[HN Gopher] Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce
Author : champagnepapi
Score : 347 points
Date : 2021-01-13 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| [deleted]
| megamike wrote:
| COBRA? COBRA is a sad expensive joke
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| They're covering 6 months of it, so it's free for 6 months.
| After those 6 months it does get expensive, yes.
| smeyer wrote:
| COBRA's joke is just the joke of the most expensive healthcare
| in the world and a system that largely ties healthcare to
| employment. It's not like there's anything extra expensive
| about COBRA; it's just all the questionable expense of American
| healthcare without an employer subsidizing it.
| andrewem wrote:
| They say "NAMER-based employees will be eligible for up to
| six months of COBRA". Note that by law, a former employee is
| eligible to pay for up to 18 months of continuation health
| coverage under COBRA. So perhaps they mean that Dropbox will
| pay the premiums for up to 6 months, but it's awfully unclear
| as written.
|
| (Also I assume "NAMER" means North America. It's a funny way
| to say "The United States" in this context, given that
| presumably Canada and Mexico, which are in North America,
| don't have a law called COBRA which is about this.)
| santoshalper wrote:
| That's exactly what they mean. 6 months of cobra
| subsidization.
| clra wrote:
| Out of curiosity, is there something lower cost/better that
| employees who have recently quit or been laid off should look
| into?
| derwiki wrote:
| Lower cost, sure any number of options on the market. I used
| https://www.ehealthinsurance.com years ago between jobs
| tidepod12 wrote:
| Lower cost premiums maybe, but I doubt any low-premium
| marketplace plans will be lower deductible than the
| corporate/COBRA plans offered by a company like Dropbox.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Healthcare needs to be disconnected from the employer. Public
| option and private and all healthcare benefits need to go to
| salary. It would make workers able to change jobs easier,
| businesses able to start and compete with others/countries
| easier, and would reduce ageism as well as going direct to
| consumer it would help the fixed pricing market of
| healthcare/medical services and supplies.
|
| We don't get our auto/home/life insurance through work, why our
| most private healthcare/insurance? It is a legacy thing that
| needs to end and is harming wage increases, competition and
| worker/labor freedom.
|
| Removing healthcare from employer responsibilities is actually
| pro-business and pro-worker and encourages the competition we
| need in that industry/service.
|
| Side note: For some reason I really don't like Dropbox color
| schemes and fonts/typography. Feels like it was made in a
| machine with billions of AB tests but ultimately looks jarring.
| I miss the nice clean branding and the little illustrations.
| simoneau wrote:
| I don't understand why this doesn't get more discussion. It's
| a much more conservative step than "medicare for all" and
| would do a lot of good.
| lvs wrote:
| It has no clear advantages over M4A, and the critical
| problem is it has no cost-control consequence.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| As I understand it, you need collective bargaining against
| insurers to keep individual premiums down. Employers do
| that today, and if employers just pay out their insurance
| spend to employees, the employees will get less insurance
| as a result. A single payer system means the government
| negotiates on behalf of all of the citizens, allowing it to
| keep costs down much more than our current system.
| solresol wrote:
| Or you mandate that the insurers can only rate on certain
| variables (e.g. zip code) and/or you mandate a pooling
| system so that insurers who have many low risk people on
| their books subsidise insurers who have many high risk
| people.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Right, there are other solutions, but "just cut the
| insurance check to employees" isn't a good option for
| employees.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| It astonishes me that a global health crisis can ironically
| trigger loss of healthcare for millions. That's such an
| abject failure of a system.
|
| You're right, healthcare has no business being tightly
| coupled to employers -- or employ _ment_ , in my opinion.
| Everyone should have healthcare.
| xvedejas wrote:
| My health insurance isn't taxed, or at least effectively not
| anywhere near what my top salary bracket is. Our tax law
| means there would be no short-term advantage for either me or
| my employer to shift that compensation into cash.
|
| If my employer offered additional desirable insurance to
| replace an equal amount of pre-tax salary, I would gladly
| except that extra compensation too.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Self employed and businesses get a tax break/expense for
| that. It could be the same with personal insurance. Doing
| things only for the tax break leads you to all sorts of
| finagling twisted fixed markets.
|
| I'd always take real wages over total/real compensation
| which is supposedly about 30-35% of your pay.
|
| Binding healthcare to employers also makes for less
| competitive consumer markets as the target customers of
| medical services are insurers and employers, not the actual
| users of the service, individuals.
|
| A good first step to break this legacy grip and fixed
| market would be allowing individuals to expense out their
| healthcare cost, it would also benefit people that have
| health issues and not make it so detrimental to their
| quality of life.
|
| Right now healthcare is a cartel borg bureaucracy because
| of being tied to employers and not a direct consumer
| service.
| rmk wrote:
| It's the lesser of three evils: losing coverage altogether,
| having to buy it as part of an open risk pool, or continuing
| coverage as part of the company's risk pool and rates the
| company has negotiated for its employees. It would be nice to
| have better options, but they will all be very expensive for
| the taxpayer. Either way, the money has to come out of
| someone's pocket.
|
| By getting more people insured, Obamacare was expected to have
| bent down the rising curve of healthcare costs. I am not sure
| if that has actually happened...
| weeboid wrote:
| > COBRA? COBRA is a sad expensive joke
|
| COBRA and supplemental insurance as primary are great late
| stage capitalism for sure
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment I
| had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download button
| for a file shared with me on Dropbox.
|
| Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of
| your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.
| disantlor wrote:
| For me, Dropbox is a great product that makes my life/workflow
| with music production so much easier and convenient. Moving
| interface things around is at worst annoying but really just
| trivial. I don't understand why people on HN get so reliably
| get fired up about UI changes.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Too bad for Dropbox and other companies HN people are not the
| only ones.
|
| There are at least two big variables here:
|
| 1 - Is the new UI actually better? by how much?
|
| 2 - What's the cost of change for the existing users?
|
| Bonus complexity: There are large groups of different
| customers inside your customer base.
|
| If your product is the best ever with no competitor in sight
| you can annoy them almost indefinitely, the second anything
| remotely similar appears, all the built up resentment just
| fuels the migration and it usually behaves like a tsunami, at
| first it's barely noticeable until a 3 foot wall keeps going
| and going and you can't do anything about it.
| te_chris wrote:
| Absolutely this. As a producer as well dropbox means I can
| work off a laptop as my main machine - albeit a tricked out
| 15in mbp with 1TB SSD. Selective sync is amazing. The web UI
| is great for listening to demos and such - I'd love a
| playlist/play dir feature though.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Agreed, it's been a really nice service. Plus, downloading is
| already taken care of for me with sync, which is where
| Dropbox is really positioned for best use.
|
| If I'm downloading something from a Dropbox, that's a pretty
| good sign I'm not going to be working with that person much,
| or it's a one-off task.
| planb wrote:
| These are not simply UI changes. Dropbox implements more and
| more dark patterns that go directly against everything it
| once stood for. This service used to be a fire-and-forget way
| to have a local directory that's also online and on multiple
| machines. Now it's a service that tries to be everything at
| once and never gets out of your way.
| FreakyT wrote:
| Completely agree! Dropbox was at its best when it had
| almost no UI outside of "sync status" and "pause/resume" in
| a menu. Now they constantly shove their terrible UI in your
| face when all you ever want to do is sync/view your files.
| babyshake wrote:
| You can tell that an increasing proportion of their product
| engineering is based around figuring out how to
| convince/trick people into paying, or paying more. This
| seems to be the rule and not the exception for SaaS
| companies that have grown to a certain point.
| disantlor wrote:
| I have to say I have literally never once had the thought
| that Dropbox is in my way. I have a 3TB pro account which I
| have setup on my studio computer with full sync to an
| external drive. I record/work on sessions with sync
| continually active. Both of those things should be "no
| no"'s, but it works fine.
|
| I go home and my laptop is smart syncing the recently
| active sessions only which conserves space on the laptop
| drive but lets me do some small work on recently active
| sessions.
|
| It's totally seamless and I cannot recall the last time I
| was even alerted by Dropbox about anything except that I
| was hitting my 3TB cap soon.
|
| The only issue I ever had was using it on Windows where it
| would occasionally create conflicted file copies, which was
| annoying, but moving to OSX resolved that.
| TurningCanadian wrote:
| You don't use the web interface much, eh?
| disantlor wrote:
| I do. I go through stuff and use the star interface to
| track things I want to focus on. Actually I was slightly
| annoyed that they made it more hidden on the web
| interface. Looks like they added it back.
| donmcronald wrote:
| If I'm paying for something I don't want to be engaged. I
| want to be efficient. It's incredible just how bad UIs have
| gotten in the last 10 years.
|
| I use Nextcloud and there are parts of the UI that defy
| logic. For example, when I select a file it brings up an
| "Actions" menu that's hidden via a hamburger button. It has
| 4 options and I have about 3000px of horizontal whitespace
| on the same row.
|
| TLDR; It's all hamburgers and whitespace and I don't
| understand why.
| jeffbarr wrote:
| I thought I was the only one who had trouble with this. Based
| on the other replies here, that's definitely not the case.
| manigandham wrote:
| 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 to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack
| but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the
| strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file
| explorer.
| hattar wrote:
| > the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a
| file explorer.
|
| Every time I encounter this I reconsider my Dropbox
| subscription.
| Grakel wrote:
| I switched to sync.com 3 months ago, and never looked back.
| newacct8086 wrote:
| [I'm being polite :)] I've been unable to find anything
| to make an informed opinion on what they mean by end-to-
| end encryption, which is prominently mentioned on the
| home page etc.
|
| [I'm not being polite. #BeingThatGuy :)] My best guess is
| that they're using their own definition of end-to-end
| encryption. i.e., SSL for transit + encryption at rest =
| "end-to-end encryption". Whatever.
| ffpip wrote:
| If you forget your password, you lose your files. There
| is a 'forgot password' option which you can disable when
| signing up.
|
| https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/
|
| Figure out what you want from the page.
| egwor wrote:
| I'm a paying customer and I just realised that I'd not been
| using my Dropbox on my rebuilt laptop for >6months. I gave
| up with the crappy view. That's pretty bad if I only just
| noticed!
| iscrewyou wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one. And once I close that window
| with Cmd+Q, I have a mild panic attack that I closed the
| actual service that was in the middle of a sync and may
| have lost some data.
| pradn wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's inevitable, since presenting a regular
| file explorer looks like they're competing in the commodity
| file syncing / backup space, not the higher-value
| enterprise collaboration space. They're trying not to be a
| "feature" as Steve Jobs called them.
| manigandham wrote:
| But the dropbox "app" doesn't even really do that much,
| it's just a clone of a native file explorer, but worse.
| mszcz wrote:
| I don't get that. As opposed to what? Displaying an
| unfamiliar window what gets in the way and is confusing?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Enterprise collaboration is going to use what integrates
| with their email - that's going to be OneDrive or Google
| Drive. The commodity syncing space was where DropBox
| shined, and it feels weird taking a step back from that.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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. Dropbox does a really good
| job of syncing well across platforms.
| manigandham wrote:
| Do you mean Onedrive? It's not built-in but installed by
| default on Windows. It's still not as good as Dropbox. For
| example it only recently added differential syncing (for
| non-office files)[1] while Dropbox puts much more effort
| into syncing tech [2].
|
| Most people probably won't notice the difference because
| the alternatives are good enough now. But if you have
| millions of files in deep folders, constant changes from
| multiple devices, or need instant syncing, then Dropbox is
| still worth the premium for the performance.
|
| 1. https://office365itpros.com/2020/04/28/onedrive-
| differential... 2.
| https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-
| of-o...
| cheschire wrote:
| I have no issues saving files to onedrive on my iphone and
| having it sync painlessly to my desktop folder on my PC,
| and vice versa.
|
| It feels really seamless to me.
| toyg wrote:
| _> window 's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than
| dropbox IMO._
|
| That's "thanks" to Dropbox though. Microsoft's "Live"
| features used to be terrible. It took a competitor to show
| them how it's done and force them to step up their game.
| forgot-my-pw wrote:
| > how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just
| worked out of the box.
|
| All the other sync / backup apps also work that way after
| installation.
|
| I actually dislike Onedrive web interface look compared to
| the top competitors. Photo view often appears buggy when
| scrolling down (outlook.com file view also has problems).
| Sharing folders/files as a public link gives full access by
| default.
|
| Both web Outlook and Onedrive do not seem to have received
| much updates in the past few years.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| djhworld wrote:
| For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their
| rigid pricing structure, PS7.99 a month for 1TB is good value
| for people who use 1TB, but I only need like 10% of that so
| would be wasting money
|
| I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers
| using all their allowance and everyone else being way under
| the limit
|
| I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at PS1.99
| which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a
| heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
| TuringNYC wrote:
| In 2015/16/17 there was also the silly 5-seat minimum for
| businesses. I purchased a $150/yr plan only to be suddenly
| billed $750 (in the fine print, you were committing to 5
| seats minimum, whether the seats were assigned or not.) If
| you checked your credit card bill more than 30 days out,
| thats it, no refund.
