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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

cnbc.com

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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#411

Post by eachro »

bayindirh wrote: post #368
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…

> 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 ne…

Linux is just 2% of the desktop market. Apple and Microsoft have good enough cloud storage + sync, so Dropbox needs to be even more compellling on macOS/windows to survive.

Their Dropbox Transfer offering is a nice alternate revenue stream for them. I wonder what else they can come up with.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#412

Post by alecbz »

munificent wrote: post #405
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…

Maybe Steve Jobs is right, but maybe it's also good for the world if you can build a sustainable business on a feature. In the world of music, an effects pedal or guitar stomp box is more "feature" than "product". You can't write a song just using a chorus pedal. But there are many many thriving companies that do nothing but produce and sell pedals. Much of this likely rests on the fact that the "protocols" that musi…

I think the problem is:

a) it's too easy to build data syncing into other products

b) the ease of having syncing built into the product I'm using is really powerful

When Dropbox first came out a lot of software was a lot more "local", and Dropbox was a lot more useful. But now we have Google Docs and Office 365 for most documents, git/GitHub, etc. for source code, things like Figma are starting to crop up for designers.

For each of these, unless the syncing was especially bad, it's hard to imagine an out-of-band syncing solution differentiating itself in any meaningful way to make up for the more complex UX/setup.

Unless someone for some reason comes up with a product that's just amazing compared to its competition but has no syncing capabilities, or syncing becomes incredibly difficult to implement well, I don't see why people would use Dropbox.

I'm not a musician, but my guess is that musicians care enough about pedals or the differences between them to justify a separate market for them. Certain pedals are smoother, or offer more resistance, and that matters a lot to certain people? But I don't see an analog to that for data syncing.

---

If there were a market for data syncing itself, I feel like it would be product companies paying for it as a service, and not something that end-users want to pay for directly.

Another way to look at this is that maybe filesystems are too low-level of an abstraction for most end-users. I found that people would often be confused by the idea of a filesystem that existed separately from any application when I was trying to explain computers to them, and UX seems to be moving away from needing users to think about a filesystem.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#414

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

I think the theory of Dropbox is that something like Paper derives its value by being deeply integrated into Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#415

Post by kersten »

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…

I agree and I'd love to support Dropbox. But I think in order for me to consider that they'd need to have a somewhat competitive pricing model.

For example: I'm currently slowly running out of my free Google cloud storage that came with my Gmail account (15GB?). The next step for me is to upgrade to 100GB which will probably be enough for at least the next 10 years or so. With Google Drive that will cost me $1.99 per month which is more than reasonable. With Dropbox the next biggest package (after exceeding the free storage limit of 2GB) is to upgrade to a $11.99 plan for 2 TB (waaaaay more than I will ever need).

I'm willing to pay 5.99 for idealistic reasons but I'm not willing to pay more than that just for the sake of supporting a "smaller" non-FAANG company. They need to provide a better deal for something between 2 GB and 2 TB.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#416

Post by rapht »

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…

The problem is that revenue growth per se does not make a company valuable - or actually, it does while you can convince someone else to buy under the assumption that said growth will deliver competitive profits.

Selling to Wall Street is the "final sell": once it's done, you need to convince that profits grow, not just revenues.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#419

Post by zillennial »

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…

Bottom line: Dropbox has 0 relevance for gen Z users, we all use Wetransfer for sharing, iCloud or Google Drive for storing

https://imgur.com/a/6gtowek

It peaked in 2012 when the millennials were in college, but it hasn't been cool for the past 5 years now. I never use dropbox ever again after they got rid of Carousel and Mailbox because I frankly don't trust them with my files

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#420

Post by secfirstmd »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #146
itsnot2020 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very happy with Tresorit - https://tresorit.com

It's quite expensive though

Yeh true but as an other example Dropbox missed out on the privacy and end to end encryption market.
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