Dropbox has been around for 8 years now. It is hard to imagine a world without it. It brought cloud storage to the masses and thanks to exclusive agreements with several companies like HTC and Samsung, millions of users have had access to the service thanks to getting it for free with their new smartphone purchases.
Thanks to partnerships with Microsoft, private users and businesses (over 100,000 companies use Dropbox) can even do more without having to look elsewhere. That and many other factors have had several positives on the service that was once a fledgling startup’s wild idea.
Dropbox shared some interesting numbers on its blog:
- It has 400 million users
- Those users sync 1.2 billion files everyday
- They create and share amongst themselves and their friends, co-workers, internet strangers etc over 100,000 new folders and links every passing hour
- They make 4,000 edits per second and much much more
While Dropbox has evolved to cater for everything from videos of your pet bunny to photos of your last family trip to being your saviour in the company’s board room during presentations, it knows it has to stay on its toes. The competition is not sleeping. There’s those who have the advantage of the platforms they are tied to. Like Apple’s iCloud service. Or those that just seem to be natural fits for most of us on a budget. Like Microsoft’s limitless OneDrive storage that is added as a bonus with all Office 365 subscriptions at around the same price (or higher!) that Dropbox will charge you for just storage. Others are even giving away unlimited storage space for photos albeit with some compression that some users won’t mind. Then there’s traditional competitors like Box. We’ve seen Dropbox introduce comments recently and integrate with more platforms. More such like developments are to be expected going forward.
Dropbox hit the 100 million user mark towards the end of 2012 (November), the 200 million mark a year later and 300 million users in May last year.
To put the milestone figure in perspective, here’s a quick timeline. Dropbox hit 100 million users in November 2012, 200 million in November 2013, and 300 million in May 2014. Thanks to increased competition and other factors, growth has slowed down a bit but things are still looking up.
