These kinds of talent shifts tend to accelerate as the company becomes more successful. Remember when google was giving $1m offers to keep engineers from going to Facebook pre-IPO?
Anecdotally, it looks like this is true for top college grads as well.
The fact is that the core product kind of sucks. It is slow to upload, very CPU intensive and incredibly slow to receive new features. And its focus on API data syncing as a growth area seems fraught with danger given iCloud and likely similar services from Microsoft, Ubuntu, Google etc.
It also has no stickiness associated to it. I could easily transition to a competitor's product with no loss of data or productivity. And if it wasn't the best of a pretty sad bunch then I would have years ago.
> The negatives you mentioned aren't noticeable to 99% of end users
Further, anyone who has used Dropbox knows about the slow upload and download rates (especially noticeable if you have a semi-decent internet connection).
>they got the product right the first time and they don't seem like they have anywhere to go from here
My parents use Google, they reluctantly signed up for Facebook (and got bored and stopped using it), but they'll never have a need for Dropbox. Nor will any of their friends, or most of my friends.
With the trend towards appliance computers and walled gardens, users interact with their file systems less than ever. Their tagline is "Never email yourself a file again!" I can't remember the last time I emailed myself a file. It might as well be "Never transfer a file between computers using a floppy disk again!"
When I was a student, and I had a desktop, a laptop, and lab computer, Dropbox came in handy on occasion. Now, I have a laptop and tablet. What would I sync between my them? Photos? Music? Notes? Cloud sharing is built in, and it's less of a hassle than going through Dropbox.
I'm sure there are people for whom it is essential. But those people are probably in the minority, and their numbers are likely to dwindle.
Everyone who uses a computer to store any kind of unique content at all is a potential Dropbox user. Many people just don't know it until the first time they want an older version of something back, accidentally delete something or have a hard drive give out.
The big challenge is mobile. Dropbox's main stickiness is when developers adopt the Dropbox API, particularly on mobile. If you just use Apple for mobile, iCloud is in some ways superior (although has Dropbox's same horrible security). There's no one doing a better job than Dropbox of crossplatform on lame devices like iOS and Android in addition to desktops (and game systems, etc.).
(I admit I'm pretty biased against Dropbox because they both lied blatantly and horribly about security for a long time, and then, when caught, did a minimal job of just handwaving and continuing as before. They make file security markedly worse for users than it was before Dropbox.)
I don't think "dropbox for teams" is much stickiness; I don't know of anyone using it in serious deployments, and in a serious deployment, switching wouldn't be that hard, either.
First, one typically has a private dropbox that they keep a bunch of stuff in. When one joins a company that is using dropbox for teams - it cuts off access to your personal dropbox, and whenever the company has rule over your account - if you leave the company, lets say abruptly, you can lose access to your data.
I don't care what anyone says about any employment relationship - there is some data that is private and crucial, and you should never save any of it in a shared team dropbox.
Finally, sharing things with people via dropbox is a stupid and inefficient way of handling sharing; Assume you have a paid 50-100GB Dropbox. Storing large files/data in there is no-issue. Sometimes you'll want to share out a project directory with another user - but they may not be a paid dropbox user. If they join your shared folder, that data gets replicated to them and they get that data deducted from their available space. So, dropbox is "counting" the space for that data on both accounts. If that other user has a small or mostly full account - that project share could bring them to their cap.
This happened to people I shared data with on large projects many many times.
If I share out a folder from me to you - and you join my share - you should get a free connection to that share, as it is using data from my account limit, not yours.
Don't forget they were implicated as "coming soon" in the whole PRISM/NSA saga. No thanks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
It went from really shitty infrastructure to somewhat less so to somewhat less so, vs. starting from crap and doing amazing work to make it work well (Facebook), or technical excellence from day one (Google).
OTOH, Twitter is way "cooler" than Dropbox, in terms of having political impact, standing up for users vs. the US Government, used by "cool" (non-tech) people, etc.
Twitter employee here: Always surprised at the amount of ridiculously talented people I work with. :)
To me, it feels like "We have the best people! You don't work here, so you must not be very good. Therefore, I'm better than you."
That's obviously not what they mean, but it strikes chords of jealousy and social exclusion when shouted in a public square.
Twitter has always been known for their Super Ego Employees though. Work 12 hours a day, go home, run twelve miles, cook a gourmet dinner, have three dates (sleep with two of them), check email before bed, sleep for four hours, then start over the next day. (with oversharing online humblebrags every step of the way, obviously)
If you're joining the company today, there better be significant growth story to justify 4x-5x growth from $10 bil baseline. If it's just 2x-3x, heck, joining GOOG, YHOO or AAPL might yield the same results if you timed it right.
(I also personally wouldn't really label Dropbox as "bigco" label like Google and Facebook, if only because you can still fit everyone in one medium-large room. I guess it's not a startup anymore, but I don't think anyone would consider it a lumbering corporate behemoth).