…One of the remarkable features of startup minimalism is its flexibility. My favourite quote from her piece is the following: You’ll find the information you need in seconds, and what a pleasing few seconds they will be. The abundance of white space around words, photos, and playful doodles exudes a friendly calm. Its goal is noise reduction, accomplished by banishing gradients, funky fonts, and drop shadows, and by relegating all-caps to little “BUY” buttons. Sans-serif lettering, neatly presented in black, white, and ultra-flat colors. It has as much in common Dropbox’s refocused brand as it does with what Eliza Brooke of Racked describes “Startup minimalism”, which is detailed here: It’s less direct in it’s focus on artists and creative professionals, but it strikes the same chord. It’s less severe than Dropbox’s drastic new aesthetic, but it evokes similar feelings. Within a few weeks of the launch of Dropbox’s new brand, Ebay brought out their own new look. And in 2017, it rebranded from a file-sharing services for “knowledge workers” to one for “creative workers”. Dropbox shut down Carousel and Mailbox, turning away from its once hopeful suit of products back towards its singular marquee product.

However the tide turned as Google and Microsoft drastically undercut their pricing, and the stalwart software giants were able to retain their foothold on the productivity market.

Dropbox quickly grew, launching team features, acquiring like-minded companies that gave the appearance that they were on the path to launch a suite of products that would usurp the crown of productivity from Microsoft and Google in the name of smart, cloud-based storage. Every major platform holder followed suit, making file-syncing a marquee feature of their upcoming product launches, appearing as though caught in headlights by this modest little product. The best stories in technology start like this. When they launched, they introduced a new type of technology to the public that changed the way they thought about how they use computers. It looked like Dropbox was going to be the next big thing. 10 October 2017 The New Alternative Written by Sam Johnstone

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