#DROPBOX PAPER VS QUIP SOFTWARE#

In March, the company bought work-chat platform Zulip for an undisclosed sum. If Dropbox wanted to be anything other than a commoditized storage provider, it had to expand its offerings.ĭropbox went on an acquisition spree in 2014. In 2008, Dropbox’s core value proposition of using the cloud to make it effortless to sync and share files across computers was unique. If Dropbox hoped to continue its growth trajectory, it had to diversify beyond storage. This was especially true in the enterprise, which all three companies had been targeting aggressively.ĭropbox may have been ahead of Google and Microsoft by 50 million users or so, but this didn’t mean Dropbox could afford to take its foot off the gas. All three of the major players in the cloud-storage space were competing for the same users. However, aside from some relatively minor differences in storage allowances, there was very little to distinguish one service from another. Google Drive was nipping at Microsoft’s heels with 240 million users.

Microsoft’s OneDrive wasn’t far behind, with more than 250 million users. Google’s Goliathīy the time Dropbox acquired Hackpad in 2014, things were heating up in the cloud-storage space.ĭropbox had more than 300 million users worldwide. So, Dropbox did what many companies facing an emergent competitor do.ĭropbox went shopping. Dropbox couldn’t afford to sit back and allow Google to encroach on the market share it had built since 2008. However, even as a new player in the space, Google cast a long shadow. Predating Google Drive by four years, Dropbox had already achieved impressive growth in the cloud-storage space by the time Google decided to get in on the action. Google was making bold moves into the space with G Suite.

#DROPBOX PAPER VS QUIP SOFTWARE#

Why failing to integrate Paper into the new Dropbox was a missed opportunity and raised questions about the company’s vision for the productīy 2014, interest in and demand for collaborative cloud-based document software was intensifying.How increasing competition in the collaborative productivity space influenced Paper’s development.Why Dropbox had to diversify its core business beyond storage and why acquiring a document-editing tool was such a smart strategy.Here are the key strategic decisions that explain where Dropbox Paper is today: An opportunity the company wasted little time capitalizing upon. Even so, Dropbox sensed an opportunity with Hackpad. Google had already made bold steps in the document-editing space with Google Docs. Despite achieving strong user and revenue growth, Dropbox had to diversify beyond its core storage business if it hoped to continue growing. After that point, Hackpad became Dropbox Paper.ĭropbox’s acquisition of Hackpad and its rebrand to Dropbox Paper was a pivotal moment for the cloud-storage provider. Unlike most acquisitions, Hackpad lived on for three years after Dropbox bought it. Hackpad boasted several features that were unique at that time, such as syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and other programming and markup languages. It was even used to create the wiki for SXSW in 2012. As well as being a capable, lightweight document tool, Hackpad was also very popular as a wiki tool. Originally forked from the open-source Etherpad, Hackpad was a popular tool with a loyal following.

The second was collaborative document-editing tool Hackpad. The first was photo-sharing service Loom. Selecting the section would copy the heading as well as the contents of the collapsed heading.On April 17, 2014, cloud-storage provider Dropbox announced it had acquired two companies. Selecting just the text would cause the user to only paste the text. Very importantly, we found that there was a difference between selecting just the text of a collapsed heading and selecting the entire section the collapsed heading represented. Special paste behaviors usually occurred when a user copied and/or pasted over a collapsed heading or multiple collapsed headings. Meaning: if a user copied a text, the paste would mirror the clipboard contents exactly. Completing this exercise, we found that the majority of the cases resulted in pure copy and paste behavior. To address this, I created a matrix to illustrate the behaviors which I considered to be most intuitive and useful. what content is selected when a user pastes the clipboard content). It is doubley complicated when you consider the paste selection as well (i.e. The distinct copy questions only comprised of half of the factors in these copy/paste behaviors.

Dropbox paper vs quip