Hacker News Reader

Comment by _pius | Hacker News Reader

This is a very clever move by Dropbox.

Indeed.

My outsider view: they are going to build a full-fledged productivity suite. They have the storage, versioning, you can view files/docs and now you have an email client. The "obvious" next move would be getting into the online document editing space. But then, this is me just speculating from the sidelines.

I've actually been somewhat hoping Dropbox would venture into email. Their service has been reliable for me for years, and it'd be nice to have a decent Gmail competitor at last.

They have to a lot to prove; Dropbox's patchy security record is now coupled with Mailbox's completely unproven security.

Mailbox uses Google's Gmail OAuth...

why? do you see huge overlap between file syncing/storage and mobile email?

I don't know about "very clever", but if you look at Dropbox as moving towards an iCloud-like service where its more than just data, it make sense. But it sounds a lot like a talent acquisition that comes with a nice mail app that probably has some similar technical challenges to the things Dropbox already does well. Seems like a good way to kickstart a Dropbox email platform.

If you look at their foray into photos and the way they talk about their service now, Dropbox is becoming a lifestyle brand focused on your personal data.

Meanwhile, the mobile e-mail client that the Mailbox team built is so cool that it convinced about a million people to let Mailbox store a full copy of their e-mail archive ... in 10 weeks.

That kind of strategic value means it's smart for them to swoop the product and team up RIGHT NOW, even if they had to pay a premium to do it.

I think that Dropbox wants to be the company on the internet where your stuff "is" and email is probably part of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com