They have a good product, no doubt - also interesting that "Box" stock has dropped some as of this hour.
However, to become the next giant, I would imagine they need to branch out and gain traction for tangential products. They've tried (dropbox paper) but not sure it has enough market share to make a dent just yet.
I really enjoy Dropbox Paper fwiw. I use it for just about all of my note-taking now, which the calendar integration makes even better.
Off the cuff, I can see a few things that they can expand to from where they are:
1. Give better central visibility into tasks/action items created in Paper docs without having to open them.
2. In my opinion, they should attempt to purchase Remember the Milk. It's an extremely polished to-do system that IMHO would be well served as a rebranded Dropbox Todos/Tasks product. If that were to happen, then it would also become the ideal destination for tasks created within Paper. The ability to share task lists would also align nicely with shared folders.
3. Get into the voip fax space by allowing users to sign up for a number, route the documents to specific folders or select an existing dropbox document and fax it to a number.
4. Get into the Docusign/Ecosign/Rightsignature space by allowing a user to select a document and send it to people for signing. They already have all of the tools they need to make this work in terms of sharing and view tracking. They've also got built in version control, so all that's really needed is the interface to designate complete-able fields and actually go through with the signing. It might make more sense to acquire one of those.
5. 3-4 could very easily create tasks in the task system, with direct document links and the ability to auto-complete them once the document was viewed or the task was completed.
6. This one might be a bit more of a long-term stretch, but if they completed those steps they'd have a system that combined document management and task tracking...and at that point they'd be very well positioned to break into the BPM game for small businesses. I've believed for a long time that a more accessible BPM solution could be big...and if you've addressed the passing docs around with tasks, then tracking completion and responses part you've got 90% of the human interaction side of a BPM system covered. Maybe even just direct integrate with Camunda?
Also they could take over handling county and government forms. So much email or fax that it hurts. Imagine you fill out a form, scan it and Dropbox it into the right folder (or form upload or even email the Dropbox link as a stepping stone).. basically replacing fax and email for secure document sending.
However, to become the next giant, I would imagine they need to branch out and gain traction for tangential products. They've tried (dropbox paper) but not sure it has enough market share to make a dent just yet.