| jsploit wrote:
| > I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers
| using all their allowance and everyone else being way under
| the limit
|
| Reminded me of this story [0] of a team with a 500TB
| account serving as a database and VCS.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dro
| pbox_...
| troydavis wrote:
| > I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers
| using all their allowance and everyone else being way under
| the limit
|
| For a PS7.99/month plan, the cost of goods sold (COGS) on
| the actual storage and bandwidth is probably about 33% of
| that -- and that's based on average usage.
|
| Here's a longer explanation with citations that I wrote in
| 2018:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883#16470633. I
| haven't looked at their annual reports since then, but the
| COGS could have easily dropped by 50% in that time, so it
| might be way less than 33%.
|
| Just based on that 2018 data, the other PS5 or so is
| customer acquisition cost, software development, support,
| administration, and everything else.
|
| The COGS is a small enough part of the price that, even if
| they could remove a lot of it (by reducing usage and/or the
| cap), the absolute cost reduction might be 10% or 20% of
| the current price.
|
| This is true for the smaller plans of almost all SaaS. The
| vendor's variable COGS are not what you're paying for.
| (Exception: cloud services with entirely usage-based
| pricing and no monthly minimum, like S3. Those are rare.)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They're not likely to add smaller packages though, since
| they KNOW 99% of their customers will never go up that
| high. It's a bit like gmail; they offered 1 GB at the time
| (if I recall correctly?) which was a ridiculous amount that
| in practice, 99% of people would NEVER reach. But it was
| great PR. Mind you, gmail is "free".
|
| If Dropbox were to offer a 500GB package for half price,
| 99% of their customers that found out about it would switch
| to that. What's worse, they would likely open themselves up
| to a class action suit for people who feel like they
| overpaid for years.
|
| Introducing a cheaper, lower capacity subscription now
| would be suicide for the company.
| toyg wrote:
| _> they would likely open themselves up to a class action
| suit for people who feel like they overpaid for years._
|
| That's overly dramatic. Companies cut prices every day.
|
| It is however true that Dropbox cannot compete on price
| with the likes of MS, Google, and Apple. They can only
| compete on experience and features, and few people are
| impressed by their evolution in those areas.
|
| Do we really need a monstruous (and monstruously slow)
| html view when right-clicking on the systray icon? Do we
| really need online file-viewers that, most of the times,
| seem meant to stop you from getting at the actual file?
|
| Dropbox was great when it did one thing flawlessly and
| got out of your way, while allowing for hackability and
| true cross-platform support. When they were doing fun
| things like the easter-egg-hunts and challenges to get
| extra space. Now they often feel like Yet Another SV App
| shouting "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I CAN DO THIS AND THAT
| AND YOU DON'T NEED ANYTHING ELSE IN YOUR LIFE! LET ME
| INGEST ALL YOUR DATA AND LOCK YOU IN FOREVER!". I still
| have an account mostly because I have a free
| grandfathered account, but the minute they turn it off
| (and inevitably they will, since they are now a Serious
| Company with Serious Strategies and Serious Spreadsheets)
| I'll just check out.
| dunham wrote:
| The useless, giant electron ticked me off. That was soon
| followed by a price increase. So I dropped them.
|
| On the way out, Dropbox blocked me from deleting
| 'tex.web' on my local machine, because it thought it
| owned anything with a '.web' extension.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I can get Office 365 Family (6 people), each one getting
| 1TB, plus 60 mins of skype per month each, plus word,
| excel, PowerPoint, online and desktop. Dropbox's Family
| plan, includes only 2TB of storage and basically nothing
| more (I know about paper but who uses it?). Office365 costs
| 50 euros per year. Dropbox 200 euros per year! Four times
| as expensive, and much less features. They are crazy
| expensive.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Real hard to make a business with a $2 a month fee. When
| credit card fees in the US, the bank is eating like 50
| cents of it. I think 7-8 bucks/pounds is about the minimum
| price for many apps to bother with it. Below that rather
| just have a limited "free" tier.
| ryan29 wrote:
| Charge annually? I use Zoho for email because of their
| $12/year/user lite usage plan. There's no way I'd pay for
| MS365 or Google Workplace given my usage. I also have an
| MXRoute account, historio.us, etc. where the recurring
| theme is they cost $20/year or less.
| vladjjj wrote:
| But I'd pay $25 a year in a heartbeat, otherwise I'm
| shuffling between free tiers.
| throw3848 wrote:
| Charge yearly... Works for domains..
| brianwawok wrote:
| Sure.
|
| Domains are really close to 0 support. Can you email
| support questions when Dropbox starts acting weird? For
| $10-$20 a year, one support ticket makes the customer
| unprofitable for the entire year.
|
| Real thin margins, seems gross to try and build a
| business on the $1-$2 a month thing. I wouldn't.
|
| Works for a Titans like apple and google because they are
| making money in other ways..
| indymike wrote:
| Credit card fees are negotiable with most processors. You
| can get a fee structure that is optimized for low dollar
| transactions.
| Supermancho wrote:
| That minimum fee has recently increased. Like 1-2 months
| ago. You are not going to negotiate that down with
| VISA/MC. Talk to a bar/restaurant worker, who gets to see
| the transaction fees.
| indymike wrote:
| I own an MSP and we have wide latitude to set rates with
| our customers. The numbers that were in the example ($.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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| You think card is present when you sign up for dropbox?
| polote wrote:
| > 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Except it matters to users. When you're trying to
| collaborate in real-time with folks, poor sync gets
| noticed.
| manigandham wrote:
| Of course it doesn't matter if it's just used for syncing
| some office files but Dropbox is common in creative fields
| like video production and visual effects where sync
| performance is a real selling point.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Knew the writing was on the wall for this company the moment
| I had to dig into a drop down chevron to find the download
| button for a file shared with me on Dropbox.
|
| Why is this such a huge problem for you? Seems super minor?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a really reliable signal that the company is optmizing
| for the wrong things. The company just got out of its way to
| make non-customers life harder, that normally doesn't happen
| by accident.
|
| It's not impactful by itself, but the more impactful things
| are less reliable as signals anyway.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Its not about the button. It's a signal that the people who
| want to make the best UI are less powerful in the company
| than the people who want to drive the highest number of
| Dropbox signups (making users think that signing up for
| Dropbox is the only/preferred way to get the file).
|
| That's a sign that the company's growth has tapped out and
| that they need to do shit like that, a solid leading
| indicator of trouble ahead.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If you see Dropbox as a service for managing files, and many
| of us do, then not being able to easily download the actual
| file is annoying. The client still won't let you set a
| preference for direct download links instead of dropbox
| preview links, the android client is basically useless and
| more and more the features added have no value to me as a
| user.
| notdang wrote:
| for me it's a sign that marketing people took over the
| company
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't get why marketing would care about a minor detail
| in the UI after you're already using the product?
| rtx wrote:
| Have you seen the recent trend of hiding the login
| button.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| User retention. Keep people in the platform so they can't
| take their data. Force users to come back to dropbox
| again and again (to run up your engagement stats) instead
| of throwing the file over Slack or whatever.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| The detail is that you have two people: one is paying for
| the product and one is not. The one who is paying shares
| a file with the one who doesn't pay. Dropbox provides a
| worse experience for the person who doesn't pay.
|
| This is in contrast to services like Zoom or Google Drive
| where part of the sales pitch is that you get a seamless
| experience when communicating with people - even if the
| person you're talking to might not be paying, you can
| guarantee because you are paying their experience won't
| be impaired, at least for the duration of your
| interaction.
| duiker101 wrote:
| I think (but it is a guess) that what the parent comment
| means is that the company is at a stage where they need to
| resort to bad UI to try and keep users in some way. It might
| be hard to download a file that has been shared with a user
| but they might make it easy to have that file ready if you
| have a dropbox account.
| dalrympm wrote:
| I have been a Dropbox customer for several years and every
| single time I try to download a file from the web I get
| stumped.
|
| It's really a user hostile interface and it's up there on my
| list of things to replace but not high enough that I've done
| anything about it.
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| just downloaded it the other day to search for old files from
| long ago and was barraged by popups, installers, and trying
| to get me to do 5 things at once. So confusing. I gave up
| searching for what I was looking for
| prionassembly wrote:
| Dropbox had a discontinuous price increase a couple of years
| ago that soured me on them. I'm still a user -- the price is
| still a couple of notches below marginal utility. But I no
| longer recommend it.
|
| Something similar happened to Evernote -- I stopped liking the
| brand when I started to feel price-gouged. And then I quit on
| them shortly after when the apps were not snappy and well-
| organized to my liking (at the price they were charging me). I
| was a bit of an Evernote evangelizer too.
|
| For a while I was storing _fiches de police_ (what 's the name
| for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe
| boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from
| canned peaches and pineapples.
| dash2 wrote:
| >For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name
| for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe
| boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from
| canned peaches and pineapples.
|
| Hmm... you may not be Dropbox's most typical consumer! :-)
| SaberTail wrote:
| "index cards", perhaps?
| pjc50 wrote:
| What is the bandwidth of a peach tin full of index cards,
| anyway?
| [deleted]
| ryanianian wrote:
| > fiches de police (what's the name for that in American?
| Light cardstock with lines?)
|
| Index cards. Usually 3x5" or 4x6".
|
| Popular for use with the "hipster PDA" (index cards and a
| binder-clip), a response to palm pilots and the like being
| way more complicated than necessary for the problem they're
| trying to solve--seems similar to what you ended up with.
| SudoAlex wrote:
| Same here - a price increase makes you reconsider the
| relationship you've got with the service you're using.
| Companies should strongly consider leaving existing customers
| alone with legacy plans rather than aiming to extract as much
| revenue as possible.
|
| For me Dropbox didn't do that, so instead of happily leaving
| our existing business account for most team members - we re-
| evaluated our usage of it, limited it to just a few accounts
| with the aim of getting rid of it entirely.
|
| At that point it's not something you'd consider recommending
| it in passing to other people.
| gresrun wrote:
| I believe you're referring to "Notecards". In the US they
| come in 2 common sizes: 5"x7" & 4"x6"
| spoonjim wrote:
| Because software switching is annoying, raising prices is the
| oldest trick in the book for getting revenue growth when you
| have tapped out the potential inherent in your product.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Precisely, yes. And then this makes you wary of
| subscription-based software in general. At one point it
| seemed that an "extended Moore's law" (if not CPU
| transistors, then the general cost of compute, memory and
| storage) and the beauty of near-zero marginal costs would
| lead to a bright "there's an app for that" future. I
| remember Evernote launched at some point an iOS app to
| store food reviews, it was glorious. But now the future
| seems darker. Bean counters have finally noticed the
| windfall that's the extreme economies of scale in internet
| businesses. There's no "singularity" of accelerated tech
| change. I'm tech-savvy enough to roll out a personal blog
| stored on my custom sqlite format, but isn't it safer if I
| just write longhand and file it physically? Use the typing
| process for proofchecking. Decelerationism.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I don't think the writing is on the wall at all here. I think
| the company over shot a little, by trying to be a general-
| purpose enterprise platform instead of a tool (or suite of
| tools).
|
| But from what I know the core business and the team are still
| really strong. They're just more of a Slack and less of a
| Microsoft, and probably have to adjust for that realization.
| dnhz wrote:
| I'm confused here. Someone shared with me a file via dropbox,
| xlsx, and right at the top of the sidebar where I can leave
| comments, there's a download button.
| ProAm wrote:
| Was the COO a bad fit? She was only in the role for ~1 year.
| paxys wrote:
| Every company needs a scapegoat when things are going downhill,
| and a relatively new exec is the perfect one when the
| established leadership doesn't want to take responsibility.
| rogerdickey wrote:
| The writing has been on the wall for many years. Unpopular
| opinion: Zoom is next when everyone else improves their codec.
| [deleted]
| tlogan wrote:
| The only way that Dropbox can stay independent is that they
| develop some email solution. Small companies (which I believe are
| core of Dropbox business) need just 3 things: email, docs and
| spreadsheets.
| hokumguru wrote:
| Funny enough I think Basecamp must have realized this exact
| niche a few years ago because they now offer all three of those
| for small business.
| dmicah wrote:
| Dropbox had acquired the Mailbox email client in 2013, but then
| shut it down in 2015. This was a very annoying turn of events
| for people who used the app prior to the acquisition.
| [deleted]
| saos wrote:
| Not surprised.
|
| Perhaps Im wrong but their price offering compared to Google
| Drive and iCloud is a bit much right?
| 0xFFC wrote:
| I didn't skimmed the article. Quick question, is it only Sales
| and Marketing or layoffs does include engineering too?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| It annoys me that they're adding features I don't need,
| reducing usability and increasing the cost. I wish there was a
| competent alternative that was just a plain cloud storage
| service (and worked well on both Mac and Linux).
| djitz wrote:
| Well, I don't hope they fail, but I will not be renewing my
| subscription this year. I've been onboard since they announced
| paid plans and.. it's just more of an annoyance than it is
| unique or useful for me.
