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Comment by tomschlick | Hacker News Reader

GOD DAMNIT NOT AGAIN!

I really do hope that they progress on the path they started instead of just acquiring mailbox for the talent. I know they said that they would but thats what we heard about Sparrow when they were bought by Google and the results sucked.

Good luck to everyone on the mailbox team, I love your product, please don't kill it.

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Did you not RTFA?

> " To be clear, Mailbox is not going away. The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen. Plus, imagine what cool things you could do if your Mailbox was connected to your Dropbox…"

I did read the article. However we have heard things like that before so I'm a bit wary that 6 months down the line DB isn't going to reconsider and kill the mailbox platform.

To be frank, it's really hard to believe that. They're being acquired, it isn't up to them anymore what happens to Mailbox. They signed the keys away to Drew Houston and the management team at Dropbox. Mailbox dies the moment Drew decides to kill it.

it's not going anywhere :)

(actually, come work on it: https://www.dropbox.com/jobs :))

What happens when Dropbox is acquired?

Dropbox is not getting acquired at this point ($5B+ val), they will go public.

man, I wish you guys were looking for a front-end developer! :D

Thanks! I've been enjoying Mailbox and am looking forward to seeing where y'all take it.

Slight aside...

Every time someone here responds when their name is mentioned, I think of this scene from "Annie Hall":

Alvy Singer: [the man behind him in line is talking loudly] What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it!

Alvy Singer: [to audience] Whaddya do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you?

Man in Theatre Line: Wait a minute, why can't I give my opinion? It's a free country!

Alvy Singer: He can give it... do you have to give it so loud? I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is, Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan!

Man in Theatre Line: Oh, really? Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called "TV, Media and Culture." So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!

Alvy Singer: Oh, do ya? Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me...

[pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]

Alvy Singer: come over here for a second... tell him!

Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!

Alvy Singer: Boy, if life were only like this!

(Sometimes it is here at Hacker News.)

Might as well share a link to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY?t=1m44s

By the way, I'm Woody Allen.

> watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY?t=1m44s

Hmm, I don't think that feature works like that. Try watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY#t=1m44s

Right you are. Weird, '?t=' is straight from the share tab on the YouTube page.

You can use # or & but not ? because that denotes the start of the query string.

I'm aware, I copy pasted the link from YouTube without looking at it. Probably a bug.

Now if you were to acquire 49% of Mailbox, I might believe that. But you must understand our doubts -- it feels like every single time a giant company acquires a useful little startup, the users eventually (and often sooner than later) get burned by it.

I'm open to your Mailbox acquisition being the exception to this trend, but I hope you understand my healthy skepticism.

Only in the startup world is Dropbox considered a "giant company."

Any company with hundreds of employees doing hundreds of millions in revenue is a "giant company".

As he said, "On(ly) in the startup world . . . " In the rest of the business world, that would be a decent mid-size company.

According to http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html, less than 1% of all businesses have more than 100 employees.

That doesn't really strike me as relevant? Many "businesses" are one or two people. Obviously "giant" is subjective but considering the largest companies are a few orders of magnitude bigger, I maintain what I said earlier: Only people who are immersed in the startup world consider Dropbox a "giant" company.

Despite having 100 employees, I wouldn't consider a chain of car washes with 20 locations and 5 people at each location to be a giant company.

Just to add some objectivity to the debate, in France, between 250 and 4999 employees a company is considered to be an "intermediate size company" (as long as the revenue is below 1.5 G€).

I don't know the American standard, but I'd be surprised if it isn't similar.

Source: http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=definitions...

This is reassuring/relieving.

Do you guys hire student interns? (Internationally - Canadian here)

This is what is said LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE TIME a company is acquired -- right along with "nothing is changing" and we'll "continue to operate with the vision that made us attractive to $acquirer in the first place"

Without a more clear rationale for why things won't change, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the product is at risk no matter what you say. The fact is, almost regardless of your intentions, your organization is going to put its thumbprint on the product.

What that means is unclear to external customers, and is also often unclear internally. If you do know what your plans are for it internally, you're still probably not going to say (though I'd love to be wrong).

Are you sure you're being LITERAL? I certainly remember some google acquisitions where it was stated straight up that the product would be discontinued in the initial press release.

http://xkcd.com/725/

I would like to introduce you to my friend, rhetorical hyperbole: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

It's not actually the case that every single acquisition in the world involves public platitudes about the continuance of management, the product, culture, office location, or lunch room perks.

Just a literally a metric ton of them.

Here's my chief gripe with using hyperbole and "literally" - If the word "literally" can be used non-literally, in a hyperbole or a metaphor, then it stops serving its purpose of marking a sentence as being literal. Then, when a sentence permits metaphoric and literal interpretations and you stick "literally" in it, nothing changes - it can still be either metaphoric or literal. The only solution I see is using "really literally" to mean that your sentence isn't metaphoric. Until people start using "really literally" in a metaphoric way. I virtually really literally actually in fact don't want to see that happen.

P.S. Use "practically" instead.

Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary already accept the use of "literally" to mean "virtually" in informal contexts. It's a losing battle.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/literally

- I'm quite upset about my favourite company being acquired and the risk of losing my app.

- hey look, Drew Houston disguised as Woody Allen

- what? Really? Or figuratively ?

- Both, but I will literally explode if another negative comment gets upvoted

... [Hamlet music plays as man lights cigar (UK only)]

Ahhhhh,HN.

I thought I would never have a chance to do this, but ironically:

http://xkcd.com/1108/

This is why I love HN. Straight from the boss.

I can't help but wonder how you're planning to make money with a product you plan to give away for free forever.

That is cool. I was very surprised to see so many legal positions open and very happy to find one of interest.

I just hope the boss will understand working on my start-up in my off time is important :)

No, they were pretty up front that Sparrow was a talent acquisition. They said that the product would continue to exist but they weren't going to update it and they were going to work on new projects at Google.

Talent acquired and squandered. Google has no decent mail app on iOS.

Pretty subjective. I find Gmail the most pleasant mail app to use on my iPad.

Agreed. I dumped the native mail client.

I like it, but its treatment of multiple mail accounts is crappy compared to sparrow (no unified inbox).

The Gmail app is slick, but extremely slow for me (on iPhone 5), as in "it's really annoying every time I use this app but I've moved away from native Mail and inertia is a hell of a thing." Other people I've talked to have had similar experiences. I'm excited to try Mailbox.

No unified inbox, etc.

you can't be serious, it's the beginnings of something good, but it has all kinds of problems, it fails to load email often (reporting "something has gone wrong.."), it routinely doesn't clear the red read indicator, it's laggy and sluggish. I am sure Google will make it kickass in the fullness of time, but for now, that's not what gmail/iOS is.

Unread indicator is always wrong, especially when you use multiple devices. Seems very I characteristic of google. It's been that way since they released the app.

Sparrow mentions should come with a trigger warning.

Money straight out the window. Ungh.

I'm still using Sparrow on my mac. It works great.

What was it, like $10? It still works to this day. Not a bad deal in my book even if they never update it again. It generally "just works."

The latest Gmail app is pretty nice.

I am shocked, SHOCKED, to find this as the top comment on Hacker News. /s

Sparrow did try some Dropbox integration (and it worked pretty reasonably), so I suspect Dropbox wants to really nail that this time around.

I haven't tried the app (no iPhone). Can someone explain to me why the Mailbox app is so great? From the intro video, I see a typical email app with a couple of extra gestures thrown in.

Like Sparrow, it seems it's more marketing and hype than a radical upgrade to the email experience.

I never even got to try it! I've been waiting in line for a week.

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