Dropbox will be shutting down its operation for email client Mailbox and photo management app Carousel.
The file hosting service is refocusing its brand towards business customers. It plans to direct its effort on core product and developing other new productivity tools. Primarily, it will concentrate on collaboration in the workplace, with an eye on paying subscribers instead of the ones who still use the limited and free storage tier. It will pay more attention to enterprise users, who can use Dropbox’s cross-platform syncing capability for team projects.
San Francisco-based company will focus on its new Google Docs-style document editing and collaboration service Paper, which may gain some of the functionality of Mailbox, Wired reported.
Dropbox has been acquiring various companies over the past few years. It includes companies such as Slack competitor Zulip and the makers of note-taking app Hackpad. Apparently, the company has reassigned the teams behind those products to work on features like chat and collaborative text editing features of Paper.
Also, Dropbox has actually acquired companies like Audiogalaxy and Readmill exclusively for their employees rather than their products, a practice known as “acqui-hiring.”
The San Francisco-based company spent around $100 million for Mailbox in 2013 and launched Carousel the following year, hoping to give users better ways to be more productive, and help them simplify email and better organize their photos.
Mailbox will close on Feb. 26, 2016, and Carousel will shut down on March 31. Why the two are not closing down on the same day? Dropbox will give existing Carousel users a way to move conversations and content from existing shared albums into Dropbox, according to Gizmodo. In addition, it will give time for users to migrate their photos.