| nickm12 wrote:
| Was there a possibility that you would ever gbe an actual
| customer and not just a potential one?
| dralley wrote:
| I get what you're saying but "greed" is not the way I would put
| it. Look at their financials, 2020 is the first year in their
| history in which they will have been profitable at all.
|
| I think as consumers we're starting to get totally unrealistic
| expectations about what kinds of services small companies (ie.
| not behemouths like Google, Microsoft, Apple) should be able to
| provide to everyone for free.
|
| With that said, yeah, not a fan of their changes. I stopped
| using Dropbox a while ago.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > 2020 is the first year in their history in which they will
| have been profitable at all.
|
| That's because they are absolutely bloated company given the
| relatively simple service they provide. In 2019, they
| employed 2300 people.
| tornato7 wrote:
| Yep, Dropbox created a nifty file sharing tool that a
| handful of devs should be able to support, but instead of
| keeping the team small they decided to go all "Big
| Enterprise Saas IPO" on us.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Dropbox is also to blame for user's expectations, because
| they did offer more in the past, for free.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I think as consumers we're starting to get totally
| unrealistic expectations about what kinds of services small
| companies (ie. not behemouths like Google, Microsoft, Apple)
| should be able to provide to everyone for free.
|
| The number of consumer services the average consumer actually
| pays for is very small.
|
| Video services like Hulu and Netflix are the primary
| exception, but they benefitted greatly from being compared to
| $100+ cable TV packages. It's easy to get people to
| transition from an expensive thing to a cheaper option.
|
| It's much more difficult to get people to switch from a free
| service to a paid service. YouTube is a good example of a
| platform that provides huge value and endless hours of video
| content to people, but selling people on the paid version of
| YouTube is a difficult battle. The outrage over the mere
| existence of YouTube premium on casual social sites like
| Reddit should be downright scary for anyone considering a
| Freemium service.
|
| Dropbox gambled that the average consumer would outgrow their
| 10GB free account as they took more photos and videos with
| cell phones. That gamble was correct, but of course other
| providers swooped in to offer better targeted plans. I'll
| take $3/month iCloud with transparent integration over
| $10/month Dropbox with a separate app.
|
| Dropbox business angle is promising, but again it's much
| easier for companies like Google and Microsoft to add storage
| plans to their existing office suites than it is for Dropbox
| to add office suites to their existing storage plans.
|
| As a techie, I wish Dropbox had stayed as a small $3/month
| for 100GB offering that did file sharing very well and
| nothing else. The latest apps get in the way more than they
| help, and I cancelled my paid plan because the core set of
| files I want to keep Dropbox-accessible is under 10GB. Bigger
| files go to other free services on an as-needed basis.
| isignal wrote:
| They could've stayed small if they hadn't taken VC money
| and hired hundreds of engineers in downtown SF.
| mdoms wrote:
| The absolute audacity of free tier customers lol. You were a
| liability on their balance sheet.
| trevor-e wrote:
| Yea, I'd understand the frustration if OP was paying for the
| service, but this reeks of entitlement. If you are a free
| user don't be mad when the company tries to convert you to a
| paid user.
|
| A better example is how pushy Apple is with upselling their
| iCloud plans. I opened my laptop the other day and it auto-
| opened the iCloud settings app _with the more expensive plan
| pre-checked_.
| math0ne wrote:
| For those that don't know you can get a free account up to 20gb
| using referrals (check out ebay), 20gb is more than enough for me
| to sync my core work between my three main machines.
| gruez wrote:
| off topic: I'm the type of person who likes to select text while
| reading, and this page is terrible for that. It seems to replace
| the select cursor icon with a highlighter icon, which is super
| jarring. It also adds a weird popup after you selected text.
| plzbo wrote:
| I agree, on top of that the animation while scrolling feels
| like scroll-hijacking. At first I thought the page is somehow
| laggy, when it isn't.
| rainboiboi wrote:
| same, i guess dropbox went downhill from the day they did the
| UI/UX redesign
| willis936 wrote:
| On the topic of the page itself: the percent scroll bar on the
| top of the page is quite nice and I wish more articles did
| this.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's what the regular scroll bar should be for, instead of
| auto-hiding.
| gruez wrote:
| yet another instance of webapps going full circle when it
| comes to ui.
| yawboakye wrote:
| The 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.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| I've been saying this over and over this year. Here's where I
| feel Dropbox has missed the mark:
|
| Dropbox understood long ago that it wasn't a document sync
| company, but a work collaboration company.
|
| It's unbelievable that a company of this size has failed to
| create popular work collaboration tools for chat (Slack), video
| conferencing (Slack), document creation (Notion) and design
| (Figma).
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Dropbox suffers hard from feature bloat!
| tidepod12 wrote:
| 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 and they were making a big push into b2b
| Dropbox, particularly with Paper, but I've yet to really hear
| about them successfully breaking into that space (have never met
| or even heard of a company using Paper in the wild). Olivia (the
| COO that's also leaving) used to head up b2b functions at Google
| before joining Dropbox. I wonder if these layoffs are also from
| the b2b teams and perhaps Dropbox is pulling back from (or at
| least rethinking) those efforts?
| samvher wrote:
| 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
| out here that it seems so unpopular.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| 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.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| I have some friends there who have been job hunting recently, I
| think a lot of people could see the writing on the wall.
| apendleton wrote:
| 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, from our
| experience, was that it's pretty polarizing, and some people
| strongly prefer something more like Word.
| loosescrews wrote:
| 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 as a standalone offering and is very
| popular, so a Slack clone may not be required. For everything
| else, limiting your customers to those already paying for
| duplicate services raises the bar. Your service needs to be
| enough better that it is worth paying for it twice.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-
| mailb...
| jhu247 wrote:
| As someone who was impacted by a past round of Uber layoffs,
| seeing this kind of messaging from the top is refreshing.
| catacombs wrote:
| Everyone is at risk.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Just venting on a semi-related note: Dropbox's web UI is
| atrocious. I have a side bar which won't go away with features I
| don't want. It's clunky, slow and endlessly frustrating. Viewing
| a PDF with something like a schematic is almost impossible unless
| I download it locally.
|
| Just get the basics right before you upsell.
| h7t_peloton wrote:
| Sorry to hear, especially given the long history of high-scale,
| performant engineering.
|
| If you are in infrastructure or SRE or developer tooling and
| looking, I am hiring at Peloton
| https://www.onepeloton.com/careers/software?city=%C2%A0%C2%A...
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I just sold my position on DBX. I used to be bullish on Dropbox
| and I'm a loyal user, but the reality is that Wall Street doesn't
| appreciate this space given how commoditized it has become.
|
| Unfortunately I have started to believe them. There's really no
| recent breaktroughs or interesting bets coming from Dropbox. Also
| the fact that migration is as simple as dropping their folder
| into the folder of something like Drive or iCloud makes that
| supposedly sticky factor not real.
|
| Paradoxically what was their UX breakthrough will be their
| demise, given how easy is to migrate out.
| neil1023 wrote:
| Is no one going to talk about how Drake posted this article? /s
| thenightcrawler wrote:
| steve jobs said that these are features not products and well....
| he hasn't proven wrong yet imo.
| avrionov wrote:
| 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 of the poor
| sync capabilities of OneDrive. Dropbox is no failure. Their
| projected revenue for 2020 is $1.8B. This is 3x more than Slack,
| but their market cap is 3x smaller. Both Slack and Evernote are
| facing the most powerful companies in the world offering their
| products for free or at really discounted rates. What makes their
| situation even worse is that they don't own the content
| (documents, pdfs, spreadsheets). The documents will be edited
| somewhere else and then shared in dropbox. On top of that many
| other applications like chat offer file transfer and sharing.
|
| Bottom line: I don't want them to fail ( I don't want Evernote to
| fail too), because it points to a world where only 5 to 10 big
| tech companies can survive. 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.
| deeviant wrote:
| I dunno. I feel dropbox has been getting less and less usable
| as their UI tries to get further away from the very light
| wrapper around windows explorer(or whatever file explorer your
| OS of choice uses).
|
| I really just wanted it to be a folder that exists on all my
| computers. That's it. Now when I ask it to open the dropbox
| folder it stays within it's own application window and attempts
| to recreate windows explorer, but without all the features of
| windows explorer and tons of gunk I don't want.
|
| This seems to be a problem of both the "lets push our userbase
| into patterns that work for us rather than them" and "Hey I'm a
| UI designer so I have design me some UIs, and I'll never stop,
| even though the UI is correct, I'll keep changing it forever!"
| JeffL wrote:
| Yeah, when I forget and accidentally click on the Dropbox
| icon when I want my Dropbox folder and get whatever
| abomination it is that comes up now instead of the folder, I
| get real ragey. It's such an anti-consumer thing when
| companies take a nice product and add a bunch of crap to it
| that no one wants.
| jwr wrote:
| 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 growth.
|
| I hope somebody will start a Dropbox competitor as a
| bootstrapper, with a long-term outlook, no VC funding, and no
| crazy growth targets. Just do file sync right without eating so
| much CPU and battery, and without pestering me with useless
| add-ons, and you'll have my money.
| greatgirl wrote:
| I've always felt this, I've never seen a business actually
| _do_ this. Why don't businesses just stop employing so many
| people? Stop expanding? Stop trying to acquire more users?
|
| I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind
| of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.
| dhnajsjdnd wrote:
| They got where they are by raising from investors on the
| premise they would 10x the money, and also hired top talent
| with stock options that are only worth anything if the
| company similarly increases in value. If ambition wasn't in
| their DNA, they never would have gotten to the good state
| you liked in the first place.
|
| The payoff if the growth attempts work is asymmetric, so
| it's worth the risk.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| From a business perspective, this is how to succeed. From a
| shareholder perspective, this is how to fail. They are
| diametrically opposed, which is hysterical. There can be
| overlap, but not until your original sword is sharpened to a
| razors edge, to borrow a phrase.
| kersten wrote:
| I agree and I'd love to support Dropbox. But I think in order
| for me to consider that they'd need to have a somewhat
| competitive pricing model.
|
| For example: I'm currently slowly running out of my free Google
| cloud storage that came with my Gmail account (15GB?). The next
| step for me is to upgrade to 100GB which will probably be
| enough for at least the next 10 years or so. With Google Drive
| that will cost me $1.99 per month which is more than
| reasonable. With Dropbox the next biggest package (after
| exceeding the free storage limit of 2GB) is to upgrade to a
| $11.99 plan for 2 TB (waaaaay more than I will ever need).
|
| I'm willing to pay 5.99 for idealistic reasons but I'm not
| willing to pay more than that just for the sake of supporting a
| "smaller" non-FAANG company. They need to provide a better deal
| for something between 2 GB and 2 TB.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| You're not a potential customer. They gave up on consumers
| and focus on companies. Cannot blame them they don't want to
| lose money on individual users like the competition.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Even the business plans make no sense. 5TB to share between
| all employees? Or pay a lot more and get no real answer on
| what their 'as much as you need' means. It sounds like you
| have to contact their support and explain why you could
| possibly need more and then its up to them to decide.
|
| Google workspaces is still a better deal and they're not
| currently even limiting storage.
| apple4ever wrote:
| And yet they are cutting 11% of their staff because they
| are losing money...
|
| Maybe they should figured out somewhere inbetween.
| apple4ever wrote:
| Thats at least a big part of their problem. Apple has smaller
| jumps ($1.99/$3.99/$9.99). Dropbox has none - its right to a
| massive amount for a big price.
|
| I would've stayed on Dropbox if they offered 100G for $4.99
| or something, but instead I switched to OneDrive and pay
| $6.99 which also includes Office!
