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.

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.

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

Box also has better security/access controls

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.

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

It's strange but it seems like others aren't trying hard enough or simply aren't interested in making a great product. My experience with dropbox has been better than with any other cloud backup service. For instance, I can move my cloud folder around without forcing a re-sync of the entire data. I can manually copy data to a new computer & it'll be magically sync'd without re-downloading everything. Dropbox also does a great job of incremental updates on binaries.

Some stuff that comes to mind (unfortunately other competitors have gotten a jumpstart on almost all of these):

- Self-hosted solutions (for enterprise). - Privacy features. - Push hard(er) for app integrations. - I like your idea of hosting games / apps. Storage upgrades will then go from a nice-to-have to a must.

In the meantime, their competitors are doing the same thing. Seamless cloud integration for Google Office, MS Office, and iWorks is hard (impossible?) for Dropbox to replicate.

OneDrive is not so great but for same price of Dropbox you get Email, Word and Excel. Same in case of Google Drive.

Yes - there might be some companies going with Dropbox for Business but Microsoft is hard to beat there.

In short, if they do not do something soon they will like SugarSync...

> their main strength seems to be that they have the best cross-platform UI/UX right now

and they will continue until Apple treats Android as a first-class platform, or Google treats Windows as one, or Microsoft figures out who they are anymore.

Google is blocked in China, not all people use Apple products, many people simply don't like Microsoft.