I was at the event in 2013 when Dropbox announced a set of sync and datastore APIs that to me just didn't make sense. They had a money-making business doing file storage on a world scale. And an API that let you build incredible apps on that capability. It made so much sense to focus, but here they were, spreading out.

Eventually good sense caught up, and they backed off the diversification, and re-focused on their main service. Good move. Developers need to think these things through when new APIs are announced. Does this seem core to their business? If not, be real careful about investing.

Meanwhile Couchbase says "We got this" and aggressively courts the Dropbox devs who built on the now-deprecated APIs.

It's interesting, to say the least! :-)