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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

#381

Post by busterarm »

brundolf wrote: post #239
busterarm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps your storage needs are low, but I feel like at this point once you're past 4-5TB, a Synology or QNAP NAS is a no-brainer for anyone even remotely technical. I need quite a lot of storage for my projects and am up to a 42TB Enterprise NAS at home w/ Fujitsu helium-filled drives. Probably more than Dropbox customers would ever want to spend, but well worth it for me. Even if I didn't need as much storage, I'm p…

I only use about 70GB right now; 2TB is as much as I could imagine ever needing. That 70GB includes a modest collection of music from before the streaming era, a few videos, backups of old documents, Blender projects, Unity projects, a backup of all my photos from my phone (from the past few years), a couple archives of family photos (from the past few decades). I also back up product licenses and shell profiles ther…

My local NAS includes replication to cloud storage and is encrypted so not super useful if stolen.

I prefer having access from my devices without the replication.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#382

Post by helsinkiandrew »

paxys wrote: post #364
thinkharderdev wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do if you have the only product that is doing the feature well.

But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras.

After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#383

Post by jonny_eh »

aeturnum wrote: post #309
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…

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…

Why are we lumping in Netflix instead of Microsoft in the group of big tech?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#384

Post by oblio »

itsoktocry wrote: post #53
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.

> 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.

Is success only taking over the world?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#385

Post by tinyhouse »

weeboid wrote: post #206
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?

Storage-as-a-service is a commodity and race to the bottom. Check $BOX and $DBX 5 year charts. Good luck competing with GAFA on this, best hope is a buyout. Firesale on depreciating assets. On the consumer side, storage will become an appliance, like a (stick of butter sized) fridge. Or just included in your centralized home + family control center.

This is not backed up by anything besides your opinion. The main chart you should look at is the increase in number of paying customers month after month.

Dropbox is much more than just storage. They also have their own infrastructure and don't depend on GAFA. They made a decision to not compete on the consumer side. I didn't like it but you cannot blame them given the large pockets of the competition and the fact they can monetize those costumers with their other products unlike Dropbox. They compete in enterprise where price is not the main factor like it's for consumers and doing it successfully.

I will ping you in 5 years... (they might indeed get acquired though. If that happens it's gonna be for at least double of what $dbx is worth today)

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#386

Post by beefalo »

sharps_xp wrote: post #322
jedberg wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do we need it? Because we don't have a social safety net in the United States, so getting laid off could make you instantly destitute. > why do employers give it? To maintain their community reputation. In the future when they hire again, it's easier to paper over a layoff if you can show that you tried to take care of the employees. Also because it's the ethical thing to do. > should one negotiate it? Usually…

what is a scenario where the employee would have leverage in a layoff? it’s hard to imagine except if something unethical/wrongful was going on leading up the layoff: sexual harassment, discrimination

Maybe for a key hire with a specific skill-set. Principal engineer level probably can leverage severance since the hiring pipeline at that level is much slower

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#387

Post by throwaway894345 »

solresol wrote: post #316
throwaway894345 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, you need collective bargaining against insurers to keep individual premiums down. Employers do that today, and if employers just pay out their insurance spend to employees, the employees will get less insurance as a result. A single payer system means the government negotiates on behalf of all of the citizens, allowing it to keep costs down much more than our current system.

Or you mandate that the insurers can only rate on certain variables (e.g. zip code) and/or you mandate a pooling system so that insurers who have many low risk people on their books subsidise insurers who have many high risk people.

Right, there are other solutions, but "just cut the insurance check to employees" isn't a good option for employees.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#388

Post by lend000 »

Dropbox has executed its business well. While I'm certain they are working on some things unrelated to their core business, I can't imagine you need thousands of employees to keep things running smoothly and make incremental improvements to their data compression and deduplication scheme.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#389

Post by brundolf »

busterarm wrote: post #381
brundolf wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use about 70GB right now; 2TB is as much as I could imagine ever needing. That 70GB includes a modest collection of music from before the streaming era, a few videos, backups of old documents, Blender projects, Unity projects, a backup of all my photos from my phone (from the past few years), a couple archives of family photos (from the past few decades). I also back up product licenses and shell profiles ther…

My local NAS includes replication to cloud storage and is encrypted so not super useful if stolen. I prefer having access from my devices without the replication.

Fair. I'm still curious how you use that much space?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#390

Post by Brendinooo »

layer8 wrote: post #358
Brendinooo wrote: post #216

I just paid money for managed NextCloud hosting last night and was starting my transition today. If all goes well, then $27/year is going to be a lot better than a kneecapped free tier or a $120/year paid plan.

How much storage do you get for $27/year, and where? (just curious)

Cloudamo. 100GB. I was managing something like 9.2GB on my Dropbox, so it'll be a big jump. They say you can upgrade storage space but I don't know how the pricing works for that.
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