👉 Background: Dropbox was founded in 2007 when it launched storage in the 'cloud'. While that sounds basic now, it was revolutionary at the time of USBs and CD-ROMs. In 2008, it went viral after running a referral campaign doubling its user base which eventually grew into 700 million registered users.

👉 What happened: Now, Dropbox will lay off 20% of its workforce - or more than 500 staff, in areas where Dropbox has “over-invested”.

👉 What else: Dropbox has lost market share to many of its rivals, like Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive and Apple’s iCloud. In fact, Dropbox only added 63,000 new users in the most recent quarter which was its lowest quarter of growth in its history.

What's the key learning?

💡In the tech world, today’s groundbreaking product can quickly become tomorrow’s standard feature.

💡For Dropbox, this means their cloud storage, which was once pretty revolutionary… is now just one of many cloud storage services, competing against Google and Microsoft who already have billions of users collectively.

💡Dropbox isn’t the first product to become a common, undifferentiated feature in another company’s app. Just like Zoom, there are other competitors around like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams who are turning video-calls into just another feature of their workplace suite of products.