The opportunity cost is staggering. Not just of the people that do the work, but the cost of focus and top-level priorities over the years it takes to do the work.
Everybody loves to cite DropBox here. The greater arc of DropBox is their product stalled, they lost the enterprise of their market to Box, and they found themselves a commodity in a commodity market. Heck, maybe they'll go back to Amazon if they keep doing things like this: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/
But that's not all. It takes a top-level directive to repatriate an entire SaaS. That's at the cost of other top-level projects. It's wild to me that any company that has significant fuel left in the tank would buy back single-digit COGS percentages instead of investing in product that could add double-digit growth for several years at scale.
Everybody loves to cite DropBox here. The greater arc of DropBox is their product stalled, they lost the enterprise of their market to Box, and they found themselves a commodity in a commodity market. Heck, maybe they'll go back to Amazon if they keep doing things like this: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/
But that's not all. It takes a top-level directive to repatriate an entire SaaS. That's at the cost of other top-level projects. It's wild to me that any company that has significant fuel left in the tank would buy back single-digit COGS percentages instead of investing in product that could add double-digit growth for several years at scale.