Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#521

Post by UnpossibleJim » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #436

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 is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine. Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of g…

From a business perspective, this is how to succeed. From a shareholder perspective, this is how to fail. They are diametrically opposed, which is hysterical. There can be overlap, but not until your original sword is sharpened to a razors edge, to borrow a phrase.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#522

Post by benhurmarcel » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:12 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #502

ryandrake wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought HN established a long time ago that you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

I can just slap Owncloud or Nextcloud to a VPS and build a relatively secure system within three hours but, some problems will arise. - Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure there will be many other tools which can talk with Dropbox but not with my server. - Collaboration: I bet that not so man…

If you like Nextcloud you can buy the service directly also. Then it works like Dropbox (but cheaper). For example Hetzner provides that [1].

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#523

Post by ballenf » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #506

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. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession. There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an i…

They also lost my trust when they sold our small team on a particular plan and then pulled all the valuable features out of that plan and raised prices 50% (or 100% if we wanted most of the features back). The messaging around that was also just cold marketing BS talking about how great these changes were. It all happened within first year of our subscription.

Luckily OneDrive was finally getting stable so we migrated over and I haven't touched dropbox since.

It quickly became clear they were focusing on enterprise customers and the SMB pricing we had undermined that effort.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#524

Post by benhurmarcel » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

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…

> Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux.

FYI, you might be satisfied by Insync.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#525

Post by vhanda » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

lightgreen wrote: post #474

bihla wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> on mobile I use GitJournal Is it good? On mobile the common case is to launch an app and immediately see/search the notes. Or type something, close the app and assume notes are synched. But git pull and git push are not blazing fast operations. And there are no pushes, to get updates from the server immediately. Git is a good storage, but I doubt it is suitable for notes without intermediate service handing note-sp…

Hey. I'm the author.

It will try to sync it as soon as it can. If you immediately close GitJournal, it won't be able to. Otherwise, on each modification it tries to sync. (Configurable) Maybe I can add some background sync.

The common use case to see and search through the notes works.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#526

Post by JeffL » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

deeviant wrote: post #514

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 dunno. I feel dropbox has been getting less and less usable as their UI tries to get further away from the very light wrapper around windows explorer(or whatever file explorer your OS of choice uses). I really just wanted it to be a folder that exists on all my computers. That's it. Now when I ask it to open the dropbox folder it stays within it's own application window and attempts to recreate windows explorer, bu…

Yeah, when I forget and accidentally click on the Dropbox icon when I want my Dropbox folder and get whatever abomination it is that comes up now instead of the folder, I get real ragey. It's such an anti-consumer thing when companies take a nice product and add a bunch of crap to it that no one wants.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#527

Post by dawnerd » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

tinyhouse wrote: post #490

kersten wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're not a potential customer. They gave up on consumers and focus on companies. Cannot blame them they don't want to lose money on individual users like the competition.

Even the business plans make no sense. 5TB to share between all employees? Or pay a lot more and get no real answer on what their 'as much as you need' means. It sounds like you have to contact their support and explain why you could possibly need more and then its up to them to decide.

Google workspaces is still a better deal and they're not currently even limiting storage.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#528

Post by karmasimida » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #21

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…

It's dismaying that even the best, most shining examples of unicorns that took off on the backs of good products and have stood toe-to-toe with the mega-corps, are now losing value simply because they're competing with the mega-corps , and being forced to look for acquisitions just like all the other startups. If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big, I don't know what will.

Market is simple and effective.

Shining examples of unicorns? Then they need to prove they can indeed exist in real world. They shouldn't be treated differently.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#529

Post by greatgirl » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #436

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 is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine. Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of g…

I've always felt this, I've never seen a business actually _do_ this. Why don't businesses just stop employing so many people? Stop expanding? Stop trying to acquire more users?

I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#530

Post by beached_whale » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

uniformlyrandom wrote: post #110

beached_whale wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The others are generally not supported on Linux. Dropbox has a cli client here that mostly works. At least if we are talking Google/Microsoft. Or the companies are small enough to go under overnight and leave me in a lurch

Google drive unofficial client works pretty well for me on Linux.

There is a difference between official and unofficial support. Also, Dropbox is big enough to be around for a while, but this is their product and if it goes south, so do they. I don't trust Google to maintain any product before rebranding, pushing the work to the users, or dropping the product. They have shown otherwise.