Dropbox Gets Back to Basics, Drops Email and Photo Services

Dropbox announced today that it is shuttering its email and photo services in order to focus on its core cloud storage business.

This is an excellent idea, as email and photo management is already properly handled by numerous other services.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox,” Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowski wrote in a post to the Dropox corporate blog. “It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love. But ultimately, we think this increased focus will help us create even better experiences for you in the months and years to come.”

Both Carousel (for photos) and Mailbox (email) were designed for consumers. But with Dropbox seeing its biggest success with businesses—e.g. those willing to actually pay for its services—the firm has rightfully decided to give them higher priority. And Carousel and Mailbox just weren’t making inroads against more popular and sophisticated solutions, especially from Google.

On that note, Mailbox will shut down on Feb. 26, 2016. But Carousel won’t shut down until March 31, 2016, because Dropbox wants some extra time to roll some of its unique photo functionality into the core Dropbox product.

“We’ll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live—in the Dropbox app,” the two co-founders explain. “We’ll also be using what we’ve learned from Mailbox to build new ways to communicate and collaborate on Dropbox (you can see early signs of this focus with Paper).”

Speaking of which, it is perhaps notable that Dropbox Paper, a productivity solution that centers around document creation, collaboration, and sharing, is not on the chopping block. I assume that’s because Paper could have some appeal to businesses.

Anyway. This was the right move: Dropbox does cloud storage right and it should absolutely focus on its strengths.