[encoderer]

"Acquisitions like this never go to plan." That kind of absolutism sounds silly to me.

And my analysis of the situation is different. I see it as dropbox adding a services layer on top of the platform of storage they built. You already see other companies doing this -- using the dropbox platform. If I'm dropbox, I see a lot of opportunity there.

[UVB-76]

The Dropbox 'platform' is razor-thin, and their core offering is fast becoming a commodity.

At the moment, their business model doesn't extend much beyond brokering storage space. They are simply a middle-man between end users and Amazon S3, whose value add is some software that makes the process of storing and sharing files relatively pain-free.

They're good at what they do, and their software is nice, but in the long-run, there isn't much money in what they do.

Diversification is the obvious course of action, but it pits them against major players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. All of these could probably afford to offer unlimited storage to all their users tomorrow, and if they got the software right, could render Dropbox redundant.

[Retric]

Dropbox works on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux. Because it's not just a website they can do things like automatically backup your phones photo's.

They avoid storing duplicate files between users which dramatically reduces storage space on S3 in ways single users can't. But, also allows them to add cheap versioning as there not storing 1 copy per user of each file.