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

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#611

Post by jimmaswell » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:08 AM UTC

trevor-e wrote: post #409

mdoms wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute audacity of free tier customers lol. You were a liability on their balance sheet.

Yea, I'd understand the frustration if OP was paying for the service, but this reeks of entitlement. If you are a free user don't be mad when the company tries to convert you to a paid user. A better example is how pushy Apple is with upselling their iCloud plans. I opened my laptop the other day and it auto-opened the iCloud settings app with the more expensive plan pre-checked .

Dropbox makes constant notifications on your desktop about upgrading alongside emails. I'd have considered paying for them if they weren't like this but now I never will. Maybe they'd have an easier time being profitable if they didn't push away all their long term users.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#612

Post by jimmaswell » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:09 AM UTC

nickm12 wrote: post #457

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?

Yes, I would've considered it if they hadn't been so obnoxious to me.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#613

Post by shirro » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

I liked dropbox early on. There was nothing radical about what they were doing but it was very well executed and simple enough to recommend to less technical people and share files with them. Even with the big companies offering cross subsidised platform integrated products I probably would have kept using them but they never innovated their pricing and products enough.

I waited years for a family plan and decided it wasn't worth paying multiple individual subscriptions. They were basically double charging for family photo storage so I bailed on them and never looked back. Apparently they introduced such a plan late last year and I never noticed. Now I have multiple streaming services, hosting and other things competing for my money. Many files which I used to protect and share with Dropbox are in a private git repo now. Photos are going into specialised photo products. And people tend to share files over different services.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#614

Post by brownbat » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:29 AM 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…

This and constant nagging that I'm running out of space (I'm definitely not), and (tightening?) limits on number of machines, had me migrate to Synology Drive this last week. Now I have basically unlimited space and devices.

I'm sorry to the hard working devs, I'm part of the problem I guess. But it's tough to pay for something with free alternatives that have fewer limitations and better features.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#615

Post by digitaltrees » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:34 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #572

rland wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. Offering Lower prices than is economically sustainable and viable is predatory and anticompetitive. In international trade it is called “dumping” and is illegal. Just because companies are getting away with it doesn’t mean it’s ok.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#616

Post by andrepd » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:34 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #608

roughly wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter and Facebook for eg. They don’t impose a cost on the public in the way railways do either. That's an interesting take after the last couple years...

I understand what you mean, but I have a natural aversion to blaming the messenger. We're all personally responsible for what we say and do.

In an age of hyper-sophisticated algorithms for which our puny mammal brains are no match, I think that's less and less true.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#617

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

iamsb wrote: post #423

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…

Currently there are 93 Internet companies with more than 1 Billion dollar in revenue and that list growing every year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa...

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#618

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:53 AM UTC

roughly wrote: post #596

simonh wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Twitter and Facebook for eg. They don’t impose a cost on the public in the way railways do either. That's an interesting take after the last couple years...

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#619

Post by Tesl » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

itsnot2020 wrote: post #98

nvarsj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use as an alternative to Dropbox? I haven't found anything that works as well across multiple platforms. I really hate all the feature bloat in it, which I never use, and weird decisions like dropping non-ext4. But still, for basic file syncing it seems hard to beat.

I'm very happy with Tresorit - https://tresorit.com

I loved Tresorit but it's camera upload feature didn't transfer files correctly from my wife's iPhone - it left them corrupted and unopenable with no warnings or errors whatsoever.

Unfortunately because of that alone I dropped them completely. I'm using Dropbox now because I haven't found a better alternative for syncing between iPhone/Android/Windows/Linux.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#620

Post by fractionalhare » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

digitaltrees wrote: post #615

simonh wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. Offering Lower prices than is economically sustainable and viable is predatory and anticompetitive. In international trade it is called “dumping” and is illegal. Just because companies are getting away with it doesn’t mean it’s ok.

I don't know, I found the argument about competing railways in one town compelling. What if I as a consumer like the "dumping"? What if most of us do?