Much has been written about this one, but does the recent Salesforce bid tell us anything about the likelihood about a play for Dropbox? The two have a whole list of similarities from a Microsoft perspective. Dropbox is to storage what Salesforce is to CRM. Both Dropbox and Salesforce have pursued a path of tight integration of their platforms with Microsoft – Dropbox, in particular, has gone to great lengths to ensure that its platform integrates seamlessly with Office, owing to the large amount of its customers’ storage that is accounted for by Office files.
By that same token, Dropbox and Salesforce both share a huge number of customers with Microsoft and those same shared goals again of enabling productivity in the cloud and on mobile. It is also safe to say that Dropbox and Salesforce have outperformed OneDrive and Dynamics quite significantly and have become the de facto standards in their fields, with huge user numbers – Dropbox currently has 300 million+ users and 88,000 paying companies on its books. So, with so much in common, the question becomes why wouldn’t Microsoft make a bid for Dropbox just like it did for Salesforce?
Well, it may be that Microsoft has more confidence in the potential of OneDrive than it has in Dynamics. It might also be true that the storage market is more commoditized than CRM, and while Salesforce has a differentiated offering that would be very difficult to replicate in Dynamics, it might be more feasible that OneDrive can catch up with Dropbox from a user experience perspective.
However, the most likely reason for Microsoft to shy away from Dropbox will be the same reason the Salesforce bid failed – Dropbox is currently valued at around $10 billion, which is roughly 25x its ARR. Is it worth that much plus a premium to Microsoft? I’m not so sure, but stranger things have happened, and Nadella has a lot of cash burning a hole in his pocket.