Saved by sari
5 lessons from Mailbox’s shut-down
The most common criticism lobbed at me:
Why don’t you build a durable app? Why have your products only been flashes in the pan?
Building a retentive social product is a black swan event: it is extraordinarily rare to create the next Facebook and displace a daily communication tool. There is no repeatable... See more
Nikita Bierx.comMailbox had multiple causes of death. Most people don’t download email apps; those who do don’t want to pay for them. The only path forward for an email app is acquisition, and the fate of most acquired apps is death. Other email apps copied Mailbox’s best features; aside from a somewhat dubious automatic archiving feature, Mailbox stopped building... See more
The Verge • Why Mailbox died
Email apps are good at being better. They've invented or popularized some of the most innovative ideas in software—even if they can’t always find a business model to match. And those features are what live on.
Matthew Guay • Email is where new software features get invented.
Somehow, today’s best-in-class email apps are hybrids, combinations of the best ideas every other email app brought before. It’s hard to imagine email without web apps, limitless storage, notifications, archive search, and a bit of over-the-top self-promotion. Each feature, at one time, was enough to launch a new email app, to convince us all to... See more