The case against Dropbox looks stronger with each passing day | The Verge

Excerpt from a Dropbox reality check -- tbd if the lightweight workflow and project management features added by competitors such as Box will prevent a category-wide reset

"It’s a set of circumstances that have led some to speculate that Dropbox will become "the first dead decacorn," as startup founder Alex Danco wrote last month in a widely read piece. ("Decacorn" is Silicon Valley-speak for a company valued at $10 billion or more, a play on the use of "unicorn" to refer to billion-dollar startups.) This month CB Insights, estimating that the company’s valuation is at least 25 times its 2014 revenues, called investors’ enthusiasm for Dropbox "irrational." Ben Thompson, the analyst and author of the Stratechery blog, calls Dropbox "probably the most fragile" of the 10 most highly valued private companies.

All of this goes well beyond the usual criticisms lobbed at fast-growing startups: that they can’t keep up their pace of growth indefinitely, say, or that their business model will hit roadblocks as they attempt to begin profiting from their users. Rather, it’s that the fundamental assumptions around Dropbox’s business have shifted, at the same time that the behavior of office workers is changing to make the product less relevant. It’s a criticism that could use a thoughtful answer — but at Disrupt, Houston was unwilling or simply unable to give one."

The case against Dropbox looks stronger with each passing day | The Verge