Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO

A major difference between between this tech boom and the dot com boom of the 90s is the general public had a real shot at investing in serious growth potential during the dot com boom. Now most of the growth is experienced under private ownership, then the grossly overvalued company is pawned off for the public to invest in. VCs have figured out how to extract most of the exciting gains.

They&#x27;ve come a long way from their Show HN 10 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8863</a><p>From a demo hacked together over a few months (written in Python, IIRC) and posted on HN to an IPO. Pretty cool, honestly.

I used Dropbox for a few years, but ultimately switched to another big-name company service. Consumers now have great options available from all the big-name companies: Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating.<p>Given this, I think it&#x27;s reasonable to ask: what&#x27;s their value proposition in 2017? I hadn&#x27;t been following them for a few years, but looking at their landing and pricing page, it&#x27;s clear they&#x27;re transitioning away from being a consumer product and focusing on enterprise customers. For those of you that are paying for their consumer offering, I&#x27;d be very interested in reading about why you&#x27;ve chosen to stick with em instead of migrating to another service.

As I expected - it looks like no-one remembers the &quot;Drop Dropbox&quot; boycott campaign that came right on the heels of Brendan Eich&#x27;s ouster at Mozilla. I strongly believe had Mozilla&#x27;s board showed him the same robust support Dropbox showed Condoleezza Rice, Mozilla would be in a much better place today.

I was a pretty early user of Dropbox back when it was featured on this site. As much as I&#x27;m loathe to admit it since I don&#x27;t like the consolidation of huge tech companies, I&#x27;ve pretty much completely abandoned them for Google offerings.<p>Google drive is just there, whether I wanted it or not. And that goes for anyone who&#x27;s signed up for Gmail or YouTube (i.e. collectively 40% of the people I know). It&#x27;s not <i>quite</i> as nice as Dropbox, but it&#x27;s right there in that weird 9-squared popup menu every time I check my email.<p>Kudos to Dropbox for having made it to this point, but how long can they survive against free + connected to your email + everything you save on an Android? What if chromebooks get more popular? I wouldn&#x27;t short them, but it&#x27;s really hard to see a big win for them given the market dynamics.

I love Dropbox, but where&#x27;s the growth potential? They do an amazing job of storage and syncing, and as a user I&#x27;d love for them to focus on that.<p>Can they use their early success in sync to bootstrap other products? &quot;Evernote&quot; by Dropbox?<p>EDIT&gt; This is an honest question, and I&#x27;d appreciate informative replies.

The only comment I will say about Dropbox is the price, I wish they would do a 100GB tier or something for £1.99 a month.<p>I really cannot justify paying £7.99 a month for 1TB of storage, especially when I&#x27;ll most likely use less than 10% of that space

Dropbox is like twitter. An over-engineered solution for a very narrowed use case. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, the product works very well. I actually use it everyday, but from an investor&#x2F;growth perspective, I fall back into what Jobs said - &quot;it&#x27;s just a feature&quot;.

My office got a call on a great deal for a renewal on our subscription and our new pricing .. and our sales rep would give us a good deal since we had a subscription for a while... it would only be 2x what it currently was. We cancelled it and went to box. Easy and much happier.

Good luck to them. Been an excellent service from day 1.

Dropbox has a great product. Before dropbox I had a special email account to store files to share with people. It was annoying if I needed to update stuff. Dropbox has without a doubt saved me time and money.

While one of Dropbox&#x27;s strengths is its simplicity, one thing that I think is currently keeping many enterprise customers away is detailed configurability – currently you only have manual folder-level control over what to sync. However, a very common use case is to autosync everything except certain types of files (certificates, keystores etc). They would probably see some quick adoptions if they covered detailed configuration and enterprise-level management in a good manner.

I see no value in Dropbox since using GDrive (have it anyway because of GSuite) and using a decent sync client like InsyncHQ. Never looked back at Dropbox.

If I had anything to do with Dropbox I&#x27;d be scrambling to cash out ASAP.<p>It’s a matter of time before Apple rolls out iCloud file&#x2F;folder sharing (which currently exists in some form already). In addition, they recently announced iMessage &quot;Business Chat&quot; which will likely later include other enterprise functionality.

Their focus on corporate users must be why their sdk&#x27;s are horrendous for a migration to their v2 api.<p>Most users I know are on extensions while their javascript sdk is broken.

Pitching this as the biggest tech IPO since Snapchat isn&#x27;t very impressive. Kind of shocked they used that comparison.

I only use their web UI, mostly for free online storage &#x2F; sharing.

I love Dropbox.

Amusingly, I just deleted my account for wholly unrelated reasons last week.

So what&#x27;s the advantage of Dropbox over FTP? Seriously. I have only used it for sharing large files. What else good is it?