Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge…
The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into customer acquisition at a loss? Probably a few of them, but I'm guessing some other company with a similar business model would have come along with VC backing and eaten their lunch (sure, that company might then be in the exact same place as the current over-valued lat…
"Woe to the VC, for they are like a dog sleeping in the manger of oxen, for neither does he eat nor does he let the oxen eat"
In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board ( http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ ). I don't know what their future holds. But personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service. I'd hope their customers are also looking at the security of their data in…
This is a rare opportunity where a regular person can hold a member of the Bush pro-war team accountable, if even in some small way.
Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge…
The problem being, how many of these businesses would have won any market share without early VC investment enabling the companies to dump money into customer acquisition at a loss? Probably a few of them, but I'm guessing some other company with a similar business model would have come along with VC backing and eaten their lunch (sure, that company might then be in the exact same place as the current over-valued lat…
That's a great question, and one I won't pretend to have the answer to. On one hand, Basecamp has carved out a very profitable niche for themselves despite venture-backed competition from Jira and others, so it's certainly possible. I also think that there is a big difference between taking money when you are small with typical angel / seed-round terms and taking late-stage money with 2x VC liquidation preferences and a private valuation north of $1 billion. Then again, like you said, it can be very tough to turn a profit when you have to compete with companies undercutting you by subsidizing their prices with an enormous reserve of easy VC cash.
Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge…
I think you're underestimating the complexity of building scalable file syncing across multiple platforms that pretty much just works from the end users' perspectives.
People stick with Dropbox for a simple reason: they do the syncing thing faster and more painlessly than anyone else out there. If Apple ever gets their act together and makes iCloud actually fast and reliable a syncing service, Dropbox might be in trouble.
It's a safe bet that 80-90% of dropbox users are on a PC.
I very happily pay for Dropbox. I haven't found any of the alternatives as easy as Dropbox. The syncing is seamless.
I agree and I'm also a happy customer of Dropbox.
But how long will it be until OneDrive or iCloud Drive catch up? I have 1TB of OneDrive space for "free" with Office. I have plenty of spare space in my iCloud storage plan. If either of those two options catch up to Dropbox's reliability, why would I stay with Dropbox?
Dropbox has the same problem a lot of the moderately successful unicorns have; it's a good product managed by smart people that would be much better off as a right-sized stable lifestyle business a la 37 Signals / Basecamp than as an attempt at a world-beating massive-growth juggernaut like Google or Facebook. Unfortunately for them (and Evernote, and a whole host of others), once you've signed that deal for the huge…
There is currently no way that 50 people (roughly the number of employees at Basecamp) could support a Dropbox-like product at scale. It's just impossible. At their scale, the technical challenges of maintaining a decent user experience (good transfer speeds, little downtime, no lost data, etc.) are enormous.