Dropbox is one of those interesting products that many people always recommend, but somehow it has always remained relatively low key. Those “in the know” swear by it, and those who use it the first time always wonder how they go along without it.
We have mentioned Dropbox a few times here on Bandwidth Blog, and it still remains one of the first things to install on any computer or mobile device. Dropbox enables a user to mirror a folder accross multiple devices, with the added benefit of “in the cloud” backup. Have an important document? Store it in your dropbox folder. Need that document some days later in the middle of nowhere? Take out your smartphone, and access that file right there. Lose your computers, and your phone? No problem, it is still on Dropbox.com. Want to share a file – share it with a single URL link. It is really that simple. And these are just some of the features.
One of the fundamentals of Dropbox is that it is platform independent – it can be used on PC, Mac, iPhone, Android etc. Compare this to products like Microsoft Skydrive, and the benefits of Dropbox quickly becomes clear. Funny enough, Dropbox has not yet been bought over by some major tech company yet. With over 25 million users, you would expect that Microsoft, Google or Apple would have taken out their cheque books already, because they are all trying hard to convince people to switch to their cloud storage solutions. Microsoft has been trying to get Skydrive going for a while now (the lack of cross-platform compatibility hurt it, and they only recently made the APIs available), Apple is rolling out iCloud soon, and Google is trying their best to get people to use their Google Docs based storage.
In order to drum up some funding, Dropbox recently held an auction to get some more funding. Sources say they needed about $200 – $300 million. The auction is now over, and the current offers have pushed Dropbox up to a valuation of up to $10 billion… To put that in perspective – Microsoft recently bought Skype for $8.5 billion. Was it worth it? Who knows.
Yes, that is silly money. But I think at a certain point the numbers that a company is valued at just becomes irrelevant figures – for example, how does one argue that Dropbox is worth more than Skype? Depends on who you ask, and which one has more revenue streams at the end of the day.
Now recently there has been a lot of people stating that we are approaching another market bubble in the technology sector, and I wholeheartedly agree. Ridiculous apps like Color which received massive amounts of funding is just the tip of the iceberg. But Dropbox is one app which I really believe is worth it – whether it worth $5 billion or $10 billion. True, they have had some recent security “missteps”, but the product is absolutely rock solid, and without peer. It is perhaps the best example of how this mythical “cloud” can help people.
Just like Skype, it is beautifully executed solution to a problem all computer users face everyday. And that is the most valuable products in these times.
So – do you think Dropbox is worth $10 Billion?
Still not familiar with Dropbox? Read our review.