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| man I love evernote. I dont want to use ios notes and deal with
| all the confusion icloud brings. I love using a service that is
| hyper focused on one thing and does it well.
| awill wrote:
| Both evernote and dropbox started making the free service worse
| by limiting how many devices you could connect. Dropbox also
| dropped support for xfs filesystems on Linux (which they later
| brought back, but not after infuriating Linux users). That's
| when I stopped using both. I then moved to Google Drive (which
| is half the price of Dropbox), and moved to using markdown note
| apps sync with Google Drive (which is free!)
|
| I don't think there's a single example of a company where >90%
| of their userbase if free, and they succeed after making the
| free user experience worse. They're thinking in terms of money
| (or reducing costs), but the other view is that they're making
| the experience for >90% of customers worse.
|
| What dropbox seems to forger is that many of their enterprise
| contracts happened precisely because the decision makers used
| dropbox personally, and liked it. By screwing over your free
| customers, you are actually only hurting future sales.
| lightgreen wrote:
| > markdown note apps sync with Google Drive
|
| Can you recommend the app please?
|
| I migrated away from Evernote when it started to have too
| much features, and was no longer convenient note taking app.
|
| I'm using Apple Notes now, which is more or less good, but it
| is vendor-locked, and I plan to move away from iPhone to
| Android.
| bihla wrote:
| I've recently move to using a git repo has my store for
| notes, and different clients for access and editing.
|
| On Desktop I use Obsidian (although most anything will do)
| and on mobile I use GitJournal which easily links into an
| existing git repo.
| lightgreen wrote:
| > on mobile I use GitJournal
|
| Is it good?
|
| On mobile the common case is to launch an app and
| immediately see/search the notes.
|
| Or type something, close the app and assume notes are
| synched.
|
| But git pull and git push are not blazing fast
| operations. And there are no pushes, to get updates from
| the server immediately.
|
| Git is a good storage, but I doubt it is suitable for
| notes without intermediate service handing note-specific
| scenarios.
| vhanda wrote:
| Hey. I'm the author.
|
| It will try to sync it as soon as it can. If you
| immediately close GitJournal, it won't be able to.
| Otherwise, on each modification it tries to sync.
| (Configurable) Maybe I can add some background sync.
|
| The common use case to see and search through the notes
| works.
| rossmohax wrote:
| roamresearch.com works really well for me
| zillennial wrote:
| Bottom line: Dropbox has 0 relevance for gen Z users, we all
| use Wetransfer for sharing, iCloud or Google Drive for storing
|
| https://imgur.com/a/6gtowek
|
| It peaked in 2012 when the millennials were in college, but it
| hasn't been cool for the past 5 years now. I never use dropbox
| ever again after they got rid of Carousel and Mailbox because I
| frankly don't trust them with my files
| sizzle wrote:
| Office 365 with MS Teams seems to have reached feature parity
| with Dropbox and slack in one nice suite of products that just
| work together seamlessly. You hit on an important insight, with
| O365 you can edit your documents right from the cloud and cross
| platform integration is tight with OneDrive and MS Teams.
|
| What does everything think?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I want the company I treat as my primary file storage
| solution to be fully committed to that feature as their
| primary selling point. The last thing I want is Google
| deciding I don't get to save my files there anymore.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| I use both and Dropbox is miles better. I don't understand
| OneDrive and the way everything is linked together in O365.
| It's a mess and I have no idea what is really going on in
| there. It reminds me a little of the icloud experience. Just
| give me a bog standard directory and let me manage it.
| schnable wrote:
| I think both of these companies could be successful, profitable
| small software shops if they stayed focused and lean. But they
| raise money and need to shoot for the moon, and it becomes all
| or nothing, and that's how they end up in trouble.
| awill wrote:
| I understand that Dropbox feels they need to add features to
| compete, especially as they compete with Google and OneDrive,
| which both bundle a bunch of extra free stuff. But that
| should never be at the cost of your core product. Dropbox
| purchased zulip, and then dropped it. They also launched
| paper. Not sure anyone uses that.
| iamsb wrote:
| 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...
| avrionov wrote:
| 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > 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 still have a 2010 mindset, at
| least when it comes to setting price. Neither seems to
| understand that their pricing is insane in 2021. $120/year is
| just too much for Dropbox (and nobody's going to fall for the 2
| TB thing). Neither has a competitive free offering, so they're
| dropping off the radar for anyone looking for a free plan.
| Anyone working at either company that's not looking for a job
| should be.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| > Anyone working at either company that's not looking for a
| job should be
|
| What?? I don't know about Evernote. But did you look at the
| financials of Dropbox? They have a solid sheet so maybe take
| a look before you suggest people there to look for another
| job.
|
| They decided to shift their focus to enterprise. They made a
| decision not to compete on the consumer side. Enterprises
| don't need a free tier. I don't know if that was a smart
| decision, but I'm sure they looked at the numbers and made
| the decision based on it.
| avrionov wrote:
| See my post about their expenses [1].
|
| If they don't grow the investors are not going to be happy
| about the high engineering expenses.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766475
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Expenses alone don't tell the whole store. I replied on
| your original comment.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > did you look at the financials of Dropbox?
|
| You are aware that this discussion is about an announcement
| that they're cutting 11% of their workforce, aren't you?
| Anything can happen when companies get in this position.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| You're making an assumption that layoffs mean company is
| in some trouble and everything can happen. That's clearly
| not the case here if you check their financials. This is
| an efficiency move.
| bambax wrote:
| 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 a lot and leave machines
| in different places instead of carrying a laptop everywhere.
| Now that I don't travel, "magic sync" is much less useful.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| It's likely you have enough money that it isn't prohibitive
| to you. I think most people would find $10 a month for file
| syncing crazy. Why would I pay for that instead of Google
| Drive? It's one more company I have to share my data with
| and hope they don't lose it/get hacked. At least I can log
| in once with Google (or OneDrive if you are in the
| Microsoft ecosystem) and two factor authentication and be
| done with it. I don't understand the Dropbox business model
| at all. Hoping people are uninformed about better
| alternatives? 9 billion market cap for that?
| onepointsixC wrote:
| > Why would I pay for that instead of Google Drive?
|
| Because of Google's abysmal customer service which is
| awful to the point that even googlers can't get help if
| something goes wrong?
|
| The point of a cloud storage is that you want your most
| important files to be backed up somewhere that you trust.
| I don't trust to store my data with an advertising
| company.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > 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.)
| apple4ever wrote:
| $120 is not cheap, not to me.
| avrionov wrote:
| Very good point about the pricing. Looking at their income
| statement [1] DropBox is not a very efficient company:
|
| Cost Of Revenues: $413.7M (22%) in software companies this
| includes Operations and customer care. There are spending as
| much as video sharing sites or video conferencing app.
|
| R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number
| for a company that is not a startup. The average for bigger
| companies is below 20%.
|
| If their growth doesn't recover, which will be difficult,
| they are going to be a prime target for acquisition from
| Private equity. PE will slash the expenses significantly and
| run them for a profit for 5-10 years.
|
| [1] https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DBX/income-statement
| tinyhouse wrote:
| This is out of context. Maybe show how these costs have
| been changing over time vs revenue change to make it more
| meaningful.
| avrionov wrote:
| Seeking Alpha link has the changes over time. They were
| able to reduce the expenses in the last 2 years, but the
| investors are going to compare them with their
| competitors, not only with the previous years. FB for
| example has engineering expenses of 21% better position
| on the market place and better growth.
|
| Dropbox in the current state can become a target for
| activist investors like Elliot. The high percent R&D
| expenses make them more attractive because there is more
| to cut.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Since when FB is a Dropbox competitor? I'm sure their
| engineering expenses will continue to drop, esp with the
| whatsapp exodus to Signal...
|
| Joking aside...
|
| > They were able to reduce the expenses in the last 2
| years
|
| That sounds pretty good to me! Reduce expenses but
| revenue is growing and revenue per user is growing. So
| they make more money without growing costs. That's great.
| With the layoffs that ratio would even improve.
| avrionov wrote:
| Google engineering expenses are 16%.
|
| We can disagree on their future, but for me it is likely
| that they'll face more challenges and more pressure from
| the investors.
| josteink wrote:
| > R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high
| number for a company that is not a startup.
|
| Last I just checked they tried to crawl out of their "it's
| all about files. Simple!"-niche and become a fully web-
| based project management, chat, collaboration, office-
| thingie with links to GSuite and Office365.
|
| As a long-time user it was quite incomprehensible, and
| definitely nothing I appreciated or felt added value to my
| Dropbox. On the contrary, I was annoyed by all the product-
| nagging about these features I didn't want.
|
| Combine that with them _obsoleting_ long-established
| features in their desktop sync-software which made them the
| only universal file-sync solution across all platforms, the
| reason I chose Dropbox over competing offers.
|
| Do all that, and you lost people like me as a user. I'm on
| Nextcloud now and not coming back.
|
| I really don't think they have worked out their survival
| plan yet. Trying to outcompete MS and Google on their own
| turf is obviously not a fight they're going to win.
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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 gives away a shitty form of your service for free
| because the costs are a rounding error to them, people will
| feel like the service has no value.
|
| I don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this.
| Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from
| entering into competition without any potential for profit? At
| the end of the day, maybe the world as a whole doesn't care
| that they are missing out on small cool tech companies that
| will never get huge? But, of course, in an environment where
| small cool tech is unsustainable we'll never know if they would
| eventually get huge.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| 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 GSuite
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think the theory of Dropbox is that something like Paper
| derives its value by being deeply integrated into Dropbox.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > 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 needs your own infra to run.
|
| Dropbox allows me to do a lot of things and they're
| currently irreplaceable for me. That's not because I can't
| replace them (would take half a day at most) but, their
| service worth the money they want.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Dropbox is a feature not a product."_
|
| Where this does ring true is Dropbox versus not OneDrive
| on it's own, but OneDrive as it comes bundled with O365.
| Many F500 type companies pretty much MUST have O365.
|
| Then, if you have O365, you have OneDrive. And the
| question then isn't whether Dropbox is better. It's
| whether OneDrive is "good enough" to suffice, despite it
| being not as good as Dropbox. And the decision maker
| doesn't care if it's not good enough for some smallish
| subset of employees that need a Linux client, etc. They
| care whether it's good enough for most.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| I think Slack is having the same problem with Microsoft
| Teams.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Many F500 type companies pretty much MUST have O365.
|
| This is the problem. Putting Linux support aside,
| focusing too much on enterprise, while necesseary up to a
| point, kills both the product and _personal productivity
| tools_ market.
|
| Is wanting to decouple work and personal files completely
| while retaining independence on personal systems a
| cardinal sin?
|
| IMHO, touting about benefits of a work/life balance is
| moot if I can't completely shut-off work stuff from my
| life while using my computer. Dropbox, Evernote and
| Trello allows me to do that. None of my work stuff is
| present in these mediums. Similarly none of my work stuff
| syncs to my personal computers directly. I use company
| laptop for that stuff.
|
| Trello also went the same route. Trello Gold was a
| personal productivity powerhouse. Now it's unmaintained,
| intentionally crippled semi-premium version of Trello
| Business class.
|
| Do I need to set-up a VPS, install {Next,Own}cloud to it
| and install all my tools as add-ons there to have a
| personal productivity space? In 2021? That shouldn't be
| necessary, that wasn't the promise.
|
| Yet we are here. Every product is targeting the
| enterprise, where the freelancer or the personal
| productivity enthusiast is either confined to its
| corporate licenses or expensive (in terms of time) self-
| hosted solutions.
| eachro wrote:
| Linux is just 2% of the desktop market. Apple and
| Microsoft have good enough cloud storage + sync, so
| Dropbox needs to be even more compellling on
| macOS/windows to survive.
|
| Their Dropbox Transfer offering is a nice alternate
| revenue stream for them. I wonder what else they can come
| up with.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Linux is just 2% of the desktop market.
|
| However, there are concentration points of this 2% which
| is beneficiary to both parties.
|
| Dropbox can target this 2% better and users of this 2%
| can use Dropbox to collaborate and sync their other
| systems which have more popular OSes.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| (And like 75% of the mobile market!)
| rodgerd wrote:
| The *ix userland is nowhere in the mobile market, and
| Dropbox is not a kernel extension. Google could replace
| Linux with another kernel tomorrow and it would be
| irrelevant to Android users; Dropbox-for-Android is
| irrelevant to Dropbox-for-Linux-Desktops.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I thought HN established a long time ago that you could
| build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting
| an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and
| then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I can just slap Owncloud or Nextcloud to a VPS and build
| a relatively secure system within three hours but, some
| problems will arise.
|
| - Integration with 3rd party tools: Trello or services
| which provide "Dropbox Apps" support won't be able to
| sync to my space or directly retrieve from it. I'm sure
| there will be many other tools which can talk with
| Dropbox but not with my server.
|
| - Collaboration: I bet that not so many people would
| install another client and remember a username, password,
| URL triplet to just work with me (e.g. academic research,
| side project, etc.). They'll either force me to use other
| tool or things will just break down (just experienced a
| similar thing at work).
|
| - Maintenance: OS, service, add-on updates, licenses,
| security, monitoring, etc. will be additional time
| consuming obligations.
|
| - Pricing: If I use a VPS, excessive network traffic or
| resource usage will result in a price hike.
|
| - Price/Performance: You cannot beat the competition at
| the price/performance ratio. I will pay more, spend more
| time and get less. Why bother?
|
| - Environmental: In my case, self-hosting at home is
| impossible. I neither have the bandwidth, nor the space
| required to store another system and keep it quiet at the
| same time. Additional power bill and heat is not welcome,
| either.
|
| These are just the issues coming from top of my head, and
| can be expanded further.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| If you like Nextcloud you can buy the service directly
| also. Then it works like Dropbox (but cheaper). For
| example Hetzner provides that [1].
|
| [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
| redisman wrote:
| Who needs google search either when you can just slap a
| ES instance to a web crawler you scripted in 5 minutes
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works
| on Linux.
|
| FYI, you might be satisfied by Insync.
| Closi wrote:
| It's obviously hard to know exactly what Jobs meant, and
| sadly he is not here to be able to ask him, but here is
| my best guess as to what he meant:
|
| In the early days of computing people would sell task
| managers, file managers, memory optimisers, software to
| burn data to a CD etc. As time went on, these 'products'
| just became features of the operating system. While it
| used to make sense for people to own a copy of Nero Disk
| Burner, over time this became expected functionality of
| the operating system. Consumers demands for base software
| change over time - Task managers used to be a product you
| bought for your OS, now they are just a feature of your
| OS.
