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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

#51

Post by perlgeek »

dralley wrote: post #10
jimmaswell wrote: post #5

Dropbox lost me permanently as a potential customer with their greed and disregard for user experience. Constant nagging if you're at ~80% your free limit and the more recent draconian device limits for two examples. I hope they fail.

I get what you're saying but "greed" is not the way I would put it. Look at their financials, 2020 is the first year in their history in which they will have been profitable at all. I think as consumers we're starting to get totally unrealistic expectations about what kinds of services small companies (ie. not behemouths like Google, Microsoft, Apple) should be able to provide to everyone for free. With that said, ye…

Dropbox is also to blame for user's expectations, because they did offer more in the past, for free.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#52

Post by manigandham »

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.

The company is nowhere near failing. It's just not necessary to be as big as it is.

Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com.

I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#53

Post by itsoktocry »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #44

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.

>But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and innovation.

I dream of the day when people will link the "Why use Dropbox when you can just..." HackerNews comment unironically.

People like to do the "success!" victory laps quite early. There's more to success than a cool product and insiders getting to exit wealthy. I think this is still a yet-to-be-seen situation.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#54

Post by yoz-y »

threatofrain wrote: post #14

It's too bad Apple and Dropbox didn't hit it off in their earlier days. Apple's file management experience still isn't up to Dropbox's level.

A major advantage of dropbox is that it works everywhere. There is quite a change that wouldn't be the case had Apple bought them.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#55

Post by brundolf »

raiyu wrote: post #30
brundolf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

I disagree; file syncing is still exactly what I want. Disk space has gotten exponentially cheaper over the years, and at the same time the amount of bulk media that people store as personal files has been dramatically cut down thanks to streaming services for music and video. I don't mind at all having my entire Dropbox mirrored across my devices; it holds basically every local file I care about, and having a local copy also gives me some peace of mind in case I ever get locked out of my account or something (which Google in particular has become notorious for). You can also, now, select subdirectories that you want to exclude from the current device. At the same time, having it in the cloud means I don't have to worry if my hard drive dies. Any file that I've thoughtlessly kept there while working on it is safe by default.

Maybe the story would be different if I ever created classical "documents" and could benefit from Office 365 or Google Docs, but I don't, and so having a cloud-first storage "drive" that primarily holds things which integrate with that particular cloud service isn't very useful to me.

> But their growth chasing leads to a degraded user experience

You're right that parts of the product have gotten distracted/annoying by trying to build out new differentiators. But the core product (file syncing and backup) still works much better than competitors, and it's not hard to simply ignore the new stuff.

Also, perhaps most importantly: I use products from multiple tech giants, and all three major operating systems, and I specifically don't want my cloud storage to only integrate well with one of them. I want it to work equally well across everything. And Dropbox does, at least compared with the competition.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#56

Post by vorpalhex »

chrisseaton wrote: post #29
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.

> 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?

If you see Dropbox as a service for managing files, and many of us do, then not being able to easily download the actual file is annoying. The client still won't let you set a preference for direct download links instead of dropbox preview links, the android client is basically useless and more and more the features added have no value to me as a user.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#57

Post by vorpalhex »

chrisseaton wrote: post #39
notdang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for me it's a sign that marketing people took over the company

I don't get why marketing would care about a minor detail in the UI after you're already using the product?

User retention. Keep people in the platform so they can't take their data. Force users to come back to dropbox again and again (to run up your engagement stats) instead of throwing the file over Slack or whatever.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#58

Post by prionassembly »

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.

Dropbox had a discontinuous price increase a couple of years ago that soured me on them. I'm still a user -- the price is still a couple of notches below marginal utility. But I no longer recommend it.

Something similar happened to Evernote -- I stopped liking the brand when I started to feel price-gouged. And then I quit on them shortly after when the apps were not snappy and well-organized to my liking (at the price they were charging me). I was a bit of an Evernote evangelizer too.

For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from canned peaches and pineapples.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#59

Post by TurningCanadian »

disantlor wrote: post #49
planb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 driv…

You don't use the web interface much, eh?
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