Dropbox calls it quits for two major products: Carousel, Mailbox
Dropbox is shuttering products from two of its most prominent releases, hinting at a continued focus on enterprise services over those for consumers.
The San Francisco-based business announced on Monday that it would be shutting down photo sharing app Carousel and Mailbox, an attempt at revamping the traditional email inbox.
Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi apologized to loyal users in a blog post, explaining Dropbox has "increased our team's focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together."
The private company's chief executive and technology officers added, without specification, that certain features from Mailbox will be integrated into the new Paper document management app while others in Carousel will be brought over to the main Dropbox app.
"With both, we aspired to extend the simplicity of Dropbox to other parts of our users' lives," wrote Houston and Ferdowsi.
Dropbox acquired Mailbox first in 2013 as the cloud storage provider began growing out its mobile portfolio.
It launched Carousel in 2014, although the online photo sharing space has become increasingly crowded with revamps of comparable services at Google and Yahoo not to mention Facebook and Instagram.
Nevertheless, under speculation that it is looking to appease Wall Street ahead of an IPO, Dropbox has made its enterprise ambitions and commitment clear over the last year.
In November, Houston didn't hold back from dishing barbs about cloud competitor Box, boasting Dropbox Business has attracted approximately 150,000 business users to date.
Furthermore, Houston touted Dropbox added 50,000 paying business customers in the last 10 months alone, asserting Box has only added that amount of customers in its entire lifetime.
Dropbox's vice president of product Todd Jackson cited on the same stage that there have been 2.8 billion connections on the platform, including an average of 100,000 new shared folders and links every hour.
After a few weeks in secretive, invite-only mode, Dropbox also removed the shroud from Paper, which Jackson described as a "brand new way for working together but ties back to existing tools."
Although details are still at a minimum, Paper initially looks like Dropbox's answer to Box Notes, Google Docs, Evernote and even communications tool Slack. (It does not, however, resemble or look to counter Facebook's identically-named Paper app, which targeted digital news readers like Flipboard and LinkedIn-owned Pulse.)
Paper is promised to become available to all Dropbox users within the next year, but Dropbox Business users can either apply for invites on their own or speak with respective IT managers.
Finally, Dropbox Enterprise debuted as an even more powerful cloud platform tier with additional capabilities designed to scale, such as domain management, visual insights into how people are collaborating on the platform, support for integration with existing IT systems and ongoing user support.
Houston described Dropbox Enterprise as "our most powerful set of tools for our largest customers, ever."
Mailbox with shut down on February 26th, 2016, followed by Carousel on March 31st, 2016.