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

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#641

Post by beambot » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 6:34 AM 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…

You might get your wish through IPFS / Filecoin...

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Post by helsinkiandrew » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

rusk wrote: post #468

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do if you have the only product that is doing the feature well. But that doesn’t mean that file sharing isn’t like CDRW or Zip drives or small cameras. After being a keen user for years I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer last week. It’s been replaced by iCloud, S3, google docs and other things that are easier for me to use in my workflow.

Hi, you’re mention of s3 piqued my interest, how are you using it?

Mainly for sharing files via http and distributing/testing html/webapps when needed. I used to use an app to mount s3 as a filesystem but tend to use command line to upload

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Post by CPAhem » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #35

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…

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.

Syncdocs has been working reliably for me for years. They seem to focus on the core file-syncing stuff, which works fast and reliably, rather than blingy features.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Post by oblio » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 7:05 AM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #453

oblio wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People like to do the "success!" victory laps quite early. There's more to success than a cool product and insiders getting to exit wealthy. I think this is still a yet-to-be-seen situation. Is success only taking over the world?

> Is success only taking over the world? Who said that? To me success is building a sustainable business, regardless of the size. I know what success isn't : making billionaires of insiders while destroying shareholder value.

Dropbox is profitable and has been around for a decade. That's more than most businesses can say. How long do they need to be around for your "blessing"? A century?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Post by signal11 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 7:56 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.

The marginal cost of storage is quite small. “Dumping” and “predatory pricing” arguments make more sense for physical goods — competitors like OneDrive or Google Drive could easily make the case that Dropbox is a premium storage service that does not reflect the true cost of storage.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#646

Post by randomsearch » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 8:15 AM UTC

Dropbox are providing a commodity that is included by MS and Google for free, essentially, as almost all businesses have to buy office and/or gmail.

Unless you can differentiate significantly, you’re dead.

What does Dropbox do? It allows me to access my files anywhere.

That’s a pretty basic product. They’ve tried different features but failed to produce anything winning.

Best plan is a quick exit to salesforce before dropbox go bankrupt.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#647

Post by mister_hn » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #213

jedberg wrote: post #168

This is interesting because having layoffs at a company that should be going off like a rocket during a pandemic is odd. What is going on at Dropbox that prevented them from taking advantage of the huge shift to remote work?

For individuals Dropbox is quite expensive compared to services like OneDrive. Microsoft 365 Personal is 70$/year and gives you 1TB on OneDrive and full access to the Office offering. Dropbox for individuals is 200$/year for 3TB. And nothing else. Unless you're hoarding data or want to avoid Microsoft, the choice is simple. And I'm sure you have even cheaper services.

a self-hosted NextCloud is way cheaper

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Post by iamsb » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 9:13 AM UTC

avrionov wrote: post #466

iamsb wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thank you for the list. Going quickly through the companies there: - Rackspace was sold to private equity and restructured and made public a second time. - LogMeIn was sold to private equity - Kaplan is part of bigger company - Ultimate software merged with Kronos - Shutterfly was acquired by private equity - Wirecard is a scam. - Grubhub is going to be acquired by a bigger competitor - Travelport, Expedia and Bookin…

Also note that these are internet companies and do no include myriad other software companies, including enterprise tech. So I am not sure if I agree with your concern on tech being reduced to 5-10 big companies.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#649

Post by simonh » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

fractionalhare wrote: post #620

digitaltrees wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not actually making that argument, I was thinking in terms of economies of scale or just that some features or services are so cheap and incidental for a huge player that they end up squashing minors almost by accident. In those cases you can make a case they are doing harm, but being alive causes harm (environmental for example). You've got to draw the line somewhere.

Dumping is tricky. I am actually sympathetic to the argument that says let them dump away. If China is subsidising cheap solar panels and manipulating their currency to make them even cheaper again, fine. Let's gorge ourselves on cheap solar panels. That's fine in theory, but the reality is more complex. What about long term investment in technology development? Control of strategic technologies? These apply to tech services too. I use Google Doc heavily, but I do worry that they are pricing out potentially innovative competition.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Post by simonh » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

noizejoy wrote: post #633

fractionalhare wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What if I as a consumer like the "dumping"? What if as consumer you benefit for a little while until all competition is dead - and then prices increase beyond prior levels? Will you still like “dumping” then?

I think the dump and pump argument is more theoretical than real in a case like this. Pump and dump only works on short time horizons.

A bigger worry for me is stagnation. Suppose Google Docs gets 'good enough' and prices out all the competition, but then Google loses interest because it's not exciting anymore.

This happened with Internet Explorer. We lost years of advancement in browser technology because they dominated, wiped out the competition but then lost interest. Yes competitors came along again after a few years, but there was a significant opportunity cost to all of us.