Dropbox Chooses Investor Group, Valuation Set at $5+ Billion • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox Chooses Investor Group, Valuation Set at $5+ Billion

#41

Post by sprovoost » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 7:08 AM UTC

Just one more problem: as more and more great platforms become available, there seems to be a trend of users storing different kinds of data in their own specialist platforms. Photos on FlickR, music on Spotify, movies on Netflix, simple documents in Google Docs, code on Github, books on Amazon, mail in Gmail, etc. That leaves less and less stuff for Dropbox.

In particular, it leaves less gigabytes for Dropbox, because the big stuff is taken care of. So with the price of storage and bandwidth dropping exponentially and the amount of "other" data dropping, it's going to be hard to sustain a freemium model just based on a storage cap.

Re: Dropbox Chooses Investor Group, Valuation Set at $5+ Billion

#42

Post by ThomPete » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 8:33 AM UTC

sprovoost wrote: post #38

jmreardon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has had such a service for a few years now, they call it SkyDrive. Unfortunately it wasn't a very good user experience when I last looked at it. It's been a while though (and I just use Dropbox now), so it might have gotten better.

Microsoft may have just been too early. Once they recognize the success they can clone the usability in no time. Or patent troll Dropbox off the map. Very risky investment if you ask me. That said, Dropbox is a great product and the free version is good enough for the small number of documents that I have that are not somewhere else in the cloud.

But the question is wether that justify the high evaluation . I thing ms and apple are going to get their act together before that prize is ver realized. But that's just me.

Re: Dropbox Chooses Investor Group, Valuation Set at $5+ Billion

#43

Post by sprovoost » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 4:46 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #42

sprovoost wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft may have just been too early. Once they recognize the success they can clone the usability in no time. Or patent troll Dropbox off the map. Very risky investment if you ask me. That said, Dropbox is a great product and the free version is good enough for the small number of documents that I have that are not somewhere else in the cloud.

But the question is wether that justify the high evaluation . I thing ms and apple are going to get their act together before that prize is ver realized. But that's just me.

It does not justify the high valuation. That's what I meant with "clone the usability in no time".