2. Palantir: I have some experience with working with Palantir FDEs who were marketed to BigCo as 'gift from god to solve all problems'. They were pretty useless.
I think Palantir is basically shit. Wait and watch.
I'm asking in all sincerity - what does Dropbox have that Microsoft would want? Their OneDrive technology is "good enough" for the vast majority of users.
Latest statistics I could find were that DropBox has 200,000,000 users and that 96% of them were free user accounts. That means DropBox has about 8,000,000 paying users. Instead of buying the company for $4 billion they could instead pay each paying DropBox customer $500 to switch.
Or they could spend $4 billion on marketing / giving away their free 1 TB of OneDrive space with purchase of an Office 365 subscription for $6.99 per month.
I'm probably missing something?
Same reasons MS ended up investing in FB, instead of turning Messenger (think: you've already got everyone and their friends using it!) into a good social network?
That's a pretty bold statement.
I've worked with them as well, and definitely don't buy into the hype either. But when the latest financing round (~Jan 2015) has them valued at $15 billion, there must be something to it.
I don't know what kind of access their private investors have to the financials, but it's been reported they have 100s millions in revenue from USG alone selling their platform as enterprise software, which typically has a longer sales cycle but more "stickiness" once the customer has committed (i.e. they are less likely to purchase another platform no matter how bad the current one is). On top of that, the alternatives in this space just aren't very good, and sometimes hype and brand are all you need to make the sale.
That being said, I'm pretty skeptical of the valuations of all the tier 1 companies SamA mentioned, with maybe the exception of Pinterest, and think that category of the three has the most likelihood of losing him this bet.