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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

#121

Post by ryan29 »

brianwawok wrote: post #95
djhworld wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their rigid pricing structure, £7.99 a month for 1TB is good value for people who use 1TB, but I only need like 10% of that so would be wasting money I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at £1.99 which suits my needs, but would m…

Real hard to make a business with a $2 a month fee. When credit card fees in the US, the bank is eating like 50 cents of it. I think 7-8 bucks/pounds is about the minimum price for many apps to bother with it. Below that rather just have a limited “free” tier.

Charge annually? I use Zoho for email because of their $12/year/user lite usage plan. There's no way I'd pay for MS365 or Google Workplace given my usage. I also have an MXRoute account, historio.us, etc. where the recurring theme is they cost $20/year or less.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#122

Post by passthejoe »

liminal wrote: post #43

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 ph…

How well does OneDrive work for files that aren't MS Office files?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#123

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

> 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.

The number of consumer services the average consumer actually pays for is very small.

Video services like Hulu and Netflix are the primary exception, but they benefitted greatly from being compared to $100+ cable TV packages. It's easy to get people to transition from an expensive thing to a cheaper option.

It's much more difficult to get people to switch from a free service to a paid service. YouTube is a good example of a platform that provides huge value and endless hours of video content to people, but selling people on the paid version of YouTube is a difficult battle. The outrage over the mere existence of YouTube premium on casual social sites like Reddit should be downright scary for anyone considering a Freemium service.

Dropbox gambled that the average consumer would outgrow their 10GB free account as they took more photos and videos with cell phones. That gamble was correct, but of course other providers swooped in to offer better targeted plans. I'll take $3/month iCloud with transparent integration over $10/month Dropbox with a separate app.

Dropbox business angle is promising, but again it's much easier for companies like Google and Microsoft to add storage plans to their existing office suites than it is for Dropbox to add office suites to their existing storage plans.

As a techie, I wish Dropbox had stayed as a small $3/month for 100GB offering that did file sharing very well and nothing else. The latest apps get in the way more than they help, and I cancelled my paid plan because the core set of files I want to keep Dropbox-accessible is under 10GB. Bigger files go to other free services on an as-needed basis.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#124

Post by cogman10 »

manigandham wrote: post #52
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 t…

I can't talk about GDrive or iCloud. However, window's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than dropbox IMO.

It actually surprised me how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just worked out of the box, the only thing I had to do was provide my windows credentials (benefits of that sort of integration).

That being said, I've not tried to access those same files from my phone. Maybe that's worse. Dropbox does a really good job of syncing well across platforms.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#125

Post by iscrewyou »

hattar wrote: post #74
manigandham wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer. Every time I encounter this I reconsider my Dropbox subscription.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. And once I close that window with Cmd+Q, I have a mild panic attack that I closed the actual service that was in the middle of a sync and may have lost some data.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#126

Post by rossdavidh »

Does anyone else feel like Dropbox has gotten worse in the last year or two? It used to be the "install and forget about it" option for backup and sync. My daughter and wife have both had to get my help in the last year in regards Dropbox failing to sync, failing to work well with Windows in regards to more than one Microsoft account on the same computer, and otherwise requiring me to think about it in a way that I didn't used to. I am a paying customer, albeit probably a small one.

I also notice they now keep pestering to convert to the "all cloud" option rather than having a local copy of everything and just using the cloud as the backup and sync infrastructure. It feels like they have shifted from the "make it easy to become a paying customer" model into the "make it hard to stop being a paying customer" model. That's not a great sign for growth.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#127

Post by te_chris »

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.

Absolutely this. As a producer as well dropbox means I can work off a laptop as my main machine - albeit a tricked out 15in mbp with 1TB SSD. Selective sync is amazing. The web UI is great for listening to demos and such - I'd love a playlist/play dir feature though.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#128

Post by rplnt »

brundolf wrote: post #21
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…

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.

Company can exist and provide good services even without being overvalued on a stock market. If there's anything dismaying it's to see how investors can kill good products because they want more.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#129

Post by donmcronald »

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.

If I'm paying for something I don't want to be engaged. I want to be efficient. It's incredible just how bad UIs have gotten in the last 10 years.

I use Nextcloud and there are parts of the UI that defy logic. For example, when I select a file it brings up an "Actions" menu that's hidden via a hamburger button. It has 4 options and I have about 3000px of horizontal whitespace on the same row.

TLDR; It's all hamburgers and whitespace and I don't understand why.

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