![]() ![]() However, in hindsight, Dropbox’s many acquisitions in 2014 all helped set the stage for what became Dropbox Paper. It may have appeared that Dropbox was buying companies left and right with little clear direction in mind. But Hackpad felt like a true collaboration tool, whereas Google Docs felt like an online word processor. Google Docs may have offered more bells and whistles. One of the most popular aspects of Hackpad was the tool’s simplicity. Some members of the open-source community were upset that Kofman and Graveley had forked an open-source project to develop proprietary software. Hackpad boasted several forward-thinking features that would later become standardized across the collaborative productivity space, such as Hackpad’s use of the shortcut to tag other users and create new documents. Hackpad was forked from the open-source Etherpad. Launched in 2011, Hackpad was developed by Igor Kofman and Alex Graveley. And in April 2014, Dropbox acquired Hackpad. Next, Dropbox acquired photo-sharing service Loom just days after announcing Carousel, Dropbox’s Flickr-like photo-storage service. Around two weeks later, Dropbox announced it had acquired German social-reading service Readmill for approximately $8 million. ![]() In March, the company bought work-chat platform Zulip for an undisclosed sum. If Dropbox wanted to be anything other than a commoditized storage provider, it had to expand its offerings.ĭropbox went on an acquisition spree in 2014. ![]() In 2008, Dropbox’s core value proposition of using the cloud to make it effortless to sync and share files across computers was unique. If Dropbox hoped to continue its growth trajectory, it had to diversify beyond storage. This was especially true in the enterprise, which all three companies had been targeting aggressively.ĭropbox may have been ahead of Google and Microsoft by 50 million users or so, but this didn’t mean Dropbox could afford to take its foot off the gas. All three of the major players in the cloud-storage space were competing for the same users. However, aside from some relatively minor differences in storage allowances, there was very little to distinguish one service from another. ![]() Google Drive was nipping at Microsoft’s heels with 240 million users. Microsoft’s OneDrive wasn’t far behind, with more than 250 million users. Google’s Goliathīy the time Dropbox acquired Hackpad in 2014, things were heating up in the cloud-storage space.ĭropbox had more than 300 million users worldwide. So, Dropbox did what many companies facing an emergent competitor do.ĭropbox went shopping. Dropbox couldn’t afford to sit back and allow Google to encroach on the market share it had built since 2008. However, even as a new player in the space, Google cast a long shadow. Predating Google Drive by four years, Dropbox had already achieved impressive growth in the cloud-storage space by the time Google decided to get in on the action. Google was making bold moves into the space with G Suite.
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