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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

#451

Post by avrionov »

tinyhouse wrote: post #410
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…

> Anyone working at either company that's not looking for a job should be What?? I don't know about Evernote. But did you look at the financials of Dropbox? They have a solid sheet so maybe take a look before you suggest people there to look for another job. They decided to shift their focus to enterprise. They made a decision not to compete on the consumer side. Enterprises don't need a free tier. I don't know if th…

See my post about their expenses [1].

If they don't grow the investors are not going to be happy about the high engineering expenses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766475

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#452

Post by ramraj07 »

sizzle wrote: post #372
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…

Office 365 with MS Teams seems to have reached feature parity with Dropbox and slack in one nice suite of products that just work together seamlessly. You hit on an important insight, with O365 you can edit your documents right from the cloud and cross platform integration is tight with OneDrive and MS Teams. What does everything think?

I want the company I treat as my primary file storage solution to be fully committed to that feature as their primary selling point. The last thing I want is Google deciding I don't get to save my files there anymore.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#453

Post by itsoktocry »

oblio wrote: post #384
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.

> 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?

>Is success only taking over the world?

Who said that? To me success is building a sustainable business, regardless of the size.

I know what success isn't: making billionaires of insiders while destroying shareholder value.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#454

Post by rorykoehler »

sizzle wrote: post #372
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…

Office 365 with MS Teams seems to have reached feature parity with Dropbox and slack in one nice suite of products that just work together seamlessly. You hit on an important insight, with O365 you can edit your documents right from the cloud and cross platform integration is tight with OneDrive and MS Teams. What does everything think?

I use both and Dropbox is miles better. I don't understand OneDrive and the way everything is linked together in O365. It's a mess and I have no idea what is really going on in there. It reminds me a little of the icloud experience. Just give me a bog standard directory and let me manage it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#455

Post by jypepin »

dheera wrote: post #346
jypepin wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more people are working remotely which probably requires more people looking for ways to share files more efficiently.

I imagine that sharing files would be the same regardless of whether you are remote or not. Even in a real office people don't usually hand USB sticks back and forth.

I have no data, but more remote people either has 0 impact, or impact on more data sharing online. Lots of businesses still work a lot on paper (think lawyers, notaries, etc) especially while working with clients, and are not forced to share docs differently.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#456

Post by lotsofpulp »

pyrophane wrote: post #326
dgellow wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For individuals Dropbox is quite expensive compared to services like OneDrive. Microsoft 365 Personal is 70$/year and gives you 1TB on OneDrive and full access to the Office offering. Dropbox for individuals is 200$/year for 3TB. And nothing else. Unless you're hoarding data or want to avoid Microsoft, the choice is simple. And I'm sure you have even cheaper services.

Dropbox actually still has a $9.99/mo (if billed anually) 2TB plan for individuals. Still not the cheapest price-wise, but not unreasonable.

It's not bad, but these big companies can bundle it all together and drive the little companies out of business, for personal use at least. Apple is offering 2TB iCloud Drive, plus all their other online services for $30 per month.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#457

Post by nickm12 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #5

Dropbox lost me permanently as a potential customer with their greed and disregard for user experience. Constant nagging if you're at ~80% your free limit and the more recent draconian device limits for two examples. I hope they fail.

Was there a possibility that you would ever gbe an actual customer and not just a potential one?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#458

Post by bihla »

lightgreen wrote: post #432
awill wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both evernote and dropbox started making the free service worse by limiting how many devices you could connect. Dropbox also dropped support for xfs filesystems on Linux (which they later brought back, but not after infuriating Linux users). That's when I stopped using both. I then moved to Google Drive (which is half the price of Dropbox), and moved to using markdown note apps sync with Google Drive (which is free!)…

> markdown note apps sync with Google Drive Can you recommend the app please? I migrated away from Evernote when it started to have too much features, and was no longer convenient note taking app. I'm using Apple Notes now, which is more or less good, but it is vendor-locked, and I plan to move away from iPhone to Android.

I've recently move to using a git repo has my store for notes, and different clients for access and editing.

On Desktop I use Obsidian (although most anything will do) and on mobile I use GitJournal which easily links into an existing git repo.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#459

Post by bachmeier »

tinyhouse wrote: post #410
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…

> Anyone working at either company that's not looking for a job should be What?? I don't know about Evernote. But did you look at the financials of Dropbox? They have a solid sheet so maybe take a look before you suggest people there to look for another job. They decided to shift their focus to enterprise. They made a decision not to compete on the consumer side. Enterprises don't need a free tier. I don't know if th…

> did you look at the financials of Dropbox?

You are aware that this discussion is about an announcement that they're cutting 11% of their workforce, aren't you? Anything can happen when companies get in this position.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#460

Post by lotsofpulp »

robocat wrote: post #445
lotsofpulp wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

The point is if Netflix creates media that people want to consume, they have to go to Netflix to get it (legally).

If Dropbox creates software that performs a task, it can be copied (to a sufficient degree) by Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and people can get it there.

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