I don't see much long-term growth for Dropbox in its current state. Right now, they're a stopgap feature. They've been successful so far because they fill a niche, but the niche that they fill is temporary. Old computing is having your files on your computer and accessing them with local applications. New computing is having your files in the cloud and accessing them from applications in the cloud. In a fully cloud-hosted architecture, there is no need for dropbox. Dropbox is a halfway point in getting us into the cloud, and as more and more apps move into the cloud they will become more and more unnecessary.
While Dropbox is a great service (I can't imagine life without it!), it's a bit delusional to think it could be the next Google or Apple. As Steve Jobs himself said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a company.
"Drew Houston, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Dropbox, last fall pocketed $250 million from seven of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms."<p>Well, that's quite the accusation.
"Dropbox engineers even hacked their way into Apple's file system to make the Dropbox icon appear on users' menu bars, a bold feat that blew away Apple's cloud team and caught the attention of none other than Jobs."<p>I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?
My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell:<p>I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
Dropbox needs to pull an "Amazon" and pivot like they did with AWS, and Apple did with the iPod. Storage is not going to take them there. Growth is limited and someone can easily come along and replace them. They need a secondary source of income.
The way the Dropbox execs have been talking themselves up in the press over the last few months just makes me think that they're angling to raise the price on an acquisition.<p>Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are:<p>* compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way.
* compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.
I'm late to the thread, but I'd like to share how I use dropbox and share some of my issues.<p>I have been a long time user, and recently I joined a company which is 100% virtual. We are all consultants who work from our homes - but travel regularly to client sites.<p>While we are working from our homes - we collaborate and work on the docs needed for our client visits.<p>Everyone has their own account, and quickly a couple gigs would fill up, due to what i feel is poor logic on dropbox's part, and it is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue.<p>The issue is that we have ~10 people all sharing project folders. But with the free account, this means we get a lot of duplicated consumption.<p>If 3 people have 2GB space, and they each share .5GB with eachother, then that .5GB is taking up .5GB from everyones account.<p>This sucks.<p>Personally, I have a paid 50GB account, and I created a shared public folder. Everyone on my team joined the public folder - which is always 50GB to ME - but to them it consumes THEIR space - and soon their syncing stops because the folder I made is larger than their box.<p>This is retarded, I think that if they visit MY folder, this should not count against THEIR storage - especially when I am paying for it.<p>I do undestand the complexities of this - but then the problem is that the cost to fix this issue is that everyone needs to upgrade their account.<p>I have looked at the team offering, but then that is too expensive.<p>I think what is best - is to have one corporate DB account, and have everyone login with that userID - and pay for the upgraded space for that one account.<p>With this said, based on the current design of dropbox and the fact that it is simply a feature - there is no way this company will be the next Apple, let alone google. Unless Drew is referring to emulating their culture, or maybe brand recognition. certainly he cant be talking about product diversity....<p>Anyway - I love dropbox, and am happy to pay for it, but as it currently stands, is a half-feature.<p>I dont even know what kind of use-case model for teams such as mine they are looking at. Perhaps I should send them an email.
Was a huge fan of Dropbox until I went out on a limb to convince my boss to move from internal servers to a team account.<p>The customer service was not just bad, but noticeably absent, and the product is overpriced and relatively shallow at an enterprise level.<p>Still pay for a personal 50gb account, but canceled the team account...well we will as soon as they actually return my call.
I know it would be relatively small but can anyone wager a guess as to how much each of the 2gb freemium packages costs Dropbox? At 50 million users it has to add up--I've always wondered about Dropbox's conversion rate (free to pay) but it must be relatively high to support the current monetary system.
>He'd strap on headphones to block out everything but the endorphin rush as he cranked code late into the night on a new service that instantly syncs all of your files on all of your devices.<p><i>sigh</i> Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?