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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

#441

Post by lotsofpulp »

paulpan wrote: post #424
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…

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.

What kind of moat could one possibly build against the Microsoft salesperson offering to throw in OneDrive for free, or at minimal cost?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#442

Post by treis »

paulpan wrote: post #424
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…

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.

>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.

It seems like Dropbox could be generating 10s to low 100s of million in profit every year. They're spending a lot on R&D that they don't necessarily need to in order to chase growth. Even if GDrive/OneDrive et.al. eventually drive them out of business it would only be after Dropbox made 100s of million to billions.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#443

Post by mszcz »

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.

I don't get that. As opposed to what? Displaying an unfamiliar window what gets in the way and is confusing?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#444

Post by shuckles »

I think the “build sustainable business” crowd should understand that part of what they imply is “don’t employ lots of people.” Layoffs reframe that idea in an interesting way: not employing lots of people also means not offering a job someone might want.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#445

Post by robocat »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #433
tshaddox wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median via RSUs since their stock prices were expected to skyrocket, with little downside, so the RSUs were as good as cash. And why other companies couldn't offer comparable pay. And nowadays it still refers to companies whose publicly trade stock prices continue to grow so much that it makes the stock portion of the compensation very lu…

> Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A feature is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not, and they are the only place to get it.

Apple, Google and Microsoft have shown they want to compete directly in streamed video market (and similarly the online music market.)

They might not have successfully competed against Netflix yet, but I have no reason to believe that one of them couldn’t come up with a better product with better platform integration, and Netflix becomes another Hulu in the middle runners.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#446

Post by themagician »

Dropbox solved a problem that we all had 10 years ago.

Today, for new users, it isn’t much of a problem because every platform (Windows, Android, Mac, Adobe, etc.) gives you free or integrated cloud storage. Many have multi-platform clients.

There is just no growth path left for their original product. It’s not a solution to a problem that new users have.

I still use Dropbox occasionally, but now iCloud handles 99% of what Dropbox did for me. I didn’t even choose to use iCloud. It was just there one day.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#447

Post by brianwawok »

throw3848 wrote: post #104
brianwawok wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real hard to make a business with a $2 a month fee. When credit card fees in the US, the bank is eating like 50 cents of it. I think 7-8 bucks/pounds is about the minimum price for many apps to bother with it. Below that rather just have a limited “free” tier.

Charge yearly... Works for domains..

Sure.

Domains are really close to 0 support. Can you email support questions when Dropbox starts acting weird? For $10-$20 a year, one support ticket makes the customer unprofitable for the entire year.

Real thin margins, seems gross to try and build a business on the $1-$2 a month thing. I wouldn’t.

Works for a Titans like apple and google because they are making money in other ways..

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#448

Post by avrionov »

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…

The way I used FAANG wasn't very precise. It is possible that Netflix will become a feature of Google, Amazon, or Disney.

I was referring to the concept of "bundling and unbundling" [1] which is beneficial to the big rich companies. The big players have the money and the control over the eco-system (files, documents, events) which gives them the advantage to go against smaller products and make them features.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/9/21/atomisatio...

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#449

Post by tyingq »

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…

"Dropbox is a feature not a product."

Where this does ring true is Dropbox versus not OneDrive on it's own, but OneDrive as it comes bundled with O365. Many F500 type companies pretty much MUST have O365.

Then, if you have O365, you have OneDrive. And the question then isn't whether Dropbox is better. It's whether OneDrive is "good enough" to suffice, despite it being not as good as Dropbox. And the decision maker doesn't care if it's not good enough for some smallish subset of employees that need a Linux client, etc. They care whether it's good enough for most.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#450

Post by bambax »

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…

I don't understand the point about pricing. I find it cheap for something that works perfectly, across any device/OS and never fails, never breaks, and is extremely fast (insanely fast).

The only way one would prefer something half-baked just because it's "free" is if they don't really care about robustness and dependability.

That said, maybe the current Covid crisis is hurting them more than others. I used to travel a lot and leave machines in different places instead of carrying a laptop everywhere. Now that I don't travel, "magic sync" is much less useful.

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