Dropbox would ultimately have to start matching them & then slowly starts a downward spiral. However, if they move into the applications layer, the pricing pressure is less intense.
Eh. If price declines become a problem, Dropbox will be just like every other seemingly free consumer-facing service.
Sell data to advertisers.
It's making Facebook $6 per user per year, and as company databases get more and more massive (Did you know Facebook has 300 fucking petabytes of user data? And 5 years ago, Google was processing 24 petabytes per day.) and machine learning / data statistical analysis gets more and more advanced and software companies have more and more cultural capital and industry reliance (Software is eating the world, etc. etc.) that number can only go up higher. Mix $6 per user per year revenue with the massive increase in users you'd get from consumer-facing vs enterprise (everyone vs. a single business vertical) and you got yourself a consumer-facing company that makes so much more moolah than the equivalent enterprise company.
But I agree there's more pressure. There are much fewer winners in consumer-facing than enterprise. But Dropbox is just betting they'll be one of those winners.
Dropbox would ultimately have to start matching them & then slowly starts a downward spiral. However, if they move into the applications layer, the pricing pressure is less intense.