Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#331

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

jiveturkey wrote: post #257

tidepod12 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same thing. COBRA means you continue any healthcare plan you had while employed, with the only difference being you pay the full premium rather than your company subsidizing it. But in this case, it seems Dropbox is still subsidizing it (if that is indeed what that sentence in the letter means)... so it is just continued health coverage.

It's not the same thing. Continued healthcare means you are fully on the employer plan and afterwards, the COBRA timer starts. Paying for COBRA means the timer starts now.

Employer health plans can't cover non-employees.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#332

Post by brightball » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #291

brightball wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely accurate. I didn’t even realize this was a thing, but on the Dropbox web interface you can now open docs, slideshows and spreadsheets in either Office365 or Google Office without accounts on either.

Oh, I didn’t know this. Thanks for sharing

I been using Dropbox since the beginning and I only discovered it last week.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#333

Post by hs86 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

abyrvalgg wrote: post #243

Migrated 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?

This week I canceled Dropbox, and on my Windows PC, I moved ~500 GiB from my Dropbox folder over to the Google Drive File Stream volume.

I barely noticed any CPU usage from GDFS, and Dropbox.exe was also somewhat reasonable, but the fans of the MacBook Air next to me started screaming.

There is something wrong with their Mac client, and with GDFS, the old MBA remains quieter, and the battery life improved as well.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#334

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

pyrophane wrote: post #326

dgellow wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For individuals Dropbox is quite expensive compared to services like OneDrive. Microsoft 365 Personal is 70$/year and gives you 1TB on OneDrive and full access to the Office offering. Dropbox for individuals is 200$/year for 3TB. And nothing else. Unless you're hoarding data or want to avoid Microsoft, the choice is simple. And I'm sure you have even cheaper services.

Dropbox actually still has a $9.99/mo (if billed anually) 2TB plan for individuals. Still not the cheapest price-wise, but not unreasonable.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#335

Post by dgellow » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

pyrophane wrote: post #326

dgellow wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For individuals Dropbox is quite expensive compared to services like OneDrive. Microsoft 365 Personal is 70$/year and gives you 1TB on OneDrive and full access to the Office offering. Dropbox for individuals is 200$/year for 3TB. And nothing else. Unless you're hoarding data or want to avoid Microsoft, the choice is simple. And I'm sure you have even cheaper services.

Dropbox actually still has a $9.99/mo (if billed anually) 2TB plan for individuals. Still not the cheapest price-wise, but not unreasonable.

You're right, I didn't notice that by default they direct you to business tiers and you have to click on a small link to switch to the "basic" plans. Their website has become such a weird thing to navigate...

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#336

Post by bjoernw » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

I know these letters are probably hard to write but when you do have to write one I think referring to people as "people" instead of "resources" would be better.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#337

Post by freeone3000 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

pradn wrote: post #302

hattar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Enterprise collaboration is going to use what integrates with their email - that's going to be OneDrive or Google Drive. The commodity syncing space was where DropBox shined, and it feels weird taking a step back from that.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#338

Post by prionassembly » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #72

prionassembly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pric…

Because software switching is annoying, raising prices is the oldest trick in the book for getting revenue growth when you have tapped out the potential inherent in your product.

Precisely, yes. And then this makes you wary of subscription-based software in general. At one point it seemed that an "extended Moore's law" (if not CPU transistors, then the general cost of compute, memory and storage) and the beauty of near-zero marginal costs would lead to a bright "there's an app for that" future. I remember Evernote launched at some point an iOS app to store food reviews, it was glorious. But now the future seems darker. Bean counters have finally noticed the windfall that's the extreme economies of scale in internet businesses. There's no "singularity" of accelerated tech change. I'm tech-savvy enough to roll out a personal blog stored on my custom sqlite format, but isn't it safer if I just write longhand and file it physically? Use the typing process for proofchecking. Decelerationism.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#339

Post by voisin » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

simplemen wrote: post #226

jedberg wrote: post #168

This is interesting because having layoffs at a company that should be going off like a rocket during a pandemic is odd. What is going on at Dropbox that prevented them from taking advantage of the huge shift to remote work?

At one time, Dropbox was the easiest and best solution if you were using Android, MacOS, and Windows. I used to pay for 1TB account although Apple offered 2TB for same monthly fee. But the Dropbox destroyed their simple UI to this ugliness clusterfuck. That was the motivation for me to cancel it and move 100% into Apple's ecosystem.

I made the decision to migrate away for exactly the same reason. I think they are desperately trying to be more than a “feature” (as Steve Jobs correctly labelled them) and in this desperation they are obfuscating the very feature that brought people to them in the first place.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#340

Post by egwor » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

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 a paying customer and I just realised that I'd not been using my Dropbox on my rebuilt laptop for >6months. I gave up with the crappy view. That's pretty bad if I only just noticed!