Large companies like PayPal have many sub systems, division and units that need to function to even keep the company alive. To give you a small example, say if you are running PayPal- For a company of that scale you can't really plan any thing on the business side unless you measure things, so suddenly you see a requirement for a system which will deal only with metrics and analytics. Once your user base grows out to a large size, suddenly you will find yourself running large data centers, service engineering teams and their operations. You will need dedicated sales teams to tackle those problems, product teams to ensure crap doesn't shipped out. You will need architects who can make a dozen systems work together, you will product managers decide the right technical course for the future. You will need program managers to ensure engineers hit the deadlines. You will need QE teams to break stuff what engineers overlook.

Yes you can argue that you may not need all that, but when you do that you will inevitably find somebody or the other in the organization doing those jobs, albeit the scenario will now be a lot more chaotic with no center of ownerships and responsibility.

It becomes difficult to move quickly in such places.

"How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?"

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298...

Good luck to Stripe and co, they are doing what PayPal should have been doing all along: iterating the platform.

https://www.x.com/products

They're also doing new vertical-oriented products for governments, banks and education.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/other-solutions-overview

Case in point: I wanted to use PayPal to let users buy my apps, went through the x.com site, and quickly dropped it. Way too complex. Now Stripe on the other hand, that's something I'd really like to integrate with my apps.

I'm not saying PayPal can't possibly improve the situation, but they need to start talking to their customers in plain, simple language. What they're doing now is a red flag to me that I've seen in several other places, right before they were obsoleted and fizzled.

Not stagnant, but definitely not innovative.

So many alternatives have been proposed but they are no way even close to replacing the qwerty layout.

I'm a Paypal employee, so I'm biased, but when the credit card company decides to reverse a payment, Paypal really doesn't have a lot of options.

Small companies with small user base predominantly dominated by power technology users can do that.

Its a little unfair to compare a start up with large corp in these issues. The right time will be when stripe will be as big as PayPal is now.

Pointy-haired management at its finest. It's a predictable ritual whenever a new CEO comes in that he will (a) cut jobs, because it plays well with Wall St. and immediately raises the value of his stock grants, and (b) micromanage and force a one-size-fits-all policy on everyone, imposing change for the sake of change, just to mark his territory like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant - in this case by making them work in bullpens. Of course CXO's are in meetings all day long and thrive on nonstop face-to-face interaction, and they can't imagine anyone working differently. They don't realize that when engineers are in meetings, they're not getting their work done. A year from now Marcus will be baffled why engineer productivity has plummeted since he took over.

Is there any indication their engineering productivity in recent years, anyway? I've seen a few design refreshes..

The only company that can do international marketplace payment processing is PayPal and no one is even close to creating the infrastructure for this.

BalancedPayments is very good but they only do U.S.

Yikes - that kind of surprises me. Braintree and Stripe will be sending out the recruiters......

In fact from my experience, the guys with most political contacts inside the companies generally get the most security.

Low wage workers rarely get cut first.

Based on that criteria we could probably cut some 15% of the total workforce. For many employees, that's all they do is attend meetings, all day long. We call these employees managers. :)

Startups where almost everyone is actually working (save VC chosen CEO's) and there's no room for corporate welfare I guess bigger companies might perceive them as "nimble".

Is that a euphemism for efficient?

The actual development team will be small in comparison.

A large product like PayPal might have dozens of sub systems. Its difficult to imagine from the outside the dynamics of large companies and how they function.

http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...

It's just another one of those companies that think profit is made with margins, and not with an actual product.

It's more a service, but whatever it is, they do have an "actual" one.

PayPal has been a cornerstone of my income since around 2001. Nowadays, there are several other services I could (and might) practically switch to, but for a good 8 years or so, it was them or nothing in the sort of business I ran. I consider that an "actual" product or service since without it, I wouldn't be where I am now.

I am far from a PayPal evangelist and find a lot of the stories about their practices saddening, but the facts are clear to me, they've offered me one heck of a useful service over the years that no-one else was able to.