Was the COO a bad fit? She was only in the role for ~1 year.
Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
261–270 of 689 posts
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#262Dropbox is often cited as a success story when it comes to startups. But makes me think, is this what we should call successful companies? Companies that takes others money, grow the company until they've grown too much and need to fire people because of their poor decisions? Sure, Dropbox is a whole of 13 years old, which is infinity time on the internet, but considering the rest of the ecosystem with businesses (wh…
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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#263Earlier 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…
> Dropbox still has the best sync by far than any other system This is a common dev thought. But almost no company in the world is going to care about that. You can onboard some consumer with that point but I hope they don't actually try to sign companies using that.
Except it matters to users. When you’re trying to collaborate in real-time with folks, poor sync gets noticed.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#264Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#265These egotistical CEOs need to work on how to deliver difficult news without making so much of it about how hard it is on themselves. > This is a hard message for me to send > This is one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make in my 14 years as CEO No one asked how you feel, Drew. You'll be fine.
And no one really believes corporate communications to start with, when it comes to motives or feelings, so it's a double dose of "yeah right"...
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#266This 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.
Not entirely accurate. I didn’t even realize this was a thing, but on the Dropbox web interface you can now open docs, slideshows and spreadsheets in either Office365 or Google Office without accounts on either.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#267Migrated from Dropbox when I noticed that their client uses about 300 Mb of memory on Windows and my old laptop with HDD was terribly slow just right after booting. WTF? Is it really necessary 300Mb of memory to just sync my files to the cloud?
Electron will do that to you...
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#268The standard practice of hiring close to you and in "famous" hubs is dying a slow and painful death as companies realize that after you skim the cream of the software engineers, there's no measurable difference between an engineer living and working in Africa vs US and (western) Europe. Hopefully they re-orient and change their processes to benefit.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#269This 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?
Storage-as-a-service is a commodity and race to the bottom. Check $BOX and $DBX 5 year charts. Good luck competing with GAFA on this, best hope is a buyout. Firesale on depreciating assets. On the consumer side, storage will become an appliance, like a (stick of butter sized) fridge. Or just included in your centralized home + family control center.
> On the consumer side, storage will become an appliance, like a (stick of butter sized) fridge. Or just included in your centralized home + family control center.
You can already get an inexpensive Synology NAS with a slick UI and backups to a cloud provider of your choice, or Nextcloud, although there's probably room on both for one click import from your existing Dropbox account using your auth and their API to migrate contents.
Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
#270Migrated from Dropbox when I noticed that their client uses about 300 Mb of memory on Windows and my old laptop with HDD was terribly slow just right after booting. WTF? Is it really necessary 300Mb of memory to just sync my files to the cloud?
Electron will do that to you...
I thought they used python?