Also I am sure the in house data centre looks cheaper to Dropbox - but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet. But I meant cheaper from a consumer point of view - I get unlimited storage at Amazon for $60 a year.
These costs are known and planned for. Dropbox wouldn't do this without running the numbers through vast herds of accountants.
Now here is the kicker. Amazon does this too (but slightly less due to economies of scale) and then makes sure their billing covers this.
i don't know if this is true or not, but it isn't at all necessary.
you can just buy everything on an operating lease for a fraction of what amazon or any other provider charges and write the payment off without any sort of depreciation schedule or hit to your cash or unnecessarily grow the balance sheet/liabilities.
how do you think it's possible that you can easily get a $15/month dedicated server?
Sorry makes no sense to me.
Even taking into account depreciation, administration, maintenance etc, if you have a large enough consistent need amazon is not the lowest cost option by a significant margin. This isn't a controversial statement.
Also, presumably, not all the AWS users are awake at the same time ;-)
yeah, they sure do.
The cloud providers are in a cut throat business (mitigated somewhat by value added services), so the price will bob along near cost (though they may eak out more profit on some work loads compared to others).
Your main argument seems to be that Amazon, Microsoft etc will undercut Dropbox on price which is fair enough. However Dropbox has done well so far offering better service and I can see that continuing. The better service thing is mostly about the people running the services and Dropbox seem good.
To see how they are moving away from commodity storage check this out:
("Dropbox used to be fundamentally about storage but now it is changing how we view productivity and collaboration") https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/2016/03/11/dropbo...