|
| So what do Dropbox offer, I would say it is "seamless
| file syncing", which meets a broader consumer goal of "my
| changes are synchronised across my team and devices". I
| think the issue is that as time goes on, this is becoming
| a standard consumer expectation of applications.
|
| Applications like Google Docs and Figma have actually
| decided that it's better if they handle the sync rather
| than Dropbox. Just like windows was better at task
| management, they are better at synchronising their own
| files. It means they can even offer things like
| collaborative editing!
|
| Secondly, as time moves on, the base expectation for an
| OS might move to 'all my files are synchronised' - and if
| that's the case, what is the role for Dropbox in a world
| where customers just expect that as standard? We used to
| have file managers as their own purchased products and
| then they became standard OS features. Why should a cloud
| file manager or sync service be fundamentally different
| in a cloud-first world? Online sync might be the new
| windows file explorer. Take iCloud for example - that's
| just a feature fully baked into OSX.
|
| So what does this mean for Dropbox? Well what it offers
| over time might just become what people expect other
| software or their operating system to do for them - And I
| think this is what Jobs was predicting. Why do I have to
| get something else to sync the files on my computer,
| surely this is an operating system responsibility?
|
| So then the Dropbox space becomes - "cross operating
| system syncing of files that don't have a native cloud
| sync process". People still buy Nero Disk Burner... it's
| just their market isn't what it used to be.
| cma wrote:
| Still, cross-operating sync of files has become far more
| important than when Dropbox was launched, with many more
| people juggling multiple operating systems (OSs which are
| often adversarial with one another).
| Closi wrote:
| It's become more important, and I think will now become
| less important as the concept of a file changes.
|
| A google docs file isn't a file in the traditional sense,
| it just exists on the cloud and we can collaborate at the
| same time.
|
| Similarly with Figma, that's not really a file. It just
| exists and we can all edit it at the same time.
|
| My todo list app used to sync with Dropbox, now it syncs
| for free without Dropbox.
|
| Even Microsoft office documents on 365 sit in a weird
| space between 'kind of a file and kind of not' - the file
| is there, but when you are doing live collaborative
| editing that's presumably not also updating the file on
| the disk in real time - there is some other sort of magic
| going on.
|
| The important thing with the above examples is they can
| offer better sync _because_ they don't rely on Dropbox,
| rather than _despite_ not using Dropbox.
|
| If sync is an application feature, sync tends to be
| better than if sync isn't an application feature and it's
| left to Dropbox to do the sync.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| There is a lot of useful things you can do with file
| storage. You can build plenty of products that synergize
| with Dropbox. Dropbox is failing to execute on these
| ideas. I was using Dropbox Carousel, now I use Google
| Photo. I wanted to use Dropbox Mailbox, but it was killed
| shortly after. Dropbox mobile app so bad that I needed to
| buy dedicated app to listen my music on Smartphone. They
| introduced computer backup in 2020! You still can sync
| only one folder!
|
| They chase after an enterprise consumer but this would
| put them into direct competition with Microsoft, a fight
| that they cannot win.
| Closi wrote:
| I don't think they can chase the consumer market either
| though - it's too competitive.
|
| Both iPhone and Android have support for cloud sync baked
| into their operating system as a core feature for their
| own service.
|
| The issue with things like Carousel or Google Photos is
| that the sync is actually a fairly small part of the
| engineering effort - the hard part is making an amazing
| photo viewing and editing app which with mobile devices
| includes the end to end user flow from your mobile phone
| camera! Google photos and iPhoto make a little more sense
| as products when you consider that these are really about
| viewing the photos you took on your Apple/google device
| and providing native sync from their camera app. I'm not
| sure what Dropbox's long term competitive advantage could
| be in the space from a corporate strategy perspective.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Dropbox had direct sync with camera app it worked better
| than Google photo sync. Over years, you accumulate
| multiple GB of just photos. I got my Google One
| subscription because of that. Once people star buying
| storage from google/apple there would be no point to buy
| any of Dropbox offering. I am only paying for Dropbox
| because there is no good Linux alternative.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Dropbox had direct sync with camera app it worked
| better than Google photo sync.
|
| Still has. It's called "Camera Upload" now.
|
| > Once people star buying storage from google/apple there
| would be no point to buy any of Dropbox offering.
|
| I think secure erase, transfers, file requests, "Apps"
| and OS independence is worthy of the price they ask for.
| Also on-demand sync on other OSes and other small
| features increase their value in my eyes a lot.
| avrionov wrote:
| > Dropbox is a feature not a product.
|
| When you are against FAANG every product is just a feature.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Maybe only if you constantly update "FAANG" such that
| every tech company who actually succeeds in creating a
| competitive or impactful product just gets their letter
| added to "FAANG," and all the companies that fail to make
| a huge impact automatically get considered "only
| features." We already see that a lot. Some people wedge
| Microsoft into the acronym and/or leave out other
| letters. And Netflix's product on the face of it is
| certainly what we would consider a feature for most big
| software companies (and indeed many of them have a
| competing streaming service). If, for instance, Netflix
| significantly declines in popularity in the next few
| years, we might just drop it from "FAANG," and someone
| might still say "When you are against GAFAM every product
| is just a feature."
| alecbz wrote:
| Mostly agree, but Netflix isn't a feature just because
| Google and FB also do streaming. It's fair to call
| Netflix a product because it's something that end users
| actually care about for its own sake. You can pay for
| Netflix and nothing else and still get value out of it.
|
| Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything
| with it on its own, you need to have some other data from
| somewhere else to use with it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies
| that could pay far above median via RSUs since their
| stock prices were expected to skyrocket, with little
| downside, so the RSUs were as good as cash. And why other
| companies couldn't offer comparable pay. And nowadays it
| still refers to companies whose publicly trade stock
| prices continue to grow so much that it makes the stock
| portion of the compensation very lucrative, which include
| Microsoft.
|
| >And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly
| what we would consider a feature for most big software
| companies
|
| Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A feature
| is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not, and they
| are the only place to get it.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| > I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies
| that could pay far above median
|
| It's not really related to compensation even if those
| companies pay well. The short history is that FANG was
| coined by Jim Cramer (he has a TV show where he talks
| about stocks) around 7 or 8 years ago to mean Facebook,
| Amazon, Netflix, Google. He just thought those were good
| stocks to invest in at the time but the term caught on
| and started being used in different contexts, Apple was
| added as the second A to make FAANG and now it's roughly
| just a synonym for a big tech company depending on the
| context.
|
| This also explains why Netflix is represented in the
| acronym but much bigger companies like Microsoft aren't.
| robocat wrote:
| > Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A
| feature is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not,
| and they are the only place to get it.
|
| Apple, Google and Microsoft have shown they want to
| compete directly in streamed video market (and similarly
| the online music market.)
|
| They might not have successfully competed against Netflix
| yet, but I have no reason to believe that one of them
| couldn't come up with a better product with better
| platform integration, and Netflix becomes another Hulu in
| the middle runners.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The point is if Netflix creates media that people want to
| consume, they have to go to Netflix to get it (legally).
|
| If Dropbox creates software that performs a task, it can
| be copied (to a sufficient degree) by
| Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon and people can get it
| there.
| avrionov wrote:
| The way I used FAANG wasn't very precise. It is possible
| that Netflix will become a feature of Google, Amazon, or
| Disney.
|
| I was referring to the concept of "bundling and
| unbundling" [1] which is beneficial to the big rich
| companies. The big players have the money and the control
| over the eco-system (files, documents, events) which
| gives them the advantage to go against smaller products
| and make them features.
|
| https://www.ben-
| evans.com/benedictevans/2013/9/21/atomisatio...
| cm2187 wrote:
| Or you can use synology for free if you own a NAS.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think it's absolutely correct that, for Google, it
| doesn't make sense to charge for sync. I also think that
| anyone who's ever relied on sync knows that there is a lot
| of value in doing it well - especially in a B2B context.
| It's true that "just" filesystem sync isn't a full product.
| The product would probably be sync-as-a-service where you
| can manage distribution and deduplication of resources
| across your systems.
|
| So we have a situation where it doesn't make sense for
| Google to focus on the feature, but the fact that they have
| the feature at all trips up specialist companies.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from
| Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID
| recession.
|
| There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large
| enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and
| it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home
| user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.
|
| The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out
| of love with as an individual.
|
| They _constantly_ upsell, even after you bought the
| product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and
| they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if
| it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool
| storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my
| wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid
| 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are
| a way better value in any dimension.
|
| Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of
| doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with
| layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they
| eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1
| generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented
| basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70%
| premium over competitive offers.
|
| Good riddance.
| Closi wrote:
| > Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension.
|
| Office 365 is crazy good value in comparison - although I
| will say my users still complain about onedrive and say
| Dropbox sync was more rock solid.
| ballenf wrote:
| They also lost my trust when they sold our small team on
| a particular plan and then pulled all the valuable
| features out of that plan _and_ raised prices 50% (or
| 100% if we wanted most of the features back). The
| messaging around that was also just cold marketing BS
| talking about how great these changes were. It all
| happened within first year of our subscription.
|
| Luckily OneDrive was finally getting stable so we
| migrated over and I haven't touched dropbox since.
|
| It quickly became clear they were focusing on enterprise
| customers and the SMB pricing we had undermined that
| effort.
| munificent wrote:
| Maybe Steve Jobs is right, but maybe it's also good for the
| world if you can build a sustainable business on a feature.
|
| In the world of music, an effects pedal or guitar stomp box
| is more "feature" than "product". You can't write a song
| just using a chorus pedal. But there are many many thriving
| companies that do nothing but produce and sell pedals.
|
| Much of this likely rests on the fact that the "protocols"
| that music gear use to talk to each other are simple, well-
| established, and legally unemcumbered. Also, for reasons
| that aren't clear to me, even dominant companies in the
| market do not seem to have pushed very hard to extuinguish
| that interoperability in anti-competitive ways. Or, at
| least, not yet.
| alecbz wrote:
| I think the problem is:
|
| a) it's too easy to build data syncing into other
| products
|
| b) the ease of having syncing built into the product I'm
| using is really powerful
|
| When Dropbox first came out a lot of software was a lot
| more "local", and Dropbox was a lot more useful. But now
| we have Google Docs and Office 365 for most documents,
| git/GitHub, etc. for source code, things like Figma are
| starting to crop up for designers.
|
| For each of these, unless the syncing was _especially_
| bad, it 's hard to imagine an out-of-band syncing
| solution differentiating itself in any meaningful way to
| make up for the more complex UX/setup.
|
| Unless someone for some reason comes up with a product
| that's just _amazing_ compared to its competition but has
| no syncing capabilities, or syncing becomes incredibly
| difficult to implement well, I don 't see why people
| would use Dropbox.
|
| I'm not a musician, but my guess is that musicians care
| enough about pedals or the differences between them to
| justify a separate market for them. Certain pedals are
| smoother, or offer more resistance, and that matters a
| lot to certain people? But I don't see an analog to that
| for data syncing.
|
| ---
|
| _If_ there were a market for data syncing itself, I feel
| like it would be product companies paying for it as a
| service, and not something that end-users want to pay for
| directly.
|
| Another way to look at this is that maybe filesystems are
| too low-level of an abstraction for most end-users. I
| found that people would often be confused by the idea of
| a filesystem that existed separately from any application
| when I was trying to explain computers to them, and UX
| seems to be moving away from needing users to think about
| a filesystem.
| panta wrote:
| > Unless someone for some reason comes up with a product
| that's just amazing compared to its competition but has
| no syncing capabilities, or syncing becomes incredibly
| difficult to implement well, I don't see why people would
| use Dropbox.
|
| For me Dropbox has the following advantages:
|
| * it works with _all_ my files and applications (not only
| those with sync built-in) * it's a separate product, that
| does one thing only, where I explicitly pay for that
| thing. It's not an after-thought or something whose
| business model is unclear or is against my privacy * for
| the same reason I am less worried that the company behind
| it will pull the plug because it's not the main focus
|
| I much happier to pay more for a service/product with a
| clear focus made by a company that doesn't a gazillion
| other things. (Btw for similar reasons I think that
| Evernote is damaging itself with their strategy of
| chasing new features at all costs).
| koonsolo wrote:
| One of the features that I love about DropBox is that it's
| not Google. I use Google for a lot of things, but my
| backups of Google go into DropBox.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Isn't this just it? There's no doubt that there's value and
| that the software is excellent in both cases. I'm just not
| sure we should try to turn every software project into a
| moonshot and expect anything sustainable as a result. It's
| not sustainable in most industries.
| ako wrote:
| Funny thing is that these days at work we mostly use
| Dropbox for Dropbox Paper, much less for file sharing.
|
| It's the best collaborative writing tool, and with the work
| from home situation, it's the best tool to replace never
| ending zoom meetings with asynchronous collaboration.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| 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.
