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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

#551
post #358

I just paid money for managed NextCloud hosting last night and was starting my transition today. If all goes well, then $27/year is going to be a lot better than a kneecapped free tier or a $120/year paid plan.

How much storage do you get for $27/year, and where? (just curious)

On my side I've been happy with Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#552

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.

I completely disagree. Netflix creates original content, but so do all (most?) of the other competing streaming platforms. And they all compete for licenses to third-party content. Heck, notable third-party content often makes headlines for moving from one streaming service to another when the contracts expire.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#553

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…

> and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.

I think this is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article.

I very recently signed up for Apple One, for Music/TV/iCloud (family photos in particular)/all the rest and the fact that I now use iCloud sync instead of Dropbox bothers me nil. Prime also comes with Photos, unlimited photo backup. Used to use that just fine. Google Photos is like $1/mo.

Honestly, if Disney bundled a cloud storage service into Disney+ I'd probably give it a shot. File syncing is a commoditized feature these days for the average Joe.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#555

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…

I haven't given any real thought to this, but maybe in terms of regulations, we should think of free software products as another kind of price dumping. It's essentially price dumping down to zero.

I've had similar thoughts but free software is so pervasive. Would this apply to stuff like Foxit Reader, 7zip, or Discord? It might be really hard to draw the line.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#556

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 get your overall point, but isn't Salesforce buying Slack? Just noting on the "it _will_ be a sad day" - perhaps it already is?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local NAS includes replication to cloud storage and is encrypted so not super useful if stolen. I prefer having access from my devices without the replication.

Fair. I'm still curious how you use that much space?

Linux ISO's Of course....

//inside joke if you dont know.... Data Hoarders only every have Linux ISO's....

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#559
post #436

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…

It's maybe not so common in tech, but being a big stable company isn't incompatible with 'markets, etc.' - you can buy back stock, issue dividends.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#560
I’ve been a Dropbox paid subscriber for many years (since it was Dropbox Pro). I’m not going to renew it. The constant upsell nagging is too much. Dropbox would be perfect if it just STFU and synced files.

One of my clients opening files I shared by Dropbox on their mobile phone successfully got dark patterned into signing up for a paid subscription. That was a fun mess to clean up. Mission accomplished?

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