This post on Evernote caught my attention last week — Evernote as the first dead unicorn. Why? They got big then the really big players came to town (OneNote from MSFT, Keep from Google, Notes from Apple) while the market kept moving (chat, filesharing, project tools like Slack, Dropbox, Trello).
Today a piece on Dropbox.
There is a common theme — whether it was Microsoft Is Dead in 2007 or Evernote and Dropbox in 2015.
–> Direct competition
–> Changing environment of needs
–> Technologies that enable these
So Microsoft was dead because
- Google was kicking ass
- Web was where people worked
- Web was capable of being software (AJAX, broadband)
- Apple made a great computer OS
More recently some trends probably killed someone (Google Search?)
- Mobile phones/apps can do whatever software or web could do
- Tons more people online, more trust online
- Mobile networks, capacity, speed, plus smartphone processors, size, batteries plus OSes