Dropbox reflection paper
Cassie Jian – Reflection paper #1 – Dropbox
This Dropbox case study, to me, was a very interesting one to read just because there were so many different elements to think about as well as an overwhelming amount of information included in the case. I always enjoy the reading the case studies because it always amazes me to read about and think about how something so big and so popular in the present started out so small, virtually from nothing. I think that one of the biggest reasons this company is so successful is because the idea is so new and fresh. Back in the early 2000s, before smartphones came around, people were totally fine with a handheld cellphone that only had 0-9 number keys and a menu button; before that, people lived perfectly fine without cellphones period. When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, they solved a social connectivity problem that people weren’t even aware of, which just further fueled all the hype around it and made everyone think that the iPhone was that much greater only because it was so new and different, and nothing like it had ever been introduced before. Drew Houston said it himself, “If you don’t think you have a problem, you’re not going to look for a solution.” So in the same sense, that’s part of what made Dropbox so enticing and so attractive to investors – because people didn’t even realize that it was a problem, until the idea of anything like it first came into fruition. Carrying around a USB drive or having to email things to yourself was the norm; it was what everyone did and no one knew any better. When different file-sharing services started to emerge, that was when people started realizing, “wow, this is potentially a major issue, and it needs fixing.” Dropbox started out by providing services to individual consumers, but it eventually extended to small businesses and today there are more than 300 million people who use it around the world. But the targeted focus group when it first started was the normal,
This Dropbox case study, to me, was a very interesting one to read just because there were so many different elements to think about as well as an overwhelming amount of information included in the case. I always enjoy the reading the case studies because it always amazes me to read about and think about how something so big and so popular in the present started out so small, virtually from nothing. I think that one of the biggest reasons this company is so successful is because the idea is so new and fresh. Back in the early 2000s, before smartphones came around, people were totally fine with a handheld cellphone that only had 0-9 number keys and a menu button; before that, people lived perfectly fine without cellphones period. When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, they solved a social connectivity problem that people weren’t even aware of, which just further fueled all the hype around it and made everyone think that the iPhone was that much greater only because it was so new and different, and nothing like it had ever been introduced before. Drew Houston said it himself, “If you don’t think you have a problem, you’re not going to look for a solution.” So in the same sense, that’s part of what made Dropbox so enticing and so attractive to investors – because people didn’t even realize that it was a problem, until the idea of anything like it first came into fruition. Carrying around a USB drive or having to email things to yourself was the norm; it was what everyone did and no one knew any better. When different file-sharing services started to emerge, that was when people started realizing, “wow, this is potentially a major issue, and it needs fixing.” Dropbox started out by providing services to individual consumers, but it eventually extended to small businesses and today there are more than 300 million people who use it around the world. But the targeted focus group when it first started was the normal,