Dropbox could have carved out a niche for itself as a platform for backup and sharing of files. However, the amount of investment capital doesn't allow them to be just a successful medium sized enterprise.

> Dropbox could have carved out a niche for itself as a platform for backup and sharing of files

Serious question - hasn't it? I know there are other players in the space, but it's absolutely the #1 solution I think of.

Being the best in a completely commodified area is tough, especially when that solution set is thrown in for free in the world's most popular productivity platforms-- Office 365.

Absolutely, but my point was it can't stop there. It has to keep trying a whole bunch of stuff to try to become more than just that.

Dropbox has the best sync clients, but that's not enough to save them from being a commodity. Dead-simple and reliable sync seems like a nice-to-have that isn't going to save them from the incredibly large footprint the likes of Microsoft already have in enterprise markets. An IT purchaser might not care much about the usability difference between OneDrive and DropBox (which I'm not even sure exists since the last time I used both.)

Have they solved the CPU usage problems? Dropbox caused serious CPU spikes during backups, and when they didn't fix it for years I moved away.

I don't notice any special CPU issues with the Dropbox client.

Dropbox needs to think of what apps you can build on top of it and let people build those apps. They are a data lake. Enable advanced analytics and ML etc...

Easy peasy.

They don't have a choice. They're publicly traded now, so they have to be more than a cloud drive.