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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Box has a completely different customer base than Dropbox, with completely different needs. Just look at their customers page: https://www.box.com/customers/

97% of Fortune 500 companies are Box customers. "Usability" is not a primary concern when your customers are building services on top of your platform.

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What a strange coincidence! 97% of the Fortune 500 also use Dropbox. :-)

From https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info: "Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses with presence in 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies."

I wonder who the 15 holdouts are in both cases.

It's quite interesting to note that Box talks about "customer" while Dropbox talk about "presence".

The really relevant number is how many of those Fortune 500 companies are fully paid up customers vs a just bunch of people using their free personal account to share files within a project on a ad-hoc basis.

I find Box's claims a bit unbelievable - 97% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers? HP, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, Google, Cisco, ... maybe they're all in the 15 holdouts?

Mind you searching for information on this is nearly impossible as Box co. don't have a trademark to distinguish themselves by.

Also I guess the whole concept of 'customer' is a bit nebulous when it comes to huge companies. If a 6 man HP sales office half way round the world decides to sign up for the cheapest option for internal use, can Box or Dropbox claim that they have HP as a customer?

It's so easy to manipulate those numbers. For example, in my 22,000 seat Google Apps domain, we have a 25 seat license for GQueues. .1% of my users use the product, yet GQueues could legitimately call us a customer. For a business productivity tool, that's ... stupid. However, about .1% of users also use engineering design tools from Cadence. Totally different situation there, given the use cases. One should always take these numbers with whole mines of salt.

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