This in contrast to Box, which has been working primarily with large enterprise companies for years to solve much more complex problems around content. “Nor are people building much on top of Dropbox in the way of business applications – it remains primarily a very efficient file sharing system,” he explained. In the weeks prior to the IPO, they made a pair of announcements designed to increase their enterprise credibility including one with Google to store G Suite documents natively in Dropbox and one with Salesforce to embed Dropbox folders in Salesforce Sales and Marketing clouds.įor now though, even with this business push, Pelz-Sharpe points out that most of Dropbox’s business customers are small teams of 3 or more people with a dash of larger implementations. That’s not to say they aren’t trying to capture more of the enterprise. “Dropbox is primarily a consumer company with 500 million users, only about 300,000 teams using their business offering,” he told TechCrunch. It seemed that such a tool would translate nicely to business, but Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been following this space for years, says Dropbox has always primarily been confined to teams on the business side. It provides a place to back up my photos from my phone. When I capture screens they go automatically to Dropbox. I can back up my life there and it incorporates neatly into Finder on my Mac. I use it and for $10 a month I get a terabyte of storage. It’s well integrated into desktop OSs and it has a nice mobile tool. Dropbox has always offered an attractive consumer storage tool. It turns out that vast majority of Dropbox’s combined business and consumer revenue of more than a $1 billion came from consumers. They had something in common, of course, but Dropbox has always been about managing files in the cloud, while Box has been focused on enterprise content use case cases in the cloud - and that’s a very different approach.Īs Shria Ovide pointed out in her analysis on Bloomberg after the filing, the S-1 also proved that Dropbox has always been a “ a consumer software company with a side hustle.” That side hustle was the enterprise business. (She also pointed out on Twitter that they may be the first company to use a cupcake emoji in their S-1, which is actually kind of cool). If you don’t believe they’re different, consider that in Dropbox’s S-1 paperwork they filed with SEC, you will note they didn’t even list Box as a primary competitor: “We compete with Box on a more limited basis in the cloud storage market for deployments by large enterprises,” the company wrote. Same goes for investors, analysts and journalists. If you are a VC and still don't get why Box and Dropbox are fundamentally different businesses, maybe stay away from SaaS.
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