| rusk wrote:
| Hi, you're mention of s3 piqued my interest, how are you
| using it?
| munificent wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I don't see this. So you have examples? I think that smaller
| companies can compete on knowing their customers better -
| it's hard for a highly paid 10 year at Google person to put
| themselves in the shoes of say a dental practitioner or even
| the shoes of a typical full stack dev wanting to use nextjs
| for example.
| pbreit wrote:
| "There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a
| good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely
| vulnerable to FAANG"
|
| I would disagree strongly with that. FAANG is not interested
| and actually has trouble competing in sub $100m markets.
| paulpan wrote:
| Indeed it's a tough for companies like Dropbox to compete
| against the Big Tech players. The proverbial you win some
| battles but lose the war.
|
| On the other hand, Dropbox could've shifted more towards the
| enterprise customers and gained traction before the likes of
| Microsoft and Google ramped up their competing products.
| That'd have built them a better moat than being subject to
| the fickleness of mass consumers.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What kind of moat could one possibly build against the
| Microsoft salesperson offering to throw in OneDrive for
| free, or at minimal cost?
| treis wrote:
| >Indeed it's a tough for companies like Dropbox to compete
| against the Big Tech players. The proverbial you win some
| battles but lose the war.
|
| It seems like Dropbox could be generating 10s to low 100s
| of million in profit every year. They're spending a lot on
| R&D that they don't necessarily need to in order to chase
| growth. Even if GDrive/OneDrive et.al. eventually drive
| them out of business it would only be after Dropbox made
| 100s of million to billions.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from
| entering into competition without any potential for profit?
|
| That's an interesting idea, but if you think about it, a lot
| of companies are in the same boat. How long did Uber go
| before making a profit? Amazon?
|
| Heck, Microsoft spent eight _billion_ dollars until Xbox
| started turning a profit for them. Xbox probably would have
| never existed if not for Microsoft taking a massive loss to
| make it happen.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Yah, it's definitely not "the one perfect idea to fix the
| problem." Tho, FWIW, I think that Uber and Amazon and the
| Xbox division were all working _towards_ profitability the
| entire time. By contrast, I don 't believe Google has ever
| said they _intend_ to make Keep profitable. This wouldn 't
| be the first time the regulators are given the
| responsibility of telling the difference between
| incompetence and bad luck v.s. anticompetitive malfeasance.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Why are we lumping in Netflix instead of Microsoft in the
| group of big tech?
| codemac wrote:
| Because the term was popularized by Jim Cramer on Mad Money
| referring to the growth of Facebook, Apple, Netflix &
| Google back in 2013.
|
| $MSFT hadn't really taken off like the others until later
| that year.
| rusk wrote:
| > $MSFT hadn't really taken off
|
| This statement seems so funny considering 20 years ago
| Microsoft were all the FAANGs
| Lammy wrote:
| 'GAFAM' is a popular term in some places.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Just how vulnerable are those smaller businesses? I can't
| help but think of failed half baked FAANG products which
| failed to kill the competition. Do you have any specific
| examples in mind?
| heshiebee wrote:
| They should do hosting for conservatives :)
| jarym wrote:
| Well at least it's more upfront and sincere than some of the cut
| backs that have been happening.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| This was my thought too. I don't know what Dropbox employess
| are going through but on the surface this looks a lot better
| than the layoffs that I've witnessed first hand.
| rmk wrote:
| Was the COO fired? It sounds like she was, reading this article.
|
| Is this a move to further reduce cost by rehiring in less-
| expensive locations? I imagine engineering functions will also be
| affected.
| underseacables wrote:
| Probably asked to resign. If the business is continuing to
| fail, and the CEO doesn't take responsibility, someone has to
| be sacrificed for the board, share holders, etc.
| gagglegoose wrote:
| Dropbox is continuing to fail?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Yea, the fact it's in the same message as the layoffs show it
| was part of the layoffs but she was important enough to
| mention by name.
| clra wrote:
| > _Was the COO fired? It sounds like she was, reading this
| article._
|
| Knowing nothing about the internals at Dropbox, it does sound
| like it (on the surface at least). Having worked at a couple
| major tech companies now, executives never get fired. They
| "step down", or go on sabbatical ... and never come back. The
| usual hallmark of the action is that the email about it isn't
| sent by the leaving executive themselves, it's sent by their
| boss.
|
| Normal employees don't tend to have these options, but
| executives are so high profile that it seems to be an
| informalized practice for both company and executive to save
| face. It's hard to worry about them too much though because
| their exit package is likely more than than most of us could
| make given ten years.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Also, the terms of whatever seperation gets figured out often
| includes keeping the exec as an employee (in a legal sense).
| They might not actually be doing any meaninful work, but but
| they still get the paychecks, extended time to exercise
| options/stock, health benefits, etc ...
| wolco5 wrote:
| I was worried this was another tech Trump ban.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Dropbox as a small business makes sense. Quality syncing, a few
| productivity tools like Paper. Along the lines of
| https://readdle.com
|
| Dropbox as a publicly traded global megacorp does not make sense.
| b3kart wrote:
| To play the devil's advocate: maybe it doesn't make sense if
| you think of Dropbox as a utility for syncing files across
| computers. But maybe it does make sense if you think of them as
| a company that's responsible for safely and securely storing a
| non-trivial share of world's data.
| sib wrote:
| Unfortunately, there's really no moat & no differentiation
| (so others could also be horizontal competitors, making this
| a commodity), and the giant platform players will always make
| it easier for their own vertically-integrated offerings to
| work better with their customer-valuable services and
| products.
| angryasian wrote:
| It does as Box seems to be doing fine. It was Dropbox failure
| at enterprise and trying to focus on consumer when other
| companies are offering similar features for free. Just bad
| strategy
| snicksnak wrote:
| I remember when I first heard of dropbox, I just started college
| and all my peers started sharing their space race challenge links
| to get 25gb free, must be ~8 years ago. Service was great for
| exchanging notes and other studying related material. By then
| 25gb felt like a lot. However fast forward two years, the 25gb
| free plan ran out if you didn't convert to a pro plan, which I
| don't think anyone I knew did, because by then the university
| caught on and provided their own free NAS up to 100GB. Also if
| you purchased an office 365 student license you got 1TB free for
| a couple years. I used those services a lot during college, but
| there was never a need for me to go for any pro plan. Haven't
| used dropbox since I graduated several years ago.
|
| I've always thought dropbox must make their revenue in B2B
| because spending hundreds of dollars for cloud for storage a year
| as an individual never made sense to me.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Does anyone else feel like Dropbox has gotten worse in the last
| year or two? It used to be the "install and forget about it"
| option for backup and sync. My daughter and wife have both had to
| get my help in the last year in regards Dropbox failing to sync,
| failing to work well with Windows in regards to more than one
| Microsoft account on the same computer, and otherwise requiring
| me to think about it in a way that I didn't used to. I am a
| paying customer, albeit probably a small one.
|
| I also notice they now keep pestering to convert to the "all
| cloud" option rather than having a local copy of everything and
| just using the cloud as the backup and sync infrastructure. It
| feels like they have shifted from the "make it easy to become a
| paying customer" model into the "make it hard to stop being a
| paying customer" model. That's not a great sign for growth.
| joemaller1 wrote:
| Feels like they're setting up for an acquisition.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Part of me expected the message to be "Your storage is running
| out, upgrade to dropbox pro"
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| I understand it's a management decision, but I'm curious as to
| why companies don't really start with "hey, we need to lay off
| 11%. Who here would like to volunteer. Here are the perks we are
| going to offer"
|
| See how many that gets you. Then again, that might get you more
| than 11% if you aren't careful.
| jedberg wrote:
| Usually they don't want any 11%, they want a specific 11% (or
| whatever) because they are cutting specific programs.
|
| For example, when I was part of a layoff in 2001, the company
| mostly let go of engineers and IT (and kept all the sales and
| marketing), but it wasn't just any engineers, it was the
| engineers working on a specific product that was being cut.
|
| Also, for IT, my boss came to the three of us and said, "I have
| to cut one of you, but you're all equally good, so you guys can
| decide amongst yourself if you want". So at least down at the
| lower level they did as you suggest.
| frivoal wrote:
| This would encourage the people who have the most options to
| leave, and those with the least to stay. This isn't necessarily
| the same, but is likely to be very similar to encouraging your
| best employees to leave, the worst ones to stay.
| Smilliam wrote:
| The issue with this approach is that the company then leaves
| itself vulnerable to a big brain drain. If the bulk of those
| volunteers end up being your best seniors/leads who know they
| can just go down the street and pick up another job at
| comparable comp all while getting a cozy three month vacation
| that you're bankrolling...well, it's easy to see how you could
| be left in a much worse position imo.
| Simulacra wrote:
| The high performers, the people who make money for the
| company, are rarely the first to be let go.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Wrong. People with the highest salary are usually the first
| to be let go, regardless of their status or contribution.
|
| update: you think rationally, looking from the "greater
| good" perspective. Decisions are never made like that in
| reality. The way it happens is the board says "we need to
| cut expenses by X% or else", and that becomes your new
| "rational" -- or you lose your CEO job. Nobody cares about
| long term consequences in situations like that.
| Smilliam wrote:
| Correct, which is why it's not ideal to allow folks to
| volunteer for severance as the GP suggested. The company
| _wants_ to choose who to let go to avoid putting themselves
| in a worse spot afterwards.
| obstacle1 wrote:
| The point is they might be the first ones to voluntarily
| leave.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| When COVID hit the company I was at previously gave opened a
| company wide offer some months of severance + playing for
| COBRA.
| lacker wrote:
| That way you lose the people who have the best prospects
| elsewhere, often your top employees. This way you can pick
| which 11% you least want to keep.
| mprovost wrote:
| Yup this is known as the Dead Sea Effect [0]. Your best
| people leave and you're left with the worst performers. Do
| this a few times and you end up with a barely functioning
| organisation.
|
| [0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-
| the-d...
| capableweb wrote:
| More than losing the people who have the best prospects, you
| lose the ones that feels the least connected to the company.
| Even if you have many other prospects, if you still feel
| strongly for the company you work, you'll probably stay. The
| ones that leaves if you ask them to, wouldn't have stayed for
| very long anyway.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| more importantly, it won't get you the precise 11% you want to
| get rid of.
| gnicholas wrote:
| When your feature comparison page doesn't include your free plan,
| that's a sign that the paid plans don't compare favorably. It's
| also not very user-friendly because it makes it hard for people
| to figure out which features they already have access to (I just
| learned they have a direct file-sending tool, and I have no idea
| if it's included in the free tier).
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/plans
| aborsy wrote:
| Happy paid user here.
|
| Dropbox has a polished app everywhere, syncs flawlessly and is
| reliable.
|
| Saving a coffee/month doesn't worth my time wasted on finding an
| alternative that works on a number of platforms that my
| collaborators and I use.
| raiyu wrote:
| 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 less than 5x 2021 revenue when the
| median is somewhere closer to the 12-14x range and that's for
| companies below 30% growth.
|
| The same was seen with Slack. Though they had great revenue
| growth, the narrative was that they couldn't compete with
| Microsoft and so their stock never really traded at a comparable
| revenue multiple compared to others.
|
| It could be said that they have a heavy spend on Sales and
| Marketing but the same could be said of plenty of other
| Enterprise tech focused companies like MongoDB that still
| commands a very high forward looking multiple.
|
| Unfortunately from the end-user side the experience has suffered
| somewhat and I've personally switched away from Dropbox so I
| can't really say they are doing great on the product side and the
| amount of "Growth Hacking for Revenue" that is now part of the
| product experience is a bit off-putting.
|
| Also shows the potential for issues if you end up solely
| dependent on one product and don't diversity, especially if it's
| seen as a commodity.
|
| The work force reduction is purely to turn the company profitable
| on a net basis and the trailing twelve months they've already
| gotten into the black. That's down from a $400MM loss just a
| couple of years ago.
|
| But the belief is that there isn't a tremendous amount of
| profitability internally, because the expenditures are just too
| high, and cutting further into that theoretically will reduce
| revenue growth further.
| brundolf wrote:
| It's dismaying that even the best, most shining examples of
| unicorns that took off on the backs of good products and have
| stood toe-to-toe with the mega-corps, are now losing value
| _simply because they 're competing with the mega-corps_, and
| being forced to look for acquisitions just like all the other
| startups.
|
| If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big,
| I don't know what will.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Historically there has been an argument in economics over
| whether markets necessarily tend towards consolidation, and
| I'm inclined to agree with Stiglitz that they do:
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/joseph-stiglitz-
| are-m...
|
| Especially in markets with strong network effects. Barring
| government action, operating systems / platforms will
| necessarily either directly subsume their most profitable
| applications, or capture all the market "rent" from them.
|
| Ultimately "network shared storage" is a feature rather than
| a product. For much of their history they were value-added
| resellers of AWS.
