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

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#591

Post by bombcar » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

loosescrews wrote: post #546

apendleton wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used Paper for awhile, but eventually didn't want to keep paying for both that and G suite (which we do anyway for mail). Personally, though, I think Paper is excellent. It's the first document-authoring tool I've spent much time with that understands that most of what we write will be consumed on (variably-sized) screens rather than in print, and yet is still accessible to less-technical folks. My sense, though,…

It has seemed to me for a while that they need to more fully compete with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and Microsoft Office 365. A big missing piece of that is email, as you said. They even acquired an email startup called Mailbox, but they killed it instead of adding an email service [1]. Every company needs email, and the most popular email services include Dropbox and Paper like products. Slack is available…

Agreed. We have Office 365 because it was cheaper than hosted Exchange which we were using before. Dropbox needed email/collaboration tools (imagine Teams but years ago) - not dependencies on software that includes the same functionality.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#592

Post by fabianhjr » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

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…

> We need smaller innovative businesses to succeed too. It will be a sad day when a $2B business can't survive and is forced to sell.

That is normal under capitalism; There are some allowed advantages like vertical integration and economics of scale for dominant buisnesses and many recognized monopolistic practices (like bundling across markets, zero-rating your service trough mobile providers, and free-offerings to undercut competition, etc)

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#593

Post by bombcar » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 1:42 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?

Partner with Netflix. Offer Dropbox mini+Netflix for $1/mo more than Netflix. Offer upgrades.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#594

Post by maccam94 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 1:43 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.

Sadly Linux users are like 1% of the market, non-ext4 is even less (and I am a full-time Linux user and big ZFS fan). They actually restored support for several non-ext4 filesystems over a year ago[1].

1: https://hub.packtpub.com/dropbox-walks-back-its-own-decision...

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#595

Post by deckard1 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #368

thinkharderdev wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSui…

> Dropbox is a feature not a product. I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops. No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but ne…

I've entirely replaced my usage of Dropbox within the past two years with Syncthing. It works great if you're on Android. Doesn't have an iOS client though.

Nice thing about Syncthing is you can entirely configure what you are syncing and how. I literally press one button on my phone, it creates a backup, and that backup is sent to my server.

I would go as far to say that Android's killer app is Syncthing. Yes, I'm putting this on the same level as iMessage for iOS. It's that good. If I ever switch back to iPhone I will really miss it.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#596

Post by roughly » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 1:59 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…

> 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...

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#597

Post by smcleod » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

Purely from a product perspective I think Evernote still has one big advantage over competitors - it's web clipper and related browser plug-in works almost flawlessly.

I know there are other applications to save websites offline, but there aren't many that have the functionality built into your notes editor.

The ones that do offer one such Bear and Notion have a vast amount of stability, performance and content / layout preservation problems making their web clippers all but useless for anything other than a plain text site.

If anyone does have a recommendation of an Evernote alternative (preferably a native app for macOS and iOS) with an excellent web clipper - I'd be very interested to check it out.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#598

Post by PascLeRasc » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #309

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…

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'd bet Microsoft loses out in the long run due to having to dogfood OneDrive and Teams.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#599

Post by triceratops » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

themacguffinman wrote: post #581

triceratops wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds reasonable to me. We already have homes with outlandish smart stuff (washers and dryers, I mean really!). If you have a fridge to store your food and a closet to store your clothes, why not a personal data storage unit?

Because it's not necessary and pointlessly inconvenient for most people? If you could store your food and clothes in the cloud, we wouldn't have fridges and closets either.

That's true. Have an upvote.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#600

Post by indymike » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 2:21 AM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #516

indymike wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own an MSP and we have wide latitude to set rates with our customers. The numbers that were in the example ($.50 plus on a $2 transaction) are on the high side of ridiculous, especially for card present. And yes, the base costs vary by industry so your milage may vary.

You think card is present when you sign up for dropbox?

No, poster mentioned restaurants & bars, which generally are card present.