> "The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day."
I'm guessing more than a few found out from this article directly. What a rough way to find out you were laid off.
Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
301–310 of 689 posts
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#302Earlier 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.
Unfortunately, it's inevitable, since presenting a regular file explorer looks like they're competing in the commodity file syncing / backup space, not the higher-value enterprise collaboration space. They're trying not to be a "feature" as Steve Jobs called them.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#303Dropbox as a small business makes sense. Quality syncing, a few productivity tools like Paper. Along the lines of https://readdle.com Dropbox as a publicly traded global megacorp does not make sense.
To play the devil’s advocate: maybe it doesn’t make sense if you think of Dropbox as a utility for syncing files across computers. But maybe it does make sense if you think of them as a company that’s responsible for safely and securely storing a non-trivial share of world’s data.
Unfortunately, there's really no moat & no differentiation (so others could also be horizontal competitors, making this a commodity), and the giant platform players will always make it easier for their own vertically-integrated offerings to work better with their customer-valuable services and products.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#304you know what doesn’t get talked about: severence. why do we need it? why do employers give it? should one negotiate it? what is fair/unfair?
> why do employers give it?
Because employers want you to sign a general release of claims, non-disparagement agreement, and/or other agreements when being sent off, and those aren't binding contracts without something in exchange.
And because, in many industries, to avoid hard feelings—if you aren't being let go for cause, especially if you have networks in a high-demand field, they want you giving positive or neutral referrals, not negative ones. And as things shift, they might even want you back.
And because the practice maintains the incentive for loyalty when company performance gives reason to expect imminent layoffs: if you don't give severance, the financial cost of quitting or being fired compared to being laid off is smaller.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Box ate their lunch in the corporate sphere and they have a lot more competition in the consumer space from things like OneDrive and iCloud Drive. The only reason I still have Dropbox at all is because I don’t have a reason to pull the plug—and it wouldn’t have to be much of an excuse.
I actually just moved all my stuff from Dropbox to B2 buckets. My December bill was like $0.09
I'm interested in moving off Dropbox in the same way, and B2 sounds interesting. Is there an app comparable to Dropbox working with B2, or did you have to build that app yourself?
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#306Dropbox as a small business makes sense. Quality syncing, a few productivity tools like Paper. Along the lines of https://readdle.com Dropbox as a publicly traded global megacorp does not make sense.
It does as Box seems to be doing fine. It was Dropbox failure at enterprise and trying to focus on consumer when other companies are offering similar features for free. Just bad strategy
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#307> I realize this is incredibly hard on the Dropboxers and their families who are impacted, and I take full responsibility for this decision.
What does it even mean to say you take full responsibility for the decision? Is the CEO taking a huge compensation cut for having arrived at this stage? What difference does that make for the ones who are let go (other than perhaps an official letter that they weren’t fired for cause)?
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#308The 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.
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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#309Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning. I was an early adopter of both of them, and they worked well. Dropbox sync between different machines worked like magic. I still remember some of the nightmares my coworkers had with OneDrive in meetings when the files for the presentations were missing because…
There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google gives away a shitty form of your service for free because the costs are a rounding error to them, people will feel like the service has no value.
I don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this. Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from entering into competition without any potential for profit? At the end of the day, maybe the world as a whole doesn't care that they are missing out on small cool tech companies that will never get huge? But, of course, in an environment where small cool tech is unsustainable we'll never know if they would eventually get huge.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#310Migrated from Dropbox when I noticed that their client uses about 300 Mb of memory on Windows and my old laptop with HDD was terribly slow just right after booting. WTF? Is it really necessary 300Mb of memory to just sync my files to the cloud?
I've been on macOS for years now, but was installing Dropbox on a Windows machine. It kept downloading that client instead of the folder sync app.
Took me a while to figure out why.. the Windows Install / Store interstitial is doing them no favors, and their documentation barely even addresses the "Install anyway" link you need to click on.