IIRC, back in the early 1900's, it was commonly known that tech companies should pay higher dividends than longstanding blue chip companies. Why? Because they were much more likely to have short lifespans. The newer the company, the more active the sector, the more turnover in the sector, the more likely the company will get replaced by something else. Somehow people seem to have forgotten this lesson. We now have tech companies like Sun or Groupon that go their entire lifecyle without paying out profits to investors.

That said, the strategy of not paying out profits makes sense for the investors and the founders. The founders will make more money by talking up how much long-term potential the company has, how it is going to be the next 100-year company. Then when they get the $10 billion valuation, the founder can take some money off the table. That is probably a better deal for the founder than getting a $1 billion valuation and just paying out dividends.

The question is, who will end up holding the bag. As much as I loved Dropbox when it came out, I switched off of it recently. I'm not sure what the future is for it in five, ten years. If you are techie, you want something with end-to-end encryption. If you are a normal user, you'll just go with whatever is bundled with your operating system or bundled with applications you use (iCloud, one drive, google drive).

> The question is, who will end up holding the bag.

The founders and employees (mostly the employees), it seems like. The VCs and growth capital funds have downside protection, and the public markets are no longer receptive to such blatantly unfavorable business models.

TFA seems to come close to arguing that certain businesses should plan to provide value, then fold within a few years. The idea had never occurred to me. It seems to have some difficult implications. If you're the founder of a business and your mission statement involves having "failed" within five years, do you tell your employees that? Or do you pretend to want permanent growth and let them buy houses close to work?

Dropbox and Evernote are more than five-year-old and I don't think they're shutting their products down any time soon. So it doesn't apply here. Large companies also pivot (Apple, HP, Intel, Motorola...), so some will ride more than one wave.

Anyway, where there is demand, there should be supply, and conversely. The car manufacturing market boomed a couple of times. Ditto for bicycles. Home appliances as well. The PC market peaked in the 2000's, now there is no point in keeping supplying these clunky metal boxes. Today the mobile apps market is very saturated, only 7 years after the App Store launched. Once customers buy a product, they won't be on the market for some time, until the product gets amortized or dies, a big innovation occurs, or what have you. When 80% of customers already bought the product, the market is mature and concentration occurs, that's always been the case. Maybe innovation getting faster is what is happening, so companies will be more shortlived. But the pace is bound by the customer's income, so the bright side is there is a feedback loop.

I think an honest founder should at least try to find employees that understand the risks and pay them accordingly. Obviously, there will be many bad players, but prospective employees will also get wiser from the Webvans, Zyngas and Groupons.

Well, if you're planning to provide value for only 5 years, then it's not a failure to shut your doors after 5 years. One example of this is the technology consulting firms that help companies maintain and transition off old technology such as Token Ring networks, FORTRAN, Y2K, etc. The companies know they won't be able to do it forever, but they don't have to do it forever.

People have been saying this about Dropbox since iCloud came out, but what has changed? Have usage statistics changed? Have Google Drive and One Drive come close in feature set? Has Office dropped support for them?

I mean the linked article suggests that this is the case without ever showing us the bases for the assumptions. As far as I know, if we are looking at major players in the field, iCloud should worry the most, since it is something that nobody uses.

I think many people see the Box performance: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/box/interactive-chart?timeframe... and they see how challenging it is for Box to hold its 1+ billion valuation in the public markets, and look at the $1.1B DropBox has raised, and think "hmm, its getting close to being unable to even meet liquidation preferences."

I know Box and DropBox are different, but for a lot of people they have the word "box" in their name, they provide cloud storage, and that is the extent of their understanding of the offerings.

So the question is, what will be the 2016 news from DropBox? And yes, there are doubters who have put them in the deadpool.

I am guessing there real problem is that they don't have any productivity suite attached to their cloud service. Google has Google Docs(which is why I went with it over Dropbox for my small business), which is the best free Office Competitor, and OneDrive has all the might of MS Office.

I think they just allowed commenting and editing Word docs through their webapps recently.

Evernote has the note market cornered. Google Keep looks like yet another silly google experiment that they might one day pull the plug on (like Reader :-( ), and Apple Notes, like icloud, only really works on Apple devices. OneNote just got free, and has got some great features and comes with Windows 10, but I don't think most non-Office365 subscribers even know it exists.

What's the problem with evernote, I was not aware it is dying. Been happily using it for years, and it does everything I need. Admittedly I just need it for usually text only storage of notes and todo stuff.

After reading this article I tested OneNote (on windows desktop). It seems to have lots of features but seemed difficult to use for plain text editing. You could move the text boxes around and paint in the note etc but that was just annoying for my use case.

And the screen capture tool just grabs a portion of the screen? No nice annotation of the image like in skitch? And easy drag and drop of the annotated image into another program like a chat window? Yes you could annotate the image in one note of course but no easy way I could find to then drag the image + annotations to another application.

Maybe I just don't know how to use it but that is just the strength of evernote and skitch, dead simple to use.

And skitch's annotation graphics are way nicer than the pixelated lines of onenote.

I too am a happy Evernote user, for text-only note-taking. Prior to Evernote, I used Xnippet, a mac-app which wasn't well supported. Evernote is a big part of my work flow, and I'd hate to see it go away. I find all the other features (web-clipping, image-editing) superfluous, and it feels like they are concentrating too much on the fluff features. Every time there is an update, it feels like they are adding more features I don't need.

One thing though about Evernote I wonder. Where are they spending all of their hundreds on millions of dollars? I haven't noticed the software changing basically at all during my using it... Well don't fix it if it isn't broken...