Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?

Not sure why this is on the front page but anyway...

> But a lesson from this story is twofold: when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it. Economically, the return from a capital efficiency standpoint would be much better. Second, public companies that are truly just a feature never give you great returns.

Dropbox was a private company when Jobs offered to buy it for $800 million in 2009. Drew Houston (the founder) has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation since then and is today worth over $2 billion. He's also on the board of Meta.

So the point about investing in companies that are features might be a decent (if obvious) one for retail investors looking at public equities, but the lesson here isn't "when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it".

> But a lesson from this story is twofold: when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it.

Not quite sure how the author reached that conclusion, considering – by their own calculations – Dropbox is profitable, rich on cash flow and worth at minimum 10x what Steve Jobs offered for it.

Dropbox pulled the plug on so many good apps. They should have built the full office suite in the browser and eventually slapped an email service on it. As a competitor to Google Workspace, they would have a real chance. Storage as a Service is too little of a moat in the cloud age.

Somewhat off-topic: When writing like this, explain your abbreviations and who the various people and companies are. PE Target? Price to Earnings Target, that makes no sense. Perhaps Physical Education, no, that's not right either. 10-K (might bold to assume that the reader knows what that is). Even smb (which should be SMB, even if it doesn't help) is probably not Small Message Block.

Think what you will of their writing and opinions, but one thing The Economist get right is that they don't assume you know what things are, it's spelled out at the first mention. So first mention of PE would be: private equity (PE).

Or

> And Sequoia’s (a venture capital firm) investment in Dropbox was a great one, second to Airbnb in Fund 12 (another venture capital firm).

I have a few qualms with this PE Target:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Bending Spoons must be watching Dropbox closely. Like the other companies that have been acquired by them, Dropbox has reached its final stage of stability.

I used to use Dropbox at work and also personally.

Work didn’t like it as Dropbox was new/unknown and eventually banned us from using it. This was about 15 years ago and the only way to share files between colleagues was to manually upload a file to their shared drive (through a browser) and then ask your colleague to go download it.

Works Dropbox was replaced by Microsoft. My personal Dropbox was replaced by Google Drive, and then by iCloud.

Nice to know Dropbox is still make lots of cash really. They started it all.

It would've helped to clarify that "PE" stands for "private equity".

Sad. I still use Dropbox personally and really like their use experience, but I just don't find enough use for it to pay for a service like that. The technology proved to be far too easy to replicate and they failed to build anything that would make users stick around, I guess. Maybe moving to workspace collaboration solution like Google docs was the play?

As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.

There are not many companies around with so much of voluntary important/intimate personal data as Dropbox has. PEs have gone for smaller note taking apps.

> ICloud went on to become a bigger business than Dropbox

And a worse app/service and that's saying something because Dropbox isn't even a shell of what it used to be. I'd agree with Jobs' observation of original Dropbox being a feature. But not any more.

As for "take it".. really?

> The product has largely remained the same

It seems to be coming from someone who hasn't been using Dropbox, at least not of late.

Also, I think their paying users used to be 2-3%. So yes PEs like this kind of chance of quick squeeze and squeeze and dry it and then leave it to die. I would reckon PEs would see a lot of one-time juice making opportunity here.

I recently migrated to a new phone and one of the apps I had to re-login was Dropbox. A feeling of nostalgia washed over me. It was absolutely essential many years ago but now the competition is huge. I'm not a fan of Private Equity but if it can keep the business alive, then it's worth exploring by the leadership.

I recall I was using Dropbox on Windows 2003 and Mac OS X 10.4. I was student and actively writing Office documents, AutoCAD, NanoCAD, LabVIEW, plenty of cryptic formats. Eventually Dropbox stopped working on Mac OS X 10.4. And I was not student anymore, I was not dealing with folders. As developer I worked with TortoiseHg and BitBucket, Mercurial repositories and reStructured Text wikis. And returned to neither Dropbox nor similar alternatives. By inertia I synchronized with Dropbox, but when Dropbox stopped working on Mac OS X 10.4, it stopped at all. Eventually I've got OS upgrade, but Dropbox already gone and never returned.

Maybe Bending Spoons could buy it?

I'm surprised Dropbox is still around, was it 15 years ago when I used? It was something new, but after they started pushing limitations I stopped using it.

Call me crazy, but I think we need more Dropboxes and fewer Metas or whatever.

Make a product that solves a sufficiently common problem, and make it extremely high quality. Want more growth? Find another problem to solve and launch a product in that space.

As for Steve Jobs and selling out, Apple bought FingerWorks. That's how they ended up with excellent, multi-touch touchpads while the rest of the computing world suffered. Make great products (or "features") and never sell out to soulless megacorps.

The selection of fonts on this webpage makes it barely readable for many.

The premise of the article that "Dropbox was .. a feature, not a Product" is complete nonsense. Remember the infamous FTP guy's top comment during their launch? I have spent almost 10 years working on making that vision a reality [1], and there are entire industries built around some variation of it: digital asset management, managed file transfer, digital preservation software, electronic document management systems, ...

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive | https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash