, Columnist
The Best Thing for Dropbox Was Breaking Up With the Cloud
The shift away from Amazon raises questions about whether others will follow suit.
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Four paragraphs in Dropbox's IPO filing highlight the limits of cloud computing for at least a subset of companies, with ramifications for Amazon, Google and others.
Those paragraphs in the public offering document (page 67) summarize the difficult and nerdy work to shift a vast volume of Dropbox users' digital files from Amazon's computer networks to Dropbox's own and to close dormant accounts to free up storage capacity. This yearslong shift to wean Dropbox off Amazon Web Services wasn't glamorous work, but it improved Dropbox's finances substantially. Without exaggeration, the shift away from cloud computing is one of the biggest reasons Dropbox is able to go public now.