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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

#571

Post by aivatra »

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…

This scares the shit out of me. Long story short: I work for a company about to go public...this year to be exact. It sounded exciting at first but as I dug deeper I realized some companies start dying slowly after IPO. I guess I’ll have see it to believe it :(

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#572

Post by simonh »

rland wrote: post #548
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…

There's a very easy precedent for this. Just widen anti-trust. Back when we actually imagined that government could stand up to powerful companies, we dealt with the Railroads with the tools of anti-trust. The situation was almost comically similar: + New, hyped technology; + Which received huge capital investment from newly printed money; + And which lent itself to a natural monopoly; + Which crushed competitors; +…

There’s nothing wrong with buying competitors or offering lower prices by themselves. That’s fine. The problem with railroads is they impose a heavy cost on society by occupying a lot of territory. Railroads are noisy, polluting, obstruct highways and other transport and infrastructure. Every town wants a railway, but no town wants two competing mutually redundant railways providing the same service with two sets of track and stations.

Many other utilities tend to natural monopolies in similar ways such as telephone service, especially to rural areas, but railways are an extreme case.

Online some network effects can create natural monopolies because users get benefits from being on the same platform as all the other users. It’s a very different dynamic though and different platforms can cater to different communities and use cases with complementary value. Twitter and Facebook for eg. They don’t impose a cost on the public in the way railways do either.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#573

Post by babesh »

kenhwang wrote: post #470
uyt wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that a lot of their acquisitions were in spaces that had the potential to exceed the market cap of their core product (which is currently stuck at 9B) had they been more successful: - HelloSign for esignatures, compared to DocuSign which has a 48.29B market cap - Zulip for chat, compared to Slack which has a 24.30B market cap - Carousel for photos, compared to Instagram which is estimated at 100B market ca…

I think Google Photos would be a closer comparison for Carousel. I think it would've been the smart play for Dropbox to expand on that if they wanted to maintain consumer customers. Photos are kinda the only thing people willingly pay to save/backup and they're a royal pain in the ass to organize. But then again, it's hard to compete against free for $0.10/user margins. Way easier catching a couple of big enterprise…

They canceled Carousel after Google Photos came out.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#574

Post by markshepard »

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…

It is not correct to say none of the dropbox competitors offer linux sync clients. We (https://www.getfilecloud.com) are a dropbox competitor and we offer clients for windows, mac and linux. We are also rank comparably well when it comes to customer rating in Gartner Peer Reviews (https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/content-collaboration...).

It is most likely Dropbox faces higher churn in their primary customer demography (Creatives and Professionals). Their offering lack many admin controls it is not yet ideal for enterprises where the churn is low. Further, OneDrive and G-Suite offers much better value by bundling the productivity suite.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#575

Post by alistairSH »

rland wrote: post #548
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…

There's a very easy precedent for this. Just widen anti-trust. Back when we actually imagined that government could stand up to powerful companies, we dealt with the Railroads with the tools of anti-trust. The situation was almost comically similar: + New, hyped technology; + Which received huge capital investment from newly printed money; + And which lent itself to a natural monopoly; + Which crushed competitors; +…

Issue is that [anti-trust actions against railroads] happened before any of us were born.

Is it that, or is it because we're all so dependent on the market (for retirements funds, etc), that we're afraid to rock the boat? That would tend to indicate that anti-trust action needs to start well before the point where we're all too invested in AAPL/MSFT/GOOGL to want change.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#576

Post by aeturnum »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #507
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…

I don’t see this. So you have examples? I think that smaller companies can compete on knowing their customers better - it’s hard for a highly paid 10 year at Google person to put themselves in the shoes of say a dental practitioner or even the shoes of a typical full stack dev wanting to use nextjs for example.

I suppose I was going off the examples in the post I was replying to. Comparing Google Drive sync to Dropbox and Google Keep to Evernote.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#577

Post by jfim »

aeturnum wrote: post #309
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…

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…

That regulation already exists, at least for international trade. The act of selling items at less than nominal cost is forbidden by anti dumping treaties. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#578

Post by mdgrech23 »

greatgirl wrote: post #529
jwr wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

b/c they hired expensive executives who get bonuses and their greed drives the whole thing. Plus the investors expect it plus you could probably say something about fiduciary responsibility.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#579

Post by ubermonkey »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #543
ubermonkey wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure what I could migrate to that would give me solid and trustworthy sync/access across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Linux. I'm happy to pay whatever I pay for Dropbox -- I don't actually remember what it is -- but I'd rather they stop throwing in bullshit kitchen-sink features.

Nextcloud. You can buy the service directly at various providers, such as Hetzner. Another solution is Google Drive, adding Insync for desktop sync.

I have zero interest in administering my own services like it appears Nextcloud, even with Hetzner, would require. I've been there and done that, but I'm too far out of the sysadmin game now to do a good job of it. It's a bad use of my time, and not something I enjoy as a hobby.

I'm unwilling to use Google services if I can avoid it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#580

Post by pietrovismara »

aeturnum wrote: post #309
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…

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 don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this

End the infinite growth model once and for all. The only solution to all these issues. The shift has to be cultural before legislative.

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