And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of enterprise execution.

(Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)

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abhiyerra 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.

The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.

	▲	price 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service. Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)