Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Wild prediction: Box goes public, Dropbox follows, Dropbox buys Box and kills it, Dropbox hires Sean Parker who tells them to "drop the 'Drop' - it's cleaner" and becomes Box: Microsoft 2.0

View on HN

Another idea. Box goes public, DropBox goes public some months later. Both do well and grow large. Box wins business in the enterprise, DropBox wins in consumer. Everyone wins and are happy ever after.

Until 7 years later when a startup kills both.

Or Oracle buys them both, kills off DropBox and turns Box into a malware distribution channel.

I don't think either are going to last particularly long with both microsoft and google aggressively trying to take their business.

I'm starting to think Box will win in the end. They've always been focused on the $$$. Maybe Dropbox is a more fun and friendly company, but investors don't give a sh about that.

(note: i like both companies alot, but this is my gut feeling)

You just need to look at the state of thing now and how everything has being going for the last year, clearly Dropbox has all the momentum and usability. How many conferences have you seen Box's ceo at, that guy is at every conference and Box is supposed to be a startup. Box was the first cloud service i used, then moved onto Dropbox because the usability was just amazing. I also think Dropbox may have better engineering talent because the syncing works so much better than ubuntu one,drive and box.

Box has a completely different customer base than Dropbox, with completely different needs. Just look at their customers page: https://www.box.com/customers/

97% of Fortune 500 companies are Box customers. "Usability" is not a primary concern when your customers are building services on top of your platform.

What a strange coincidence! 97% of the Fortune 500 also use Dropbox. :-)

From https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info: "Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses with presence in 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies."

It's quite interesting to note that Box talks about "customer" while Dropbox talk about "presence".

The really relevant number is how many of those Fortune 500 companies are fully paid up customers vs a just bunch of people using their free personal account to share files within a project on a ad-hoc basis.

I find Box's claims a bit unbelievable - 97% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers? HP, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, Google, Cisco, ... maybe they're all in the 15 holdouts?

Mind you searching for information on this is nearly impossible as Box co. don't have a trademark to distinguish themselves by.

Also I guess the whole concept of 'customer' is a bit nebulous when it comes to huge companies. If a 6 man HP sales office half way round the world decides to sign up for the cheapest option for internal use, can Box or Dropbox claim that they have HP as a customer?

It's so easy to manipulate those numbers. For example, in my 22,000 seat Google Apps domain, we have a 25 seat license for GQueues. .1% of my users use the product, yet GQueues could legitimately call us a customer. For a business productivity tool, that's ... stupid. However, about .1% of users also use engineering design tools from Cadence. Totally different situation there, given the use cases. One should always take these numbers with whole mines of salt.

I wonder who the 15 holdouts are in both cases.

Shame, really. By concentrating on the enterprise market, Box may have sealed a brighter future for themselves than Dropbox has. That's sad because I'm pretty sure the team at Dropbox could run circles around the Box team. I mean, they have Python's creator working for them.

And there's a lesson there for would-be entrepreneurs with a technical background - your technical abilities only play a small role in the success of your venture. The smart business move is to focus on generating revenue, like Box did.

Not sure. My sister recently had her wedding and obviously the issue of sharing photos comes up.

Me: "Just put them in cloud storage." Her: "Oh you mean ##a## DropBox?"

It has become a common noun instead of a proper noun - at least for the less savvy. That level of entrenchment was one of Facebook's historical defining moments.

Edit: Grr, homegrown textile.

The "DropBox" has been around longer than the service though...

I heard it for the first time with KDX (Haxial) servers, where you had one designated folder into which you could upload files to the server (the others were read-only). But I'm certain that it was used for ftp servers/clients in the same way before

"Drop the drop"

Love it.

That would work as a fantastic campaign for box as well.

This, was perfect.

aerofs will beat everyone ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com