Dropbox Acquires Command E

First, it uses the Mac command vs the windows control. That’s funny to go with the smaller market share for your name.

I didn’t know what this command does so I checked and it ejects on Mac. Not used nowadays so can be overloaded.

That being said, I like the idea of local search and really miss Google desktop. I find both windows and Mac search slow and inaccurate and would like to see proper search integrated into the OS. Proper in that it finds what I’m looking for- a super grep- and that it doesn’t eat my cpu (windows stupid indexing service frequently chews along at 100% on a cpu even though nothing has changed).

This is a good fit for Dropbox as at least they can index everything in the cloud and apply that index to searching on my local machine.

I still use command+space to open all apps and common docs.

I’m still pissed that they won’t support Apple silicon after a year of it being on the market. All that beautiful battery life in those new MacBooks just shot to pieces because this supposedly large public tech company can’t bother themselves to update their app.

Anyway, I worked on a product like this a few years back. It’s a really challenging problem, mainly because the APIs you need to use are severely limiting at scale. My team speculated that it would take an acquisition of this kind to make it viable. Not for funding/runway per se (although that helps), but for the potential for integration deals with more generous (ie not as severely rate limited) access and API designs intended to support the use case.

Notwithstanding Dropbox’s reputation, I’m hopeful to see how this goes if it does become available again with the same general set of features.