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Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#371

Post by rco8786 »

ilyt wrote: post #164
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

Imagine thinking that because Big Company Does it it must be sensible and logical because they are Big Company so they don't make blunders like that.

I never said anything of the sort. DBX using AI might be a horrible flop. Nothing I said had anything to do with the [potential] success of their roadmap. Only that they have one (which, I guess, is only an assumption), and the OP doesn't know what it is but is commenting as though they do.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#372

Post by rco8786 »

soared wrote: post #90
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.

> organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.

This is genuinely blind to anything that's happened in AI over the last 6-12 months. The data that is the most valuable to AI is exactly all of the random, unstructured data (product requirements, decisioning documents, engineering designs, process documentation, etc etc) that has been shared across teams.

> I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff.

requiring a layoff no, certainly me neither. There is definitely a bit of "compliment sandwich" happening in this letter. The layoffs were likely just a long time coming for a company that has been rather stagnant for quit some time.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#373

Post by rco8786 »

carlmr wrote: post #236
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

>DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. Snark incoming - if somebody at Dropbox reads this they might have an AI strategy now. I think your idea is amazing. But I think that a lot of publicly traded companies are now "doing something with AI" like a headless chicken without any deeper though on why. But your idea is good!

Yea I don't understand all these responses. I'm not commenting on the quality or viability of DBX's AI strategy. Because I don't know what it is! I am commenting on the OP, who is acting like they know what it is.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#374

Post by gumballindie »

xyst wrote: post #29

Why is a digital storage company moving into AI? Personally haven’t used them for at least 5-6 years so I am out of the loop there. Seems like a poor excuse to cut people.

Loads of data to steal and resell via ai. Time to move on to better suited image hosts or private storage.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#375

Post by rco8786 »

ipaddr wrote: post #196
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do? Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited? Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph? Understanding product strategies are part of many users day to day lives. Don't dismiss everyo…

> Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do?

My message is that OP doesn't know DBX's product strategy. I don't either. I never claimed to.

> Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited?

Sorry, where did I do that?

> Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph?

No, I do not. I never claimed to.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#376

Post by rco8786 »

deeviant wrote: post #231
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals. > It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models. What could go wrong in dropbox invading their customer's privacy to scrap…

> Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals.

I have no idea what their strategy is. Neither do you. Neither does OP. That is all i said.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#377

Post by hbn »

kiratp wrote: post #329
hbn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google One's tiers are better, but they're still kinda nonsense. The first 2 paid tiers are 100GB and 200GB which are fine. But then you have to jump up 3.5x the cost to 2TB. Why can't they just offer finely-tuned increments of 100GB? Or even 50GB or 25GB. I'm mindful with what I put on cloud storage (mainly photo/video backups with Google Photos). I'm fine bumping up as I use more, but I don't feel like you suddenly…

It’s pretty simple. Selling storage is a crap margin business. The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers. They only make money when you upgrade and buy more storage than what you use. They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.

> The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers.

Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#378

Post by rco8786 »

time_to_smile wrote: post #163
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership. I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking" 14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, w…

Super weird comment. I've worked at tech co's for ~15 years on sprint teams and directly next to the CTO and everywhere in between...and they've all had product strategies.

Maybe DBX sucks at executing theirs. Maybe their strategy sucks. I don't know. I'm not claiming to. All I am claiming is that there is some strategy at the leadership level right now at DBX that appears to involve AI - and any comments beyond that are purely speculative.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#379

Post by gizmo »

hbn wrote: post #319
gizmo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understand this kind of moralistic thinking about pricing. If you get more storage than you need for a price you're willing to pay you should be happy. You get the storage you need and then some. I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm w…

Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually g…

For services like these, whether it's Google One or Dropbox, R&D is the major expense. Not hard drive space. In order to recoup the R&D cost you have to segment customers by their willingness to pay. When you charge per GB you leave a lot of money on the table.

Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Figuring out where my data went is too much work, so I subscribed. Other people will delete old photos/attachments/files so they don't have to upgrade to the next pricing tier. Price segmentation works.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#380

Post by bedosh »

gizmo wrote: post #283
tapoxi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/ , it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).

Syncthing is not end-to-end encrypted. It's peer to peer TLS encrypted. With end-to-end encryption you can transfer data with an untrusted server as intermediary, which syncthing doesn't support.

Syncthing supports transferring data via untrusted relays (used when two nodes cannot communicate directly) and also supports storing data encrypted on untrusted nodes (those nodes cannot decrypt the data)
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