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Open the "More" menu in your Dropbox interface and I think you may be surprised at how many different products they have.

I am sure they're not trying to be a Microsoft of Google, but they're trying to make a niche in document handling, file sending, password management, a lot of those little things that are something of a pain for many businesses.

I think if you compare what Dropbox is offering at $15/user/month to Microsoft 365, there are a bunch of things that Microsoft isn't really covering or isn't covering as well (and vice versa, to be fair). For example, the ability to take e-signatures, document watermarking, facilitating out-of-organization file transfers, etc.

I also think they compete quite well with Amazon Drive, considering that Amazon Drive was discontinued.




    > Open the "More" menu in your Dropbox interface and I think you may be surprised at how many different products they have.
Yeah, but what if I don't need/want "more"? I just want my files on my different devices.


I never said you personally are their ideal customer profile.


My point is that this is probably the case for most users; the "more" doesn't mean anything because it's some functionality created by underemployed product managers rather than things that customers actually need/want to pay for. If you have to point out "hey, look here under this 'more' menu", then it's not part of the primary value proposition for the product and not why someone would pick that product. Sure, it might be that it is useful for some subset of users, but that you need to wave people down to show them that value means that it's probably not that valuable.


The amount of businesses whose target audience is “most users” is very small. You might get lucky and be a Microsoft or Apple but almost every other business has a very specific type of customer that they want.

The other thing is that the most popular features aren’t necessarily the most profitable ones.

Dropbox doesn’t make money on the millions of people with free accounts, and they are selling commodity storage for their paid users at thin margins. But a product that can solve business pain in a unique way can command better margins, which is why they are getting into other businesses like document signing rather than just sticking to selling bulk cloud storage.




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