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A comment on Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by Mahn on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @01:00PM (#12298818)
The most important thing you are missing is traction. They reached half a billion signups recently, and have many millions of active users, which is very valuable in itself.

Sure, if you were you start a file syncing dropbox competitor today you would have a hard time, but the position they are in is far more defensible simply because they have a massive user base.

It's the same reason why WhatsApp was acquired for billions, their "value proposition" from a product and feature set point of view was weak, but they had a traction and a massive user base. And having a massive user base is almost all that matters nowadays.

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Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by PeCaN on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @01:09PM (#12298880)
The reason WhatsApp is valuable is because a chat app is rather useless without a massive userbase. That's not true for file syncing.

Having a massive user base may be all that matters for inherently social applications, but Dropbox is definitely not one of those.

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Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by Fomite on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:37PM (#12299553)
It matters because an established DropBox user might not care to add other services.

For example, all the new students in my lab will be using DropBox, because its what their PI uses.

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Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by gaius on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @01:31PM (#12299033)
It depends how much it's used for sharing files.
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Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by vaishaksuresh on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:23PM (#12299439)
I've been using dropbox for many many years now. I had a lot of space because of the space race thing they did when I was in school. I still have about 7 GB of space which is ok for the moment.I would not pay for more space though. I have a NAS connected to the internet anyway. I am pretty sure a majority of the billion users also will not pay. So what is the point in having so many users?
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Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by prostoalex on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @01:52PM (#12299177)
The jury is still out on conversion numbers for those sign-ups. If you were on a mission to maximize freely available online storage space, wouldn't you sign up for all available?
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