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.)

> They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft

Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.

I don't see the need to become bloated like slack and a one size fits all application. They do a great job with the product they have. Is there anything wrong with just being what you are? Why does the lack of a second act need to be a bad thing if your first product is great and still extremely valuable?

I would also if anything put Zoom in with Dropbox, they have a product that is by far the most enjoyable to use in that space, but any other offshoot is not worth it.