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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

cnbc.com

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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#41

Post by raiyu »

nvarsj wrote: post #35
raiyu wrote: 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…

What do you use as an alternative to Dropbox? I haven't found anything that works as well across multiple platforms. I really hate all the feature bloat in it, which I never use, and weird decisions like dropping non-ext4. But still, for basic file syncing it seems hard to beat.

My use case maybe different from yours but GDrive has worked well for me.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#42

Post by judge2020 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20
judge2020 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have gone all in on Dropbox Paper and building out an office suite to compete with GSuite and O365. Didn't happen.

This is a steep hill to climb. Microsoft is deeply entrenched in enterprises with .Net, Active Directory, SQL server, all that jazz (witness how fast Teams sped past Slack usage). It's easier for Microsoft to roll out storage than it is for Dropbox to become Microsoft or Google. Jobs was right, Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

https://www.notion.so/ is a thing, so there's probably a market, but it would be extremely hard to pull off.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#43

Post by liminal »

I recall someone who worked there describing people being paid to do nothing, just so they wouldn't be hired by anyone else. Sounded like they had fat to cut.

Regarding their product and viability, I've always relied on their product and have found it to generally perform better than OneDrive or Google drive. But I can get 1TB of OneDrive for $70/year with all the Office apps and I need Google drive for my phone's photos, so I've never seen the point of paying DropBox. Their value prop was commodified.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#44

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

Dropbox:

- CPU runaway consumption on OSX.

- Annoying off-on drive storage paradigm.

- Annoying integration with other apps (eg. Excel).

- Little differentiation from competition.

- Poor integration with their other offerings (eg. Paper).

But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and innovation. There are 5 or 6 initiatives they could implement now that would turn the tide.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#46

Post by PedroBatista »

disantlor wrote: post #26
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #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.

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.

Too bad for Dropbox and other companies HN people are not the only ones.

There are at least two big variables here:

1 - Is the new UI actually better? by how much?

2 - What's the cost of change for the existing users?

Bonus complexity: There are large groups of different customers inside your customer base.

If your product is the best ever with no competitor in sight you can annoy them almost indefinitely, the second anything remotely similar appears, all the built up resentment just fuels the migration and it usually behaves like a tsunami, at first it's barely noticeable until a 3 foot wall keeps going and going and you can't do anything about it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#47

Post by manigandham »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20
judge2020 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have gone all in on Dropbox Paper and building out an office suite to compete with GSuite and O365. Didn't happen.

This is a steep hill to climb. Microsoft is deeply entrenched in enterprises with .Net, Active Directory, SQL server, all that jazz (witness how fast Teams sped past Slack usage). It's easier for Microsoft to roll out storage than it is for Dropbox to become Microsoft or Google. Jobs was right, Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

It doesn't have to be another clone. For example Quip was acquired by Sales and there are tons of modern collaboration software tools like Airtable, Notion, Slack, etc. They could've created a suite that was tailored around that while leveraging their existing integrations with Office.

Also people forget Box.com exists and does an even better job with corporate storage than Dropbox with much better features and UX.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#48

Post by hokumguru »

tlogan wrote: post #23

The only way that Dropbox can stay independent is that they develop some email solution. Small companies (which I believe are core of Dropbox business) need just 3 things: email, docs and spreadsheets.

Funny enough I think Basecamp must have realized this exact niche a few years ago because they now offer all three of those for small business.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#49

Post by disantlor »

planb wrote: post #34
disantlor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are not simply UI changes. Dropbox implements more and more dark patterns that go directly against everything it once stood for. This service used to be a fire-and-forget way to have a local directory that's also online and on multiple machines. Now it's a service that tries to be everything at once and never gets out of your way.

I have to say I have literally never once had the thought that Dropbox is in my way. I have a 3TB pro account which I have setup on my studio computer with full sync to an external drive. I record/work on sessions with sync continually active. Both of those things should be "no no"'s, but it works fine.

I go home and my laptop is smart syncing the recently active sessions only which conserves space on the laptop drive but lets me do some small work on recently active sessions.

It's totally seamless and I cannot recall the last time I was even alerted by Dropbox about anything except that I was hitting my 3TB cap soon.

The only issue I ever had was using it on Windows where it would occasionally create conflicted file copies, which was annoying, but moving to OSX resolved that.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#50

Post by beached_whale »

raiyu wrote: post #41
nvarsj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use as an alternative to Dropbox? I haven't found anything that works as well across multiple platforms. I really hate all the feature bloat in it, which I never use, and weird decisions like dropping non-ext4. But still, for basic file syncing it seems hard to beat.

My use case maybe different from yours but GDrive has worked well for me.

The others are generally not supported on Linux. Dropbox has a cli client here that mostly works. At least if we are talking Google/Microsoft. Or the companies are small enough to go under overnight and leave me in a lurch
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