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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

#421

Post by Lammy »

jonny_eh wrote: post #383
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…

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

'GAFAM' is a popular term in some places.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#422

Post by secfirstmd »

tidepod12 wrote: post #186

I have a couple connections on LinkedIn that work at Dropbox, and through them I have noticed a decent amount (certainly more than usual) of somewhat-high-up individuals leaving Dropbox in the past couple weeks. Might just be completely coincidental, but I wonder if they had advance notice (or perhaps just saw the writing on the wall)? Also anecdotal and total speculation, I interviewed at Dropbox a couple years ago…

I have some friends there who have been job hunting recently, I think a lot of people could see the writing on the wall.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#423

Post by iamsb »

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…

Currently there are 93 Internet companies with more than 1 Billion dollar in revenue and that list growing every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#424

Post by paulpan »

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…

Indeed it's a tough for companies like Dropbox to compete against the Big Tech players. The proverbial you win some battles but lose the war.

On the other hand, Dropbox could've shifted more towards the enterprise customers and gained traction before the likes of Microsoft and Google ramped up their competing products. That'd have built them a better moat than being subject to the fickleness of mass consumers.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#426

Post by koonsolo »

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…

One of the features that I love about DropBox is that it's not Google. I use Google for a lot of things, but my backups of Google go into DropBox.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#427

Post by alecbz »

tshaddox wrote: post #407
avrionov wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropbox is a feature not a product. When you are against FAANG every product is just a feature.

Maybe only if you constantly update "FAANG" such that every tech company who actually succeeds in creating a competitive or impactful product just gets their letter added to "FAANG," and all the companies that fail to make a huge impact automatically get considered "only features." We already see that a lot. Some people wedge Microsoft into the acronym and/or leave out other letters. And Netflix's product on the face…

Mostly agree, but Netflix isn't a feature just because Google and FB also do streaming. It's fair to call Netflix a product because it's something that end users actually care about for its own sake. You can pay for Netflix and nothing else and still get value out of it.

Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own, you need to have some other data from somewhere else to use with it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#429

Post by josteink »

avrionov wrote: post #370
bachmeier wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup.

Last I just checked they tried to crawl out of their “it’s all about files. Simple!”-niche and become a fully web-based project management, chat, collaboration, office-thingie with links to GSuite and Office365.

As a long-time user it was quite incomprehensible, and definitely nothing I appreciated or felt added value to my Dropbox. On the contrary, I was annoyed by all the product-nagging about these features I didn’t want.

Combine that with them obsoleting long-established features in their desktop sync-software which made them the only universal file-sync solution across all platforms, the reason I chose Dropbox over competing offers.

Do all that, and you lost people like me as a user. I’m on Nextcloud now and not coming back.

I really don’t think they have worked out their survival plan yet. Trying to outcompete MS and Google on their own turf is obviously not a fight they’re going to win.

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