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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I'm really not sure what Dropbox could even do other than have gone full swing towards a serious pivot or a new expansion into a new domain, but if they were going to do that they should have done that some years ago, if their current CEO stepping down alarms some of their existing customers, it might not end well.

Dropbox is one of those companies that did something right, and its kind of sad seeing them in this weird limbo state. I hope they don't wind up crashing down hard before they can finally figure something new out. I think their time to shift from being a "single service / product" style company is long overdue. They don't need to shutdown anything they currently have, but it would be in their best interest to either acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering. I really do wonder why they had not done so sooner.

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Problem is most consumers and businesses would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each. The former is cheaper and often is easier to cross-integrate - I'd rather just use AWS or GCP storage options than ever touch drop box

> would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each

See Microsoft/Office 365. Aggressive bundling means one license gets you literally everything. Sure, it's all mediocre but it checks boxes and is largely "good enough." No reason to go out and buy slack, zoom, box.com/dropbox, 3rd party email gateways, 3rd party EDR, DLP, an MDM, etc. Microsoft will sell you whatever "checks boxes" product you need under one license and cheaper than buying separately.

And what do we do when Microsoft kills the competition and hikes up the prices? They already did some time ago by the way. [0]

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/1iwfgzn/with_the...

Throw our hands up and go "wow, never saw that coming!"

In reality, the bundling should have been addressed in the courts via antitrust a long time ago before we got to this point. OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint Storage, InTune, PowerAutomate, etc should all be separate, standalone products. They are heavily subsidized for market capture.

The EU tried, and now Microsoft has to keep an M365 tier without Teams, but it's only $8/user/month cheaper, conveniently cheaper than slack still and pre-integrated. Its malicious compliance.

Yea, Dropbox was a pretty good DSLR camera, problem was everybody has a mobile phone now…

I mean yeah, who would rather spend time at their job helping other users figure out how to include the right add-in for Dropbox to work with their various apps vs how Office integrates with OneDrive or Google Mail, Sheets, et al. integrates with Drive? Thus adding another layer of software to manage updates, etc. At some point, there is an opportunity cost to using siloed products, especially for something that's become relatively commoditized like cloud storage.

> acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering

I think they've been doing that, but it's tough to do it successfully. Often the best thing is to return money to the shareholders so they can look for higher returns elsewhere. I think the fact that they're still in business is kind of a miracle considering the competition.

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