Also, plenty of people who could really use a service like Dropbox have not heard of it. Even with their current product offerings, there is an ocean of customers who haven't been reached yet.
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/90/better-more-affordable-st...
2) I do not see why DB couldn't end up being a 100B company. They built a huge business with one fucking product. One. I do not even remember the last time I noticed new features. I want to see them starting to move more into backing up/syncing social data as well. There could be a day when all your social data will be simply poured into your DB, and they will do the job at syncing it via all your devices, and social networks.
Go DB.
Edit: Imagine. I take pictures. Put them on my DB. Set privacies (social, private, family, work, etc...). Then Facebook can now directly grab from my DB, Google, Twitter and new startups as well depending on my settings.
That's not a good sign, that's a bad one. That means if anyone attacks that one product credibly, the whole company is rocked hard. Better to be diversified, broadly speaking. (Details matter, of course.)
What are the odds Google, Amazon, and a not insignificant number of the other backup vendors in the world are planning some form of direct competition?
... actually, this speaks to what sort of concerns me about a bubble right now. Excessive valuations aren't themselves a cause, they have to be a symptom of something else. ISTM there is an excessive optimism over any one company's ability to completely lock up the market forever and ever, amen. To be honest I don't expect one masterstroke that comes in and just destroys Dropbox in three days, but valuating them as if it's just an assured thing that they're going to completely own the home backup market over the next ten years is absurdly optimistic. It's one possible outcome, but not anywhere near the most likely. Valuating Facebook as if it's going to own social networking forever and ever is absurd; look at the very rapid inroads G+ is making, my point being that even if G+ crashes and burns it has clearly demonstrated that it has a chance, and that means other competition has a chance, too. Valuating X as if it's going to own the market is stupid, and a lot of the valuations seem to be based on that; not a reasonable, rational assessment of the possibility that they may own the market or at least do well, but valuations based on the solid, near-100% of that outcome. Seems unwise to me.
If their business model isn't supporting the growth they want and they're not going to change it, is throwing money around going to be all that helpful?
Maybe I'm doubting that they'll be able to bring in that many new users because I can't imagine how anyone hasn't heard of dropbox by now -- which is pretty silly. I've just known about it for a long time because of HN.
Or maybe there are economies of scale that I don't know about, and by spending $x they'll be able to save/make $y>>$x?
(...Are they going to get off of s3, set up their own datacenters?)