statement involves having "failed" within five years, do you tell your employees that? Or do you pretend to want permanent growth and let them buy houses close to work?

People have been saying this about Dropbox since iCloud came out, but what has changed? Have usage statistics changed? Have Google Drive and One Drive come close in feature set? Has Office dropped support for them?

I mean the linked article suggests that this is the case without ever showing us the bases for the assumptions. As far as I know, if we are looking at major players in the field, iCloud should worry the most, since it is something that nobody uses.

What's the problem with evernote, I was not aware it is dying. Been happily using it for years, and it does everything I need. Admittedly I just need it for usually text only storage of notes and todo stuff.

After reading this article I tested OneNote (on windows desktop). It seems to have lots of features but seemed difficult to use for plain text editing. You could move the text boxes around and paint in the note etc but that was just annoying for my use case.

And the screen capture tool just grabs a portion of the screen? No nice annotation of the image like in skitch? And easy drag and drop of the annotated image into another program like a chat window? Yes you could annotate the image in one note of course but no easy way I could find to then drag the image + annotations to another application.

Maybe I just don't know how to use it but that is just the strength of evernote and skitch, dead simple to use.

And skitch's annotation graphics are way nicer than the pixelated lines of onenote.