My understanding is DropBox was trying to transition from sync and share to being a multi-product document-centric company (look at acquisitions like HelloSign).
One possibility is they staffed up a bunch of projects on bets that ultimately didn’t turn into viable products, and are now pulling the plug.
More like the cloud sync functions out of the box on Google, Microsoft and Apple products caught up in features and already got good enough for the customer base of these to not bother paying extra for Dropbox no matter how much better they would have been. See Evernote.
It's difficult to go against Apple, Google and Microsoft when they're vertically integrated and can squeeze you on all sides offering an OS, email, browser, cloud sync, document editing, etc with seamless integration between them, while you're just a cloud sync service on their OS. You don't have any moat, while they do. There's no way you can compete with them from that position unless the government were to break up their vertical integration for anti-competitive practices.
I think that is why Dropbox has been trying to diversify their offerings. They know as well as the rest of us do that cloud storage that's only cloud storage and not much else will have serious trouble competing with cloud storage that you also need to have to work conveniently with Google Docs, or Office 365, or whatever.
But, as parent poster pointed out, taking on that new work requires hiring people to do it. But that's expensive, and those new products need to start generating revenue quickly in order to cover the increased payroll costs.
>For me, Dropbox's moat and USP is that they make all of their money from file storage, giving me some confidence that they'll ensure it keeps working.
To me that's now become a red flag with these companies. Not speaking of Dropbox in particular but all these start-ups from the past that offered a free new innovative product/service for Android/iOS went to shit soon after Appel and Google copied and integrate similar functionality into the OS out of the box, leading to investor money drying up and the company suddenly paywalling and gouging existing users to make money to survive. Look at Evernote, LastPasss, Cerberus, etc. but also Amazon, Netflix, etc, enshitification galore.
Google and Apple are less likely to do that since they already make more money than God and tend not to want to fuck up their reputation just to squeeze a few more bucks from their users.
That's why I don't trust these small app companies anymore, since they'll get squeezed out by Apple, Microsoft and Google, and enshitification will ensure. The app is good in the beginning for a few years when VC money is abundant and their goal is user growth at any cost, but after that suddenly once you're locked in, you get paywalled, as the company tries to squeeze more money from you so VCs can get their money back. Rinse and repeat. So no thanks, I got burned a few times already.
The problem is that it’s unclear consumers actually ever wanted Dropbox to become any more than a sync and share company, or to deal with the resultant complexity that that will bring to what has been a beautifully simple product. But they had to do that to justify Sky-high valuations.
One possibility is they staffed up a bunch of projects on bets that ultimately didn’t turn into viable products, and are now pulling the plug.