Business Analyst Case and Background-Dropbox

Fortune100 Strategic/Historical Analysis of DropBox                                                                2

Intro

Historical Perspectives

Year of Founding and the Founders

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowski. The motive for dropbox came from Drew’s frustration of having to work on multiple computers and not being able to sync his work to stay up to date on everything at the time. During the founding year of Dropbox, the only solutions to sync your work was flash drives and sending files as email attachments  to anyone whether that was to yourself or other people. Therefore, a modern update for storing files is a must.

Original Mission Statement vs the Current Statement

Original Mission Statement

“Most productive tools drain creative energy. They constantly ping, distract and disrupt your team’s flow. And none of them connect, so you spend days switching between apps, tracking down feedback. It’s busy work, not the meaningful stuff. We want to change this.” … “So, we’re building a home for all your team’s work. A better way to stay in flow and bring your team’s best ideas to life, asset of tools that minimize distractions.”…. (Dropbox:About Us, retrieved from https://www.dropbox.com/about) The first mission statement focused on the issues that resulted in the need for dropbox to be created. The issue focused on the barriers of using physical storable resources such as flash drives and sharing attachments via email. Dropbox provides an advantage by being able to sync the file at once regardless of computer of origins. Another feature is that busy work no longer exists for file management. This mission statement as a result reflects the need for Dropbox in 2007.

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Current Mission Statement

“We’re here to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working” (Dropbox, Intro Section) Dropbox currently focuses on a modern way to work by storing files in the cloud. Flash drives are good for portability but will not provide back up for any files.Therefore, it is important to be able to store files in the cloud to prevent losses of work overtime. Dropbox at the same time also continues to prevent the need to store files as email attachments in your email address.

The CEO’S and Senior Executives

Senior Management Team

Name of Manager or CEO

Position

Contributions/Responsibilities

Experience before Dropbox

Drew Houston

Co-Founder and CEO

·         Coming up with the idea for Dropbox.

·         General Direction for the company

·         Product Strategy

Unknown

Arash Ferdowsi

Co-Founder

·         Co-founding Dropbox with Drew Houston with easy navigation and corporate culture.

·         Product strategy and reliability

Unknown

Quentin Clark

Chief Technical Officer

·         Leader of Engineering, product and design departments

·         Manager at Microsoft, SAP and other major business application/engineering companies.

Yamini Rangan

Chief Customer Officer

Customer and business functions which include……

·         Sales

·         Marketing

·         Customer experience

·         Business strategy

·         Operations

·         Vice President of Sales Strategies and Operations at Workday.

Ajay Vashee

Chief Financial Officer

·         Head of the Financial and Strategy department which includes managing the financial, accounting, financial management, taxation and real estate departments at Dropbox

·         Investment Banker at Morgan Stanley

·         Venture Capital Associate at the National Education Association

Bart Volkmer

General Councel Member

·         Head of the legal, trust/security, and public policy departments

Lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati focusing on newly established technology companies.

Li-Hua Lu

VP of Communications

·         Head of the corporation, product, international and internal communication departments

·         Head of corporate communication at Square, INC.

·         Partner at the Brunswick Group

Fortune 100 Strategic/Historical Analysis of DropBox                                                                5

Current Sales and Profits

Currently, Dropbox has a revenue of $1,391,700,000which was dated from success in 2018. The sales rate from each employee is$599,096. Over 2,300 people are currently employed by Dropbox which is also dated from 2018 as well.

Challenges at Dropbox

Financial Challenge

Apple’s iCloud Storage service is a barrier for DropBox  as a result of pricing since2011 for a financial challenge. The issue even surfaced when Steve Jobs was still alive. iCloud currently offers 5GB free for every Apple product user regardless of device or timing while Dropbox offers a 30-day free trial to try out the service. After the 30-day trial of Dropbox, a user must choose a plan to continue service which is currently is $9.99 per month for 1TB of storage with the plus plan while the professional storage plan with 2TB of storage is $19.99per month. For value purposes, the customer could go for iCloud instead due to cheaper rates. iCloud has options for a 50GB plan at $0.99 per month, 200GBplan for $2.99 per month or 2TB for $9.99 per month. Therefore, this challenge is a consumer decision for personal and financial preference.

Legal Challenge

While Dropbox didn’t have any legal issues or lawsuits, lawyers however have been struggling to use the service in their law practices for various reasons. The first reason consists of storage, band width and limits problems. The second reason consists of disorganization and file inaccessibility. The third reason is loss of revisions and work history. The fourth and final reason is lack of security.

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The Strategy that Dropbox Uses

Growth Strategy

Dropbox currently uses a growth strategy to keep thriving in their success for several reasons. The first reason is the sign-up homepage. Anyone who is new to dropbox’s website first sees a two minute introductory video that shows what the service does while also persuading people at the same time to do a 30 day trial or go immediately into the purchase for a plan that is either monthly or yearly which is for individuals or teams of people especially if the subscription will be used for a business.The second reason is the simple sign up process. Anyone who choses to sign up for Dropbox has only a few they need to do before access the subscription or trial they signed up for. The third reason is the friend referral tool. Any user can recommend their friends for Dropbox which help them decide to join or not. After a referral was accepted, a user has an incentive to get more storage space on their subscription. The fourth reason is the social media connection.Anyone who participates in this incentive has the ability to gain more storage space after linking any of their social media accounts which includes Facebook and Twitter. The fifth reason is the sharing simplicity. Anytime a non-dropbox user accesses a file, no barriers exist for them to access any file that a user’s shares a link for like Google Drive does. The sixth reason is drop quests. Users can do activities such as puzzles online to gain more storage space at times. The final reason is multi-device accessibility. Dropbox can be accessed on many devices as a result of the quick download of the app to your chosen device.

Did the Co-CEO’s Make the Right Strategic Decision?

The CEO’s did an excellent with choosing their strategic method as a result of continuing their success by tailoring to their customer needs for cloud storage. Advertisements were not primarily necessary as a result of referrals primarily providing awareness about the brand to get more users to the site. Simplicity of subscribing the service was one of the additional factors that has kept Dropbox continuing to standout from other cloud storage services such as ICLOUD and Google Drive. Therefore, I wouldn’tchange the strategy for Dropbox if I was responsible for making the decision.

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Company Longevity

Will the company be around in 100 years from now?

Dropbox currently has a potential to be around for another 100 years from now, however it is based on two factors as a result of the impossible of finding an accurate expert prediction from known researcher. The first factor for influencing Dropbox’s longevity is the introductory of zettabyte storage (bigger than a terabyte). The second reason being that super computers will be more compact which will influence the need for more cloud storage in the future.Therefore, predictions need to be improved by doing more research for accuracy.