[ajkjk]

It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service.

(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)

[layer8]

The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition.

While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.

[ajkjk]

For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way.

Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)

[layer8]

Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.

[computerdork]

Hmm, tend to disagree, but this is just an educated guess of mine. Seems like business have more specific needs that individuals, and would guess that Dropbox has many small features targeted for just companies (richer api's, more stability, more customization). Yeah, at least in my opinion, the larger the business, the more features they need.

[ajkjk]

Well they do. The problem is that if a competitor arises on the individual market they can pretty efficiently copy anything that makes them competitive.