14 DAY TRIAL // The company grew from 300 million users as reported last year to 400 million, all in the span of eight years since its inception in 2007.
With over 1.2 billion file syncs, 4,000 file edits, and 100,000 new shared folders and file links created each day, Dropbox's servers seem to be pretty busy nowadays.
In the last few years and especially after Dennis Woodside joined as COO less than a year ago, the company has grown tremendously, penetrating more and more markets with its easy-to-use software.
First there was integration with Microsoft's Office 365 suite, then the deal with Vodafone to distribute its software, and then followed by a plethora of new features, all added in the past year.
Dropbox has now support for adding comments to files, advanced image and document previews, a full-text search feature, and also a custom Gmail extension.
All of this amounts to a pretty solid service which has managed to keep it above strong competitors like Google Drive and Box.com.
Dropbox has problems converting free users into revenue
But things aren't as good as they seem. From all the hoopla that came with the "400 million users" announcement, analysts managed to notice how the company has only 100,000 paying business customers, which is a very low percentage when compared to its total userbase, which mostly uses the free accounts.
According to researcher IDC (via Bloomberg), Dropbox's current market share for business file sharing is 24%, not that far in front of Box and Microsoft, both with 21%. The problem is that those two managed to double their market share in less than a year, which means Dropbox is actually losing ground where it matters, and that's in its bank accounts.
You can see this clearly in Dropbox’ and Box' client pages. Dropbox has one Fortune 500 company listed (Yahoo), while Box has four (General Electric, Nationwide, P&G, Boston Scientific), with one in the top 10 and two in the top 100.
Box has also managed to secure collaborations with Microsoft and IBM in the same timeframe, while slowly moving away from free accounts to a more business-heavy offering instead.