Little more than five years since Dropbox first hit the net, more than 200 million people are using the service to store and share more than a billion files a day. And at least some of these file sharers -- the company won't say how many -- are paying at least 10 bucks a month for extra online storage space.
But those monthly fees are likely insignificant compared to the potential profits to be made by getting large corporations to become paying Dropbox customers.
Enterprise cloud storage and sharing is a marketplace crammed with competitors, among them some of the biggest tech companies on the planet. But Dropbox is banking on one unique advantage as it tries to slip past firewalls and into the hearts of IT managers everywhere: you.
Today, the San Francisco startup announced new tools that would seem to make it easier than ever for its everyday users to convince their bosses to embrace Dropbox at work.
Though the engineering behind the new Dropbox for Business is apparently quite complex, the end result is simple: a new, separate Dropbox folder for your work stuff. You still log into your Dropbox account as you always would. The difference is that your IT guy has access to -- and control over -- the new work folder.
The Dropbox approach piggybacks on the "bring your own device" trend of the past few years. As a tidal wave of workers started using their personal smartphones for work, for example, IT departments have been more or less forced to accommodate them. It just became too difficult to keep people on corporate BlackBerries, say, rather than iPhones.
Dropbox users wanting to use their personal file-sharing accounts at work feels like the "bring your own app" version of this bottom-up reconfiguring of corporate tech.
For Dropbox, the new work folder is intended make it easier than ever to persuade reluctant companies that they can let you use the apps you already know and like without giving up control. More than 4 million businesses already use Dropbox, including 97 percent of the Fortune 500, the company says.
That kind of grassroots push is something Dropbox will likely need more than ever as frenemy Amazon launches WorkSpaces, a cloud-based desktop for businesses that would seem to enable many of the same cross-platform sharing features as Dropbox for Business. Unlike Dropbox, WorkSpaces seems to follow the traditional top-down enterprise model. Your company decides to use it, which means you have to use it.
At today's launch event, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston smiled ruefully at a question about going head-to-head with Amazon, which through Amazon Web Services happens to store much of the data users upload through Dropbox.
"Every major internet company competes with us," Houston said to sympathetic laughs from the crowd as he played the startup David to a small army of big-tech Goliaths. "We get it."
