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

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#361

Post by ffpip » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

newacct8086 wrote: post #231

Grakel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to sync.com 3 months ago, and never looked back.

[I'm being polite :)] I've been unable to find anything to make an informed opinion on what they mean by end-to-end encryption, which is prominently mentioned on the home page etc. [I'm not being polite. #BeingThatGuy :)] My best guess is that they're using their own definition of end-to-end encryption. i.e., SSL for transit + encryption at rest = "end-to-end encryption". Whatever.

If you forget your password, you lose your files. There is a 'forgot password' option which you can disable when signing up.

https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/

Figure out what you want from the page.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#362

Post by jarek83 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

santoshalper wrote: post #233

CedarMills wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their UX has become worse, questionable design choices, and 2 GB limit is almost a joke. Chances are, if you're in the market, you just use something like Box which provides a lot more value for free.

I'm a long time user and when people talk about the UX (many, not just you), I am always puzzled. What UX are you speaking of? For me, Dropbox is just a folder on my hard drive with no real UX to speak of. It's the ultimate "gets out of my way and just works". Are you talking about the web site?

I use only their online app and it's where their UX got much worse recently.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#363

Post by grumple » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #137

itsoktocry wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It seems like a failure of expectations. Dropbox created a market and delivered an extremely well executed product to meet it. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the expectation of growth that VC funded businesses have.

"Innovate or die" seems to ring true here.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#364

Post by paxys » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:52 PM UTC

thinkharderdev wrote: post #313

aeturnum wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 give…

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSui…

That was and still is a terrible take. You don't get to an annual revenue of $2B and market cap of $10B with a "feature, not a product".

In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#365

Post by WoodenChair » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

anonymouse008 wrote: post #197

superbcarrot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm can you share more about this? It makes sense on the surface but it would be great to know what the context was.

Other folks have said it was in context of trying to buy Dropbox, which is true. I believe Steve already saw the fully realized platform of cross device computing in 2001. iPod illuminated the idea that context can birth new device classes, so naturally if you're going to have the same person use multiple devices, their context should morph to the device while being consistent in a global user state. This means that…

Actually this goes way before the iPod. At NeXT they already had a (pretty standard in Unix environments) setup where you could login to any machine on the network and have access to your personal Home folder. I remember reading this was one of the reasons he didn’t right away change over to using a Mac when he came back to Apple.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#366

Post by rogerdickey » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

The writing has been on the wall for many years. Unpopular opinion: Zoom is next when everyone else improves their codec.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#367

Post by ffpip » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

DixieDev wrote: post #111

josefresco wrote: post #67

Clients share files with me using Dropbox so I need a Dropbox account. My Dropbox account is now close to full and I have to "manage it". I don't like how files shared with me count against my quota and I don't like having to babysit a service my clients use to share files. I wonder how many business owners "just pay" to make the nag messaging go away.

Not a Dropbox user myself, but this system of counting shared files towards your quota seems pretty awful, and I'm surprised I've not seen more complaints about it. Do other cloud storage providers work this way?

Google doesn't do it as long as you are just adding a shortcut to drive.

However, when the original person deletes the folder/file, you lose access to it since it was only a linked to you and not added to your drive.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#368

Post by bayindirh » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

thinkharderdev wrote: post #313

aeturnum wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 give…

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSui…

> Dropbox is a feature not a product.

I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops.

No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but needs your own infra to run.

Dropbox allows me to do a lot of things and they're currently irreplaceable for me. That's not because I can't replace them (would take half a day at most) but, their service worth the money they want.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#369

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

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.

I'd add lack of flexibility as a huge downside for me. No way to sync external drives to Dropbox, even though their common 2TB plan is way bigger than most laptops' builtin storage. And no way to sync any files on your primary drive outside of the main ~/Dropbox folder. I always want to sync certain configuration settings so that if I use the same apps on multiple computers, or get a new computer, everything just works the same way. Syncing symlinks used to be a decent workaround for this even though it was never officially recommended, but they killed that ability and never replaced it with any other solutions.

Now I've switched to iCloud, where I can more easily back up my full machine, and which syncs my Documents folder by default which is where a lot of Mac apps have started putting some configuration files. It's also a better replacement for Google Photos which is shutting down its free storage soon.

It always felt like Dropbox was too eager to play "me too" with all the other cloud service offerings, and not only did they not particularly succeed at that, but they kind of gave up on their own core competency to do it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#370

Post by avrionov » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #359

avrionov wrote: post #299

Dropbox 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…

> Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. I was also going to comment on their similarities. It's not mentioned as often, but Evernote's biggest selling point in the beginning was that they figured out how to make multidevice sync work. The product was good, but not unique. In the early days there were no competitors that could offer the comfort of Evernote's sync. Unfortunately both companies st…

Very good point about the pricing. Looking at their income statement [1] DropBox is not a very efficient company:

Cost Of Revenues: $413.7M (22%) in software companies this includes Operations and customer care. There are spending as much as video sharing sites or video conferencing app.

R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup. The average for bigger companies is below 20%.

If their growth doesn't recover, which will be difficult, they are going to be a prime target for acquisition from Private equity. PE will slash the expenses significantly and run them for a profit for 5-10 years.

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement