That's interesting. I got a lot out of it:

- He seems to believe Dropbox is superior technically.

- Box is Dropbox's closest competitor.

- Fundamentally there are two ways of making money from storage, enterprise direct-sales and consumer self-service.

- Box has self-service as a loss-leader for direct-sold enterprise accounts, and accounts for the operating costs of its self-service accounts as a marketing expense.

- Dropbox doesn't; we don't really know Dropbox's cost of customer acquisition, which is a big deal for a consumer product.

- A much greater percentage of Box's accounts are paying customers

- Box can put together customized offerings for enterprise customers in ways Dropbox can't and so Box has negative churn.

- On the other hand, running the business this way means that the early investors in Dropbox (including Drew Houston) kept a far larger part of the company for themselves.

- Box is outperforming Dropbox in the market.

- Atlassian is outperforming both of them.

- File storage is probably not the strategic high ground for enterprise computing, something Thompson used to think.

Dropbox is about to go public. An analysis that suggests they're a niche company is a big deal. Dropbox's investors will be betting that they're not.

I found the article very insightful. I spent the weekend reviewing Dropbox's S1 and had the same issue - they are not being completely honest about their cohort retention numbers. They have created some new metrics/charts that show increasing value but doesn't show the real metrics - what is specific cohort churn etc. This article mentions that very clearly.

Don't get me wrong - Box's initial S1 also had some very abstract cohort metrics. They took some very early cohorts and extrapolated from that. I think they are more open now as there is more stability in those metrics and they are moving in the right direction.

I think it’s unfocused but there’s a lot of interesting ideas/lessons in here imo.

writing about high level tech and strategy is an art form. you probably want to see deeper detail, more in depth examples? me too. but although he isn't saying much of anything to you, (and sometimes I struggle to understand it too), be careful of dismissing things you don't understand that have gained a lot of validation. The crowd may not always be wrong and I like the challenge of understanding a different mindset from my day to day level of thought.