The "Drop Box Effect" Is A Myth

It's a painful lesson:

The logic works something like this: Devote the bulk of your funding to designing the product. CIO’s will fork over a piece of their sizable budget if enough employees get hooked and use it at work. Founders often tell me that just like cloud storage company Dropbox or enterprise social network Yammer, their product will be a hit with large organizations if it’s well-designed and easy to deploy.

Do a search for “Dropbox problem” or “Dropbox effect” and you’ll find thousands of articles. I agree that Dropbox has inspired more enterprise founders to experiment with freemium models or to build intuitive products, but it is not proof that a consumer-focused company can simply change focus to the enterprise without having to reengineer its technology from the ground up. View Full Story