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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

#461

Post by bachmeier »

bambax wrote: post #450
bachmeier wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. I was also going to comment on their similarities. It's not mentioned as often, but Evernote's biggest selling point in the beginning was that they figured out how to make multidevice sync work. The product was good, but not unique. In the early days there were no competitors that could offer the comfort of Evernote's sync. Unfortunately both companies st…

I don't understand the point about pricing. I find it cheap for something that works perfectly, across any device/OS and never fails, never breaks, and is extremely fast (insanely fast). The only way one would prefer something half-baked just because it's "free" is if they don't really care about robustness and dependability. That said, maybe the current Covid crisis is hurting them more than others. I used to travel…

> I find it cheap for something that works perfectly, across any device/OS and never fails, never breaks, and is extremely fast (insanely fast).

That doesn't help if your target customers believe they can get the exact same thing at a much lower price. (And many of them get those services from their employers for free.)

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#462

Post by thisisbrians »

samvher wrote: post #317
tidepod12 wrote: post #186

I have a couple connections on LinkedIn that work at Dropbox, and through them I have noticed a decent amount (certainly more than usual) of somewhat-high-up individuals leaving Dropbox in the past couple weeks. Might just be completely coincidental, but I wonder if they had advance notice (or perhaps just saw the writing on the wall)? Also anecdotal and total speculation, I interviewed at Dropbox a couple years ago…

I use Paper and have to say I quite like it - I started using it at my current job where it seemed common and hadn’t heard of it before. The main thing I like it for is quickly putting together group TODOs - you can create checkboxes with [] and can tag people’s names to items and add deadlines. That combined with some indentation is exactly the level of structure I like to organize such things. I’m surprised to find…

My startup also uses Paper (and we love/have loved it) but are migrating more and more to Confluence recently. I still use Paper for quick brainstorming/organizing for smaller groups and projects, though. The collaborative editing and always-on edit mode make it great for documents in rapid flux, whereas Confluence is better for long-lived strategy and documentation related items.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#463

Post by gumby »

cogman10 wrote: post #124
manigandham wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

I can't talk about GDrive or iCloud. However, window's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than dropbox IMO. It actually surprised me how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just worked out of the box, the only thing I had to do was provide my windows credentials (benefits of that sort of integration). That being said, I've not tried to access those same files from my phone. Maybe that's worse. Dropb…

Unfortunately there are a lot of filenames it can't handle, and can't always explain. It supports only Windows filenames, while I use my Mac as a unix machine and create all sorts of filenames.

That spooked me.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#464

Post by uyt »

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…

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 cap

- Paper for documents

- Mailbox for emails

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#465

Post by aborsy »

F00Fbug wrote: post #75
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.

Have a look at Syncthing.

Secure access over the internet is a limitation of self hosting.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#466

Post by avrionov »

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...

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 Bookings are 3 very similar companies which bought all the smaller competitors.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#467

Post by gowld »

munificent wrote: post #397
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 haven't given any real thought to this, but maybe in terms of regulations, we should think of free software products as another kind of price dumping. It's essentially price dumping down to zero.

Dumping is different from bundling, but the boundary is fuzzy.

Dumping is an unsustainable business practice that cripples competitors before raising prices to sustainable levels.

Bundling isn't bad if its price is higher than cost and it's cheaper for customers than unbundling.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#468

Post by rusk »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #382
paxys wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was and still is a terrible take. You don't get to an annual revenue of $2B and market cap of $10B with a "feature, not a product". In recent years Apple itself has started purchasing a ton of cloud services, including Box, for its own employees.

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?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#469

Post by usaar333 »

msoad wrote: post #11

I interviewed with Dropbox before their IPO. It felt like an old company that everyone is coasting. I wonder how young companies get to that point so quickly?

They stop growing. The ambitious people leave first when they realize growth is slowing. Ultimately, only the less ambitious are left.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#470

Post by kenhwang »

uyt wrote: post #464
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…

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 fishes.

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