| brundolf wrote:
| I agree completely. I think history (at least, the past 150
| years) has shown this clearly. I've come to see an economy
| of corporations as a stew that tends to "clump up" and
| needs to be periodically "stirred" as part of the natural
| course of its development.
| busterarm wrote:
| It's cyclic between consolidation and new investments.
|
| We're just ramping up into the consolidation period now.
| avs733 wrote:
| >If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too
| big, I don't know what will.
|
| Or...it could be free markets don't work? Why blame big tech
| when this same cycle has proven itself out over way too many
| historical economic eras.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| For me it was the lack of storage tiers. When the only
| options is to get 1TB or more, I think you lost a lot of
| users. Additionally, they should have figured out a way to
| share storage with a family, if the only profitable storage
| tiers are 1TB or more then let people share it.
| brundolf wrote:
| Meh, we're talking a single-digit increase in price to go
| from the previous-lowest tier to the current-lowest 2TB
| tier. I only use a tiny fraction of it, but it's still a
| good value.
|
| The family thing makes sense - I don't have a family I
| would share with so it's never come up - though couldn't
| you just sign into the same account on multiple devices?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Well for my needs the Dropbox plan costs 10 times more
| than the Google or iCloud plan. Because I need 50GB, not
| 2000.
| raiyu wrote:
| Signing into the same account on multiple devices creates
| security and ownership issues, much better to be able to
| delegate permissions and also keep ownership clearly
| understood.
| brundolf wrote:
| Is that really a concern within a household? Give each
| person a top-level directory
| raiyu wrote:
| Wait till some siblings get pissed off at each other and
| start deleting important files that the other one cares
| about =]
| brundolf wrote:
| Guess I'm revealing my ignorance about what it's like to
| have kids :)
| dharmab wrote:
| I can tell you don't have any horny teenagers in your
| household :)
| apple4ever wrote:
| Its a huge jump from $0 to $12 a month!
| jrgoff wrote:
| They do now have a family plan:
| https://www.dropbox.com/family
| karmasimida wrote:
| Market is simple and effective.
|
| Shining examples of unicorns? Then they need to prove they
| can indeed exist in real world. They shouldn't be treated
| differently.
| raiyu wrote:
| That's certainly one perspective, the other is that in the
| consumer segment churn is high but also the are a tremendous
| amount of people.
|
| Dropbox had a head start but over time other companies like
| Google where able to build out competing services and because
| the total population of potential consumers continued to
| increase, a lead today, doesn't guarantee a lead tomorrow.
|
| The other side of is that what made Dropbox amazing at the
| beginning, the ability to sync files with direct access on
| your computer, is actually now a detriment. Many users don't
| want the files locally, download speeds have increased
| dramatically (I have 1Gbps fiber at my apartment), so having
| the files locally is actually annoying and takes up
| diskspace, so you have a bit of a late mover advantage,
| especially if the population of available consumers continues
| to increase.
|
| In this case it isn't simply X couldn't compete with big
| Tech, the landscape did shift a bit.
|
| It's also important to note that Dropbox is still a very
| successful company, and if they aren't chasing revenue growth
| and profit they still provide a great service to consumers.
| But their growth chasing leads to a degraded user experience,
| which also pushes people away from their product and has them
| explore alternatives to really see if it's an apples to
| apples comparison. And that's where the "cloud" first storage
| solutions today present a better platform.
|
| What really slows this down is the cost of switching for
| older customers that have a tremendous amount of data already
| in Dropbox and have it integrated into their workflows so it
| really isn't a fun project to migrate off.
|
| This is also where the price increases create revenue growth
| because customers aren't willing to go through the pain of
| migration, but you aren't delivering more value to them,
| instead you are playing off of the cost switching to drive
| revenue growth and that begins a downward trajectory.
| brundolf wrote:
| > The other side of is that what made Dropbox amazing at
| the beginning, the ability to sync files with direct access
| on your computer, is actually now a detriment
|
| I disagree; file syncing is still exactly what I want. Disk
| space has gotten exponentially cheaper over the years, and
| at the same time the amount of bulk media that people store
| as personal files has been dramatically cut down thanks to
| streaming services for music and video. I don't mind at all
| having my entire Dropbox mirrored across my devices; it
| holds basically every local file I care about, and having a
| local copy also gives me some peace of mind in case I ever
| get locked out of my account or something (which Google in
| particular has become notorious for). You can also, now,
| select subdirectories that you want to exclude from the
| current device. At the same time, having it in the cloud
| means I don't have to worry if my hard drive dies. Any file
| that I've thoughtlessly kept there while working on it is
| safe by default.
|
| Maybe the story would be different if I ever created
| classical "documents" and could benefit from Office 365 or
| Google Docs, but I don't, and so having a cloud-first
| storage "drive" that primarily holds things which integrate
| with that particular cloud service isn't very useful to me.
|
| > But their growth chasing leads to a degraded user
| experience
|
| You're right that parts of the product have gotten
| distracted/annoying by trying to build out new
| differentiators. But the core product (file syncing and
| backup) still works much better than competitors, and it's
| not hard to simply ignore the new stuff.
|
| Also, perhaps most importantly: I use products from
| multiple tech giants, and all three major operating
| systems, and I specifically _don 't_ want my cloud storage
| to only integrate well with one of them. I want it to work
| equally well across everything. And Dropbox does, at least
| compared with the competition.
| raiyu wrote:
| Yeah I think there is still definitely a segment that
| want the disk syncing, but for me it was actually
| becoming a hinderance and having everything online was
| actually much easier. Plus I started doing more file
| storage that I was accessing both on desktop and iphone.
| Certainly the original use case for Dropbox of local sync
| was amazing and exactly what I needed years ago, but my
| work/life needs have changed over time and I wouldn't be
| surprised if a larger amount of people are falling in to
| the cloud first category today as compared to when
| Dropbox originally launched.
|
| Back then cloud syncing just made no sense at all because
| the speeds were pretty bad and inconsistent.
|
| Not saying everyone falls into this category, but just
| pointing out that the market has evolved somewhat from
| their original position.
| brundolf wrote:
| I use Dropbox on my iPhone and it works great. I can see
| how that particular use-case doesn't benefit as much from
| the "just syncing local files" paradigm, but it certainly
| isn't a _worse_ experience. In fact, these days Dropbox
| is my favored mechanism for transferring files to and
| from my phone. The auto-sync on the desktop side is much
| easier than going through a website.
| tw04 wrote:
| I disagree, mega-corps aren't the problem. As Steve Jobs
| famously said: they're a feature, not a product.
|
| Even if you eliminate Microsoft, Google, AND Amazon from the
| discussion, the list of alternatives is endless.
|
| Synology and QNAP both have a "free" sync and share client.
| WD, Seagate, Samsung, Apple, not to mention the open-source
| options out there. Do the big 3 put MORE pressure on Dropbox,
| sure. But they never pivoted. Just look at a company like
| Druva - we used them forever ago as a file sync and share,
| and now they look very, very different.
|
| Dropbox's problem isn't mega-corps or "big tech getting too
| big", it's that they didn't or couldn't innovate beyond their
| core product.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Why can't a good feature survive on the market?
| dharmab wrote:
| One reason is that there's friction with purchasing. If a
| company already buys Active Directory and O365, it's much
| easier to get OneDrive added on than it is to set up a
| new vendor like Dropbox.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Because it can be copied and doesn't have a defendable
| business model.
|
| For most people, consolidating many services into one is
| just more convenient, even if it means using a "good-
| enough" version of that feature.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| How is that meaningfully different than a product which
| can be copied?
| alecbz wrote:
| I think features are often products for other companies,
| not for end-users.
|
| E.g., digital displays are a "feature, not a product".
| End-users get value out of digital displays on their
| thermostats, microwaves, etc., but no end-user buys a
| digital display themselves, thermostat and microwave
| manufactures buy them.
|
| I think the problem with Dropbox is that it's become too
| easy for product companies to build data syncing
| themselves.
| busterarm wrote:
| > I disagree, mega-corps aren't the problem. As Steve Jobs
| famously said: they're a feature, not a product.
|
| I almost kneejerk downvoted out of disagreement. Mega-corps
| are _a_ problem, but not the problem here, which you
| astutely pointed out.
|
| Dropbox didn't/couldn't innovate beyond their core product
| is clearly the issue here.
|
| Additionally, most of what I find that companies use
| Dropbox for equates to Shadow IT. Something that mature
| corporations ruthlessly eliminate.
| brundolf wrote:
| The thing is that I (and many people) still want exactly
| the core product that Dropbox offers (and does better
| than anyone else), even if that's a smaller market than
| it was ten years ago. It makes sense that businesses
| would want to get all of their IT solutions from a single
| integrated company for simplicity's sake, and it makes
| sense that consumers don't mess with actual files as much
| as they used to. But for my own purposes I actually wish
| Dropbox would _stop_ trying to move beyond their core
| product. And even though the market of people like me has
| shrunk, I don 't think it will ever go away completely.
| busterarm wrote:
| Perhaps your storage needs are low, but I feel like at
| this point once you're past 4-5TB, a Synology or QNAP NAS
| is a no-brainer for anyone even remotely technical.
|
| I need quite a lot of storage for my projects and am up
| to a 42TB Enterprise NAS at home w/ Fujitsu helium-filled
| drives. Probably more than Dropbox customers would ever
| want to spend, but well worth it for me. Even if I didn't
| need as much storage, I'm pretty sure I would use the
| same product.
|
| Access from all of my devices is easy as they're all on
| one VPN, including my phones.
| brundolf wrote:
| I only use about 70GB right now; 2TB is as much as I
| could imagine ever needing.
|
| That 70GB includes a modest collection of music from
| before the streaming era, a few videos, backups of old
| documents, Blender projects, Unity projects, a backup of
| all my photos from my phone (from the past few years), a
| couple archives of family photos (from the past few
| decades). I also back up product licenses and shell
| profiles there, for easy setup of new machines (which I
| highly recommend). The only important files that don't go
| in my Dropbox are my actual code projects, since those
| live on GitHub.
|
| I use a whole lot more space than that when it comes to
| software, of course - Steam games, in particular - but
| there's no reason to put any of that on Dropbox because
| it can be trivially re-downloaded. I have 4TB of disk
| space on my desktop, but nearly everything outside of
| that 70GB is a glorified cache.
|
| I honestly can't fathom how I would utilize 42TB of
| backed-up data storage, unless I decided to start
| torrenting. And anyway, a local NAS won't do me much good
| if the house burns down or gets broken-into. A cloud
| storage solution that presumably gets replicated across
| multiple data centers, and _also_ mirrors local copies on
| all of my devices, is the most durable data storage
| solution I can imagine.
| busterarm wrote:
| My local NAS includes replication to cloud storage and is
| encrypted so not super useful if stolen.
|
| I prefer having access from my devices without the
| replication.
| brundolf wrote:
| Fair. I'm still curious how you use that much space?
| busterarm wrote:
| I create a lot of media and shoot raw.
|
| I do back up my Steam library, btw, because occasionally
| they remove games. That folder is at about 4TB.
| rplnt wrote:
| Company can exist and provide good services even without
| being overvalued on a stock market. If there's anything
| dismaying it's to see how investors can kill good products
| because they want more.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| It's never easy to say conclusively why a stock goes up or
| down. But do we really need this megacorp explanation?
| Dropbox could be losing value because they've been trying to
| make money for a loooooong time and still aren't.
| rchaud wrote:
| An alternative interpretation might be that a company that
| just makes one thing may not survive as a publicly traded
| entity considering the scrutiny and industry comparisons that
| entails.
|
| GSuite and Office 365 do not trade as standalone companies,
| but even if they did, they'd be far ahead of Dropbox, as they
| integrate cloud storage with an entire suite of office
| products.
| rapht wrote:
| The problem is that revenue growth per se does not make a
| company valuable - or actually, it does while you can convince
| someone else to buy under the assumption that said growth will
| deliver competitive profits.
|
| Selling to Wall Street is the "final sell": once it's done, you
| need to convince that profits grow, not just revenues.
| nabla9 wrote:
| More important than revenue growth is the expected margins
| after the growth slows down.
|
| What Dropbox is selling is something that will be bulk
| commodity. They will never be able to settle and get good
| revenue.
| nvarsj wrote:
| 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.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| Have a look at Syncthing.
| aborsy wrote:
| Secure access over the internet is a limitation of self
| hosting.
| passthejoe wrote:
| Syncthing is solid. Maybe a little too geeky for most, but
| for tech-minded people it can really work. I've had little
| issues here and there, but it definitely solves some
| problems for me.
|
| I generally use Dropbox for personal files and Syncthing
| for business. It's a great setup to keep those things
| separate.
| itsnot2020 wrote:
| I'm very happy with Tresorit - https://tresorit.com
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| It's quite expensive though
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Yeh true but as an other example Dropbox missed out on
| the privacy and end to end encryption market.
| m-ee wrote:
| Box seems to be taking some of the enterprise market share.
| raiyu wrote:
| My use case maybe different from yours but GDrive has worked
| well for me.
