When your feature comparison page doesn't include your free plan, that's a sign that the paid plans don't compare favorably. It's also not very user-friendly because it makes it hard for people to figure out which features they already have access to (I just learned they have a direct file-sending tool, and I have no idea if it's included in the free tier).
Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
531–540 of 689 posts
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Who needs google search either when you can just slap a ES instance to a web crawler you scripted in 5 minutes
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not backed up by anything besides your opinion. The main chart you should look at is the increase in number of paying customers month after month. Dropbox is much more than just storage. They also have their own infrastructure and don't depend on GAFA. They made a decision to not compete on the consumer side. I didn't like it but you cannot blame them given the large pockets of the competition and the fact th…
It makes no sense not to compete on the consumer side. The enterprise side has enormous barriers to entry, like a long sales cycle, RFPs, security audits etc. Office 365 simply offers more, plus with a familiar interface that doesn't require extra training for end-users. Who is going to be championing Dropbox on the enterprise buyer's side? Employees that are satisfied consumers or the IT office that uses the same 4-…
I don't say you're right or wrong, cause I don't know. All I can say is that you cannot say "makes no sense" because it's been working OK for them so far. They have ~15M paying users and the number keeps growing (not at a very high pace but still steady growth). Their revenue is growing at a higher pace than expenses. Enterprise sales is not easy but they have been doing it for a while now. They also expand their product line to be a more complete solution for team productivity and collaboration. They have been doing a lot of mistakes on the way. They launched many products that failed. Their vision was lacking. But overall their numbers show it's a healthy company moving in the right direction. It's just not been growing in the pace everyone was thinking they would after their IPO.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#534Earlier 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…
Funny thing is that these days at work we mostly use Dropbox for Dropbox Paper, much less for file sharing.
It's the best collaborative writing tool, and with the work from home situation, it's the best tool to replace never ending zoom meetings with asynchronous collaboration.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#535And yet, they are still hiring for many positions: https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/all-jobs
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It’s likely you have enough money that it isn’t prohibitive to you. I think most people would find $10 a month for file syncing crazy. Why would I pay for that instead of Google Drive? It’s one more company I have to share my data with and hope they don’t lose it/get hacked. At least I can log in once with Google (or OneDrive if you are in the Microsoft ecosystem) and two factor authentication and be done with it. I…
> Why would I pay for that instead of Google Drive?
Because of Google's abysmal customer service which is awful to the point that even googlers can't get help if something goes wrong?
The point of a cloud storage is that you want your most important files to be backed up somewhere that you trust. I don't trust to store my data with an advertising company.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it was the lack of storage tiers. When the only options is to get 1TB or more, I think you lost a lot of users. Additionally, they should have figured out a way to share storage with a family, if the only profitable storage tiers are 1TB or more then let people share it.
Meh, we're talking a single-digit increase in price to go from the previous-lowest tier to the current-lowest 2TB tier. I only use a tiny fraction of it, but it's still a good value. The family thing makes sense - I don't have a family I would share with so it's never come up - though couldn't you just sign into the same account on multiple devices?
Well for my needs the Dropbox plan costs 10 times more than the Google or iCloud plan. Because I need 50GB, not 2000.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#538Sorry to hear, especially given the long history of high-scale, performant engineering.
If you are in infrastructure or SRE or developer tooling and looking, I am hiring at Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/careers/software?city=%C2%A0%C2%A...
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
The company is nowhere near failing. It's just not necessary to be as big as it is. Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com. I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage t…
For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their rigid pricing structure, £7.99 a month for 1TB is good value for people who use 1TB, but I only need like 10% of that so would be wasting money I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at £1.99 which suits my needs, but would m…
> I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit
Reminded me of this story [0] of a team with a 500TB account serving as a database and VCS.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_...
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#540Earlier 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…
> Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension.
Office 365 is crazy good value in comparison - although I will say my users still complain about onedrive and say Dropbox sync was more rock solid.