I picked up DBX right on its IPO, primarily because of its brand. My thinking was that with brand, revenue, and customer base, it was a very ripe takeover target.
Normally I never buy stocks because they might be a takeover target - it is just like gambling. Brand is a different point it is hard to build and worth a lot on the internet.
But when Google recently repriced their Google Drive storage, it got me thinking. I realized that my thoughts on Dropbox were based on my reminiscences from when they were a first mover in personal cloud storage.
Today they have lots of competition and no moat. Not only that, their competition includes very nice offerings by Google and Microsoft. These are the products I can’t do without - Microsoft for convenience, Google Drive for collaboration. DropBox is just a commodity provider.
I realized I had made a mistake in buying Dropbox, and decided to sell on the next up day. I’m glad to get out of my mistake with 10% profit. Now I won’t be concerned even if Dropbox gets bought out tomorrow at a nice premium.
I think it’s important to evaluate your stocks and make sure you are still happy with your decisions. I don’t buy stocks planning for quick flips, but I have no problem with selling if my thesis is proved wrong, or I made a mistake. Buy and verify, sell and don’t look back 
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Brilliant. Especially since Dropbox is essentially a custom implementation / UI of standard AWS EC2 / EC3 & edge services. First mover and a widely known & successful name, but not a moat.
Interesting. I never entered DropBox but held onto my BOX which is in break out.
I guess there are 3 points 1 germane to BOX and the others relating to both.
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BOX is investing heavily in AI in order to add artificial intelligence to storage, access, sharing, retrieval and combination of data assets
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Both may or may not be commodities but they are in an area of massive growth demand (in the cloud based big data storage era)
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One argument against the commoditisation aspect are certain regulatory and industry standards that come into play. Similar to how a requirement for government and insurance recognised cyber security standards differentiates one Next Gen firewall etc vs another and similar to how non-substitutability regulations and standards prevent substitution of one flash memory chip supply vs another e.g. Micron or how an original off patent drug with proprietary delivery or coating mechanisms differentiates from a generic medication version - so also the requirements to have industry recognised online secure storage of mission critical data is a differentiator. One of the reasons why we moved from DropBox to BOX was that in our lifescience and healthcare industry, BOX has the industry HIMSS recognition for data storage and security and Drop Box didn’t. (HIMSS = Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society).
Not sure how you guys feel about these points or BOX specifically but I’m still holding although I recognise your position and arguments.
Ant
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