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Comment by tidepod12 | Hacker News Reader

I have a couple connections on LinkedIn that work at Dropbox, and through them I have noticed a decent amount (certainly more than usual) of somewhat-high-up individuals leaving Dropbox in the past couple weeks. Might just be completely coincidental, but I wonder if they had advance notice (or perhaps just saw the writing on the wall)?

Also anecdotal and total speculation, I interviewed at Dropbox a couple years ago and they were making a big push into b2b Dropbox, particularly with Paper, but I've yet to really hear about them successfully breaking into that space (have never met or even heard of a company using Paper in the wild). Olivia (the COO that's also leaving) used to head up b2b functions at Google before joining Dropbox. I wonder if these layoffs are also from the b2b teams and perhaps Dropbox is pulling back from (or at least rethinking) those efforts?

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We used Paper for awhile, but eventually didn't want to keep paying for both that and G suite (which we do anyway for mail). Personally, though, I think Paper is excellent. It's the first document-authoring tool I've spent much time with that understands that most of what we write will be consumed on (variably-sized) screens rather than in print, and yet is still accessible to less-technical folks. My sense, though, from our experience, was that it's pretty polarizing, and some people strongly prefer something more like Word.

It has seemed to me for a while that they need to more fully compete with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and Microsoft Office 365. A big missing piece of that is email, as you said. They even acquired an email startup called Mailbox, but they killed it instead of adding an email service [1]. Every company needs email, and the most popular email services include Dropbox and Paper like products.

Slack is available as a standalone offering and is very popular, so a Slack clone may not be required. For everything else, limiting your customers to those already paying for duplicate services raises the bar. Your service needs to be enough better that it is worth paying for it twice.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...

Agreed. We have Office 365 because it was cheaper than hosted Exchange which we were using before. Dropbox needed email/collaboration tools (imagine Teams but years ago) - not dependencies on software that includes the same functionality.

I use Paper and have to say I quite like it - I started using it at my current job where it seemed common and hadn’t heard of it before. The main thing I like it for is quickly putting together group TODOs - you can create checkboxes with [] and can tag people’s names to items and add deadlines. That combined with some indentation is exactly the level of structure I like to organize such things. I’m surprised to find out here that it seems so unpopular.

My startup also uses Paper (and we love/have loved it) but are migrating more and more to Confluence recently. I still use Paper for quick brainstorming/organizing for smaller groups and projects, though. The collaborative editing and always-on edit mode make it great for documents in rapid flux, whereas Confluence is better for long-lived strategy and documentation related items.

I have some friends there who have been job hunting recently, I think a lot of people could see the writing on the wall.

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