[_razvan]

The long term game for Dropbox is in having businesses outsource storage to them. While consumer cloud storage is a tough market (due to it being a race to the bottom), the vision of getting businesses of all sizes to replace their legacy file servers with Dropbox sounds very compelling.

You can already see Dropbox has transitioned its focus to businesses. Mailbox and Carousel shut down. That is because a single consumer can easily switch to another service based on price alone and can afford to spend his/her own time on figuring out how to migrate their files.

On the other hand, once you have 100 business users which got used to Dropbox, switching to another solution has a real cost for your business. That's why Dropbox is focusing on businesses: they are stickier in the long run.

However, Dropbox will still maintain a strong consumer presence because familiarity is one of the key points for selling Dropbox to businesses. Moreover, every business starts small and every founder is a consumer at heart.

The promise of Dropbox for businesses is in outsourcing the complexity of storage in exchange for a monthly/yearly subscription. Consumer cloud storage is just a step in executing a bigger vision.

[swampthinker]

I can attest to this. I do some tech support for a growing construction company nearby, and I just tossed out their aging server. Moved all their data to Dropbox and set it up on the PM's laptops. Took me about a week of answering questions before they were all happy and smooth again.

[wcfields]

Agreed. We had a SMB share on our network that had grown increasingly unused. Since there wasn't a business processes in place users organically started using Dropbox to communicate with clients.

Eventually they have you because then you realize that you have so much business information in them that you can't let employees walk out the door with.

[cpach]

”On the other hand, once you have 100 business users which got used to Dropbox, switching to another solution has a real cost for your business. That's why Dropbox is focusing on businesses: they are stickier in the long run.”

Great point! Hadn’t thought of it like that before.

[notyourwork]

Which is going to be a struggle due to businesses also shifting other things to cloud and other providers offer complete solutions whereas dropdox is a piece of a large puzzle.

[propogandist]

this is where Box is king and they've pretty much been focused on businesses since the start. They've been inking partnerships with everyone from Microsoft to IBM to make their service king among corporate/enterprise users.

Box also has better security/access controls

[mrweasel]

>The long term game for Dropbox is in having businesses outsource storage to them.

Is the business version somehow different? We simply don't all users to run Dropbox, because it eats up local disc space on our terminal servers, or desktops. Unless Dropbox starts working more like a local file server there's a ton of business that will never adopt it.

The default where Dropbox just sucks down files until you run out of disc space, and the on-disc-cache can't be shared between users, needs to change for Dropbox to be truly successful in business.

[dagw]

Unless Dropbox starts working more like a local file server there's a ton of business that will never adopt it.

They're already actively working on and advertising a solution to this problem. Look up Dropbox Project Infinity talked about here a few weeks ago

[joe563323]

User Lockin. Great.