Why Mailbox died

But Slack’s struggle to succeed as an independent company sadly mirrors that of many one-time innovators in enterprise productivity. Mailbox died and Acompli sold to Microsoft, where it became the mobile Outlook app. Evernote is a pale shadow of its former self. Of that early cohort, only Box and Dropbox became — and still remain — public companies... See more

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.

To me, the clearest example is Dropbox. I’ve used Dropbox since the earliest days, and I love it. Nothing has ever come close to providing the speed, reliability, and cross-platform compatibility for file synching of Dropbox. Even though I technically get iCloud File Storage “for free” as part of some broader package, I still pay for Dropbox with a... See more