There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that s

There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain. For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs. The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues. It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share. IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers. Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO. IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.