Building a platform for consumers is incredibly difficult….For consumers, collaboration is an edge case….Consumers need to be convinced of the value of their data….There are multiple reasons why the latter is a more attractive target for all software-as-a-service companies, especially those focused on data:
That is likely why Dropbox has spent much of the last year pivoting away from consumers to the enterprise. I’m increasingly convinced that, outside of in-app game purchases, consumers are unwilling to spend money on intangible software. After all, notably absent from my piece on Business Models for 2014 was consumer software-as-a-service. I explained why this mattered in 2014’s Battle of the Box:ĭropbox’s model makes sense theoretically, but it ignores the messy reality of actually making money. Said comparison, though, mostly serves to highlight that while the two companies might have similar products, there are so many other ways to be different.įirst and foremost, Box has, since the earliest days of the company, been focused on enterprise customers, while Dropbox started out as a consumer product. Dropbox Versus Box and the Question of Lifetime Valueĭropbox and Box have always been compared, and for a rather obvious reason: the core offering of both companies is cloud storage. Still, even if the utility and durability of Dropbox’s product was immediately apparent, the long-run trajectory of its business is, even with the release of the company’s S-1, less so. And now the company behind it is going public - I knew it! Indeed, I was so convinced that Dropbox wasn’t going anywhere that I felt no compunction about using Dropbox (plus a bit of Apple Script) as a de facto syncing system for a school I was working at it has been ten years, the school has expanded to multiple locations, and every classroom still has the exact same set of files thanks to a product that does exactly what it promises.
DROPBOX COST SOFTWARE
I am usually quite conservative when it comes to how much time, data, and effort I am willing to put into a product from a new startup: too many go out of business or are acquired-and-sunset, and who wants to go to the effort twice?ĭropbox, though, was something else entirely: the initial release in 2008 was so good, and filled such a need, that I switched all of my most important data there immediately and I’ve never left, even though I have lots of free data storage included with other SaaS software plans.
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