

Dropbox’s main advantage is in its 400 million registered users, but it's unclear how or when those users will convert to using Paper. It's hard to see how Paper will overcome long-established competitors like Quip, Evernote, Google for Work, and others.

The only difference is Quip runs a much smaller team (less than 20 engineers from what we hear) and already has “millions of users in over 30,000 companies,” as Quip CEO Bret Taylor told us. Quip offers similar features as Paper, including document creation and collaboration, as well as real-time commenting and editing. The timing of the announcement coincidentally falls on the same day as Quip’s big $30 million round of funding. There are also some interesting features, like automatic embedding of files with a Dropbox URL, file previews within the document, and a more robust search functionality. The product was in closed beta so we couldn't test it, and Dropbox hasn't posted any public information on it.īut from what we can tell, Paper seems like a word processing app that lets users create, edit, and collaborate on documents. If you go to the Notes page today, you see an invitation to sign up for Paper. Dropbox told Wired that Paper’s expanding from “a few thousand people to a few thousand teams” with today’s beta roll out. According to Wired, the app is an extension of its note-taking app called Notes, which also rolled out in beta just 6 months ago.
