"Dropbox, which is increasingly competing with Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage,"<p>This implicitly (if not explicitly) reverses the actuality, which is really:<p>"Dropbox, which is increasingly facing competition from Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage,"<p>They do a better job later on with,
"Those features come at a time large rivals like Microsoft and Amazon Inc are muscling into cloud-storage, a strategic weapon in an era of widespread mobile computing."
Every time I see Dropbox on the front page of HN I think about this[1] all over again…<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863</a>
The problem I see is dropbox as a service becoming a commodity as competition in the sector ramps up. Apple is making a big push on cloud with airdrop and icloud, Tencent is offering 10tb storage.<p>It's heating up and it's gonna be hard to maintain a viable USP.
"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million."<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303985504579206763922615986-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwOTExNDkyWj" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...</a>
Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%?<p>I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.
Recently, more of my software has added Dropbox as an option for synchronizing its data between devices - but I'm hesitant to do so. It seems like Dropbox lacks the necessary access-control granularity. If your FTP client, and a chat program, and a password manager all decide they need read/write access to your dropbox, doesn't that open up attack-vectors across completely unrelated applications and services in ways that previously may have been isolated and sandboxed?
I'm curious to know what the plans are to keep driving revenue. Obviously very impressive numbers, but it looks like YoY top line growth looks slow: less than 100% [$116->$200M+]. It leaves one scratching their head as to how Dropbox gets to something like $1B/year under its current business model and later justify something like a 20B public market cap. That would take a something billion users with roughly the same conversion rate. They would need the same base of users as Facebook, but with a huge percentage of them actually paying money, while facing intense competition by players who demonstrate they are willing to lose billions of dollars a year to compete in new markets.<p>One obvious answer is Dropbox for businesses, but it remains to be seen how well they actually compete in that space. Fined tunes permissions/controls. Integrations. Enterprisey things. They all become more necessary at higher price points. I wonder if Box is in a position to improve their existing sync client faster than Dropbox is to add all those features/controls yet keep their core simplicity.
Seems a bit like setting an anchor for a buyout. I have a feeling a 4 billion offer by Google/MS/Amazon would be accepted very quickly even if it was very little cash/all stock.<p>Maybe my sense is very wrong but it seems like a decent time to get bought out timing wise.
During the Dublin Web Summit (two weeks ago) Drew Heuston stated that Dropbox hadn't touched the previous funds they had raised. I wonder why the need to raise the money at this point?