>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."
Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.
I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.
Someone questioned whether Dropbox could compete with Amazon at scale, but decided to delete it. This is a really valid question. I recalled a while back that Backblaze asked a similar question and came up with a really cool solution.
I see this as Dropbox's future. PaaS is good for getting started, but with numbers like what's shown in that blog post, it's hard to argue that something like S3 is really priced at commodity levels.
This same line of reasoning came up with the last few Netflix stories to hit HN. Netflix depends on Amazon who runs a competing on-demand video service. The general consensus is that Amazon's divisions are independent enough to not try anything funny. More importantly, Amazon is big enough that they wouldn't risk the publicity fallout of monkeying with the competition's services.
Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.
I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.