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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#21
post #9

Dropbox has been hammered by Wall Street ever since it went public. On the surface it should be trading well enough given it's revenue growth from when it went public to now, however, the narrative of competing with both Microsoft and Google was a tough one to play down. Revenue growth will slow down to below 20% in 2021 which basically starts to take DBX out of the high growth tech stock focus and it is trading at l…

It's dismaying that even the best, most shining examples of unicorns that took off on the backs of good products and have stood toe-to-toe with the mega-corps, are now losing value simply because they're competing with the mega-corps, and being forced to look for acquisitions just like all the other startups.

If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big, I don't know what will.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#22
Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox.

Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#24
post #11

I interviewed with Dropbox before their IPO. It felt like an old company that everyone is coasting. I wonder how young companies get to that point so quickly?

By not innovating in new products would be my guess. Dropbox is their product and? There's "Corporate Dropbox" and that's it?

I feel like a lot of the companies are the same way though. I mean AirBnB pretty much only ever has had 1 product.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#25
post #2

I was JUST seeing job opportunities in my LinkedIn from these folks. That's just careless.

I too was planning on applying to them in the next few days. But I will first find out who exactly is being cut out. This article says that its some support staff (I assume these are mainly non-technical people), but it does raise some concerns.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#26

Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox. Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.

For me, Dropbox is a great product that makes my life/workflow with music production so much easier and convenient. Moving interface things around is at worst annoying but really just trivial. I don't understand why people on HN get so reliably get fired up about UI changes.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#27
post #18

Can you draw parallels between Zoom and Dropbox? Users love the product but it makes less sense for the IT department to pay for them when Microsoft and Google are offering similar and "good enough" alternatives for "free"? Can Zoom survive?

Zoom didn't gain traction by being a pioneer in video conferencing, they gained traction by offering a far superior and easier experience, I agree some dark patterns are leveraged for that experience but at the end of the day a zoom meeting is easier to start and is of a higher quality than what Microsoft and Google have offered for years and especially in Google's case seemed to consider a solved problem.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#28
post #9

Dropbox has been hammered by Wall Street ever since it went public. On the surface it should be trading well enough given it's revenue growth from when it went public to now, however, the narrative of competing with both Microsoft and Google was a tough one to play down. Revenue growth will slow down to below 20% in 2021 which basically starts to take DBX out of the high growth tech stock focus and it is trading at l…

It's dismaying that even the best, most shining examples of unicorns that took off on the backs of good products and have stood toe-to-toe with the mega-corps, are now losing value simply because they're competing with the mega-corps , and being forced to look for acquisitions just like all the other startups. If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big, I don't know what will.

For me it was the lack of storage tiers. When the only options is to get 1TB or more, I think you lost a lot of users. Additionally, they should have figured out a way to share storage with a family, if the only profitable storage tiers are 1TB or more then let people share it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#29

Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox. Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.

> Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button for a file shared with me on Dropbox.

Why is this such a huge problem for you? Seems super minor?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#30
post #9

Dropbox has been hammered by Wall Street ever since it went public. On the surface it should be trading well enough given it's revenue growth from when it went public to now, however, the narrative of competing with both Microsoft and Google was a tough one to play down. Revenue growth will slow down to below 20% in 2021 which basically starts to take DBX out of the high growth tech stock focus and it is trading at l…

It's dismaying that even the best, most shining examples of unicorns that took off on the backs of good products and have stood toe-to-toe with the mega-corps, are now losing value simply because they're competing with the mega-corps , and being forced to look for acquisitions just like all the other startups. If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big, I don't know what will.

That's certainly one perspective, the other is that in the consumer segment churn is high but also the are a tremendous amount of people.

Dropbox had a head start but over time other companies like Google where able to build out competing services and because the total population of potential consumers continued to increase, a lead today, doesn't guarantee a lead tomorrow.

The other side of is that what made Dropbox amazing at the beginning, the ability to sync files with direct access on your computer, is actually now a detriment. Many users don't want the files locally, download speeds have increased dramatically (I have 1Gbps fiber at my apartment), so having the files locally is actually annoying and takes up diskspace, so you have a bit of a late mover advantage, especially if the population of available consumers continues to increase.

In this case it isn't simply X couldn't compete with big Tech, the landscape did shift a bit.

It's also important to note that Dropbox is still a very successful company, and if they aren't chasing revenue growth and profit they still provide a great service to consumers. But their growth chasing leads to a degraded user experience, which also pushes people away from their product and has them explore alternatives to really see if it's an apples to apples comparison. And that's where the "cloud" first storage solutions today present a better platform.

What really slows this down is the cost of switching for older customers that have a tremendous amount of data already in Dropbox and have it integrated into their workflows so it really isn't a fun project to migrate off.

This is also where the price increases create revenue growth because customers aren't willing to go through the pain of migration, but you aren't delivering more value to them, instead you are playing off of the cost switching to drive revenue growth and that begins a downward trajectory.

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