| beached_whale wrote:
| The others are generally not supported on Linux. Dropbox
| has a cli client here that mostly works. At least if we are
| talking Google/Microsoft. Or the companies are small enough
| to go under overnight and leave me in a lurch
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| Google drive unofficial client works pretty well for me
| on Linux.
| beached_whale wrote:
| There is a difference between official and unofficial
| support. Also, Dropbox is big enough to be around for a
| while, but this is their product and if it goes south, so
| do they. I don't trust Google to maintain any product
| before rebranding, pushing the work to the users, or
| dropping the product. They have shown otherwise.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Insync works well for Google Drive on Linux.
| toyg wrote:
| If long-term is your game and you don't like the big
| boys, you should probably look into Syncthing. Being an
| open protocol, it will never go away.
| apple4ever wrote:
| OneDrive has been absolutely rock solid for me (even on a
| Mac)
| u678u wrote:
| > Dropbox has been hammered by Wall Street ever since it went
| public.
|
| "Hammered" ha SV lives in a dream world. Its barely making a
| profit and no great product in the future. It still has market
| cap more than say Wendy's and H&R Block put together.
| uyt wrote:
| 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
| kenhwang wrote:
| 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.
| ant6n wrote:
| It sucks having to pay google and dropbox for storage cuz i
| have files and photos. Dropbox doesnt do photos well, i
| dont trust them for it. Dropbox wants to do photos, but
| doesn't separate that from storing files, so just searches
| all my files for images or something. Also, it doesn't
| allow searching based on image recognition.
| shroom wrote:
| I'm a paying customer for Dropbox and I've just had it
| installed on my computer for when I occasionally had to share
| files with customers. Never really felt I used it to any extent
| but I also never canceled my subscription because I'm happy for
| what it is and I can't bother to find alternatives.
|
| However my computer recently crashed and when "re-installing"
| Dropbox I discovered that they have many more useful "Apps"
| included like backup and password-sync and a neat paper
| scanning app for the phone. All of which I was very happy to
| discover. So I see myself keeping my subscription for the
| foreseeable future. :)
| davis_m wrote:
| > "The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the
| end of the business day."
|
| I'm guessing more than a few found out from this article
| directly. What a rough way to find out you were laid off.
| paxys wrote:
| How do you find out if you are getting laid off from the
| article exactly?
| jdavila90 wrote:
| Everyone is integral to the company until they are not. Only
| founders and investors win at the end
| secfirstmd wrote:
| It will be interesting to see if Sia or Filecoin can compete in
| this tight market.
| staunch wrote:
| Even smart good people have to fire people. Dropbox clearly
| overextended itself, which was a mistake and is entirely the
| CEO's fault. But the severance package is the best way to judge
| their ethics in these cases. It looks like they're behaving
| compassionately.
|
| We should all refuse to work for well funded companies that do
| layoffs without ethical severance packages.
| msoad wrote:
| 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?
| usaar333 wrote:
| They stop growing. The ambitious people leave first when they
| realize growth is slowing. Ultimately, only the less ambitious
| are left.
| raverbashing wrote:
| By not innovating in new products would be my guess.
|
| Dropbox is their product and? There's "Corporate Dropbox" and
| that's it?
| [deleted]
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I feel like a lot of the companies are the same way though. I
| mean AirBnB pretty much only ever has had 1 product.
| mrlala wrote:
| I think that's a good thing though. The last thing _I_ want
| is dropbox to 'innovate'. They are already trying too hard
| by _forcing_ you to have windows explorer integration which
| slows the crap out of my machine.
|
| I am overall very happy with Dropbox and we use them because
| of what they are- a file syncing company. If they become
| more, it will surely be at the expense of simple file syncing
| which is all I want from them.
| judge2020 wrote:
| They should have gone all in on Dropbox Paper and building
| out an office suite to compete with GSuite and O365. Didn't
| happen.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is a steep hill to climb. Microsoft is _deeply
| entrenched_ in enterprises with .Net, Active Directory, SQL
| server, all that jazz (witness how fast Teams sped past
| Slack usage). It 's easier for Microsoft to roll out
| storage than it is for Dropbox to become Microsoft or
| Google.
|
| Jobs was right, Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
| manigandham wrote:
| It doesn't have to be another clone. For example Quip was
| acquired by Sales and there are tons of modern
| collaboration software tools like Airtable, Notion,
| Slack, etc. They could've created a suite that was
| tailored around that while leveraging their existing
| integrations with Office.
|
| Also people forget Box.com exists and does an even better
| job with corporate storage than Dropbox with much better
| features and UX.
| judge2020 wrote:
| https://www.notion.so/ is a thing, so there's probably a
| market, but it would be extremely hard to pull off.
| paxys wrote:
| Dropbox Paper itself was an acquisition.
| laddng wrote:
| I wish they kept their Mailbox app as well - I really
| enjoyed using it
| (https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-
| mailb...)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Why? It's almost impossible to keep up with Microsoft (as
| LibreOffice shows), it's _definitely_ impossible to write
| one from scratch.
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| Once the product is built you don't need as many people
| draw_down wrote:
| Sorry to hear it. I was thinking this would be another BLM/anti-
| rabble-rabble post about saving our democracy and all that jazz.
| Now I wish it was that.
|
| I fundamentally agree with Steve Jobs's take about this company,
| though I'd prefer to feel otherwise. I respect that they have
| been trying to find their way out of that pit; I really enjoy
| Dropbox Paper and use it at work most days. I just don't think it
| will be enough for them, but I hope to be wrong about that.
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a product similar in nature to the initial
| beginnings of Dropbox - a client that syncs a folder to the cloud
| and allows you to access/easily share those files? Not just rsync
| or a command line thing.
|
| I tried the Google Drive client for this (for Mac) and it was
| just a huge memory/resource hog, way worse than the initial
| DropBox client. But if someone just had "Dropbox as it was in
| like, 2010", that would be killer.
| d33lio wrote:
| In other words, they fired the bottom ~ 10% of people incapable
| of being productive (to their definition) while working from
| home...
| someonehere wrote:
| Dropbox has not evolved over the last ten years. They've bolted
| on features, but as an admin the service is horrible to manage.
|
| Case in point, the admin console is not user friendly. It's so
| bad I can't search for a file in someone's personal shared
| folder. I have to rely on the APIs or a third party like
| BetterCloud to find what I need. When I talked to Dropbox about
| renewal for my company, we could pay an additional $20k-$30k to
| get a limited version of BetterCloud to get the admin features I
| want.
|
| I'm also bitter because I interviewed there in their early days
| and they used my experience to get answers to problems they were
| facing on their team. My interview was free support for them and
| I knew afterwards the path they walked me down was intentional to
| get ideas on what problems they had.
| xnx wrote:
| File synchronization is a niche feature, not a product. Or it can
| be a product, but only in a utility-software way, not a billion-
| dollar enterprise way. Salesforce can acquire them?
| santoshalper wrote:
| I tend to agree. File sync was a product 10+ years ago, but has
| become so commoditized that it is more of a pack-in feature
| now. Then again, I thought the same thing about chat and web
| meetings 10 years ago and that keeps getting reinvented.
| demygale wrote:
| >"The steps we're taking today are painful, but necessary,"
| Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said in an employee memo Wednesday.
|
| Did they consider the "painful, but necessary" step of not paying
| the CEO $110 million salary?
| brainzap wrote:
| Thats not his salary, his salary is about 700k I guess.
| mdoms wrote:
| These 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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"...
| bdcravens wrote:
| If no emotion was expressed, I think they'd face criticism for
| being cold and calculated.
| mod wrote:
| The emotions you express are perhaps empathy, compassion, and
| regret.
|
| Emotions about the affected people, not about how hard it has
| been on you personally.
| edoceo wrote:
| It's with a heavy heart I deliver this difficult news to my
| team and our investors...
|
| Emotion. But, not centered around the individual
| tickthokk wrote:
| Yes! If I'd just been fired, the last thing I would care about
| are their feelings, and how my firing is part of the "strategic
| goal" I am no longer involved in.
|
| He also mentioned taking full responsibility. That line should
| have been followed by how he did that. Pay reduction for
| himself? Upper management?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| They don't really care what the people they're firing think
| as long as they aren't upset enough to sue or cause other
| problems.
|
| Messaging like this is for the people who are still at the
| company. Talking about "strategic goals" is trying to
| reassure them that the company isn't on verge of collapse.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Drew has always been this self-centered. About a year ago he
| got up in front of the whole company to whine about how
| engineers are eating too many potato chips from the kitchen,
| announcing "belt tightening". Completely ridiculous statements
| from a multibillionaire.
|
| Around the same time the company paid out very little of
| nominal bonus plan. I quit over the bonus fiasco and many other
| people in my area left at the same time for the same reason.
| asddubs wrote:
| haha, did this actually happen? i imagine him being in the
| kitchen discovering the empty remains of the last bag of
| potato chips immediately prior.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes it actually happened and it is not even the first time
| that I've had to suffer through a gazillionaire whining
| about how software developers' Doritos appetites were too
| costly. I had previously heard the same thing during
| Google's "scrappy" phase.
| wjamesg wrote:
| I don't disagree, but is it such a bad thing to convey some
| empathy?
| mdoms wrote:
| "This is hard for me" is not conveying empathy, it's seeking
| sympathy.
| apple4ever wrote:
| Sad for the people involved, but not surprising.
|
| They restricted syncing to 3 devices only. And the only way to
| remove that was to pay some exorbitant price (I think it was like
| $20 a month). So I switched to OneDrive. And ended up paying for
| the extra space (at $7 a month) which also included office.
|
| They really did not think their plan through, even after people
| complained.
| verteu wrote:
| Will SWEs be cut? Or is this primarily because their "Virtual
| First policy means they require fewer [people] to support their
| in-office environment"?
| abyrvalgg wrote:
| Migrated 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?
| toyg wrote:
| Electron will do that to you...
| gruez wrote:
| I thought they used python?
| toyg wrote:
| I doubt that gargantuan UI is now python.
| hs86 wrote:
| This week I canceled Dropbox, and on my Windows PC, I moved
| ~500 GiB from my Dropbox folder over to the Google Drive File
| Stream volume.
|
| I barely noticed any CPU usage from GDFS, and Dropbox.exe was
| also somewhat reasonable, but the fans of the MacBook Air next
| to me started screaming.
|
| There is something wrong with their Mac client, and with GDFS,
| the old MBA remains quieter, and the battery life improved as
| well.
| jasonv wrote:
| I've been on macOS for years now, but was installing Dropbox on
| a Windows machine. It kept downloading that client instead of
| the folder sync app.
|
| Took me a while to figure out why.. the Windows Install / Store
| interstitial is doing them no favors, and their documentation
| barely even addresses the "Install anyway" link you need to
| click on.
| threatofrain wrote:
| It's too bad Apple and Dropbox didn't hit it off in their earlier
| days. Apple's file management experience still isn't up to
| Dropbox's level.
| yoz-y wrote:
| A major advantage of dropbox is that it works everywhere. There
| is quite a change that wouldn't be the case had Apple bought
| them.
| [deleted]
| cecida wrote:
| Microsoft Office 365 with 1TB of OneDrive storage per person for
| up to 6 people for EUR69 a year is almost impossible to compete
| with.
| stunt wrote:
| Microsoft Office 365 convinces some companies to use Azure over
| AWS. Eating Dropbox lunch is plain sailing for Microsoft.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Should've listened to this guy all along:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| sharps_xp wrote:
| you know what doesn't get talked about: severence. why do we need
| it? why do employers give it? should one negotiate it? what is
| fair/unfair?
| jedberg wrote:
| > why do we need it?
|
| Because we don't have a social safety net in the United States,
| so getting laid off could make you instantly destitute.
|
| > why do employers give it?
|
| To maintain their community reputation. In the future when they
| hire again, it's easier to paper over a layoff if you can show
| that you tried to take care of the employees.
|
| Also because it's the ethical thing to do.
|
| > should one negotiate it?
|
| Usually in a mass layoff like this you can't negotiate it,
| since it's a standard package and you don't really have any
| leverage. But if you're a one off "layoff" you can and probably
| should negotiate it. Your leverage is "I might sue you for
| wrongful termination". So the company has to make a calculus on
| what that might cost them.
|
| > what is fair/unfair?
|
| That's the 64,000 dollar question, isn't it? It seems like
| three months is pretty typical. When someone gets six months
| most people call them "lucky". When someone gets a year people
| call it "unheard of". No whether that's fair or not is anyone's
| guess.
|
| It would be great to get some data on how long the average laid
| off tech worker is out of work. Maybe start a movement to get
| severance to match that. But again, the laid off employee has
| very little leverage.
| sharps_xp wrote:
| what is a scenario where the employee would have leverage in
| a layoff? it's hard to imagine except if something
| unethical/wrongful was going on leading up the layoff: sexual
| harassment, discrimination
| jedberg wrote:
| Usually when you are a high level employee they want you to
| sign an anti-disparagement clause. For example the COO
| here. Even if Dropbox did nothing wrong, it could really
| hurt their business if she went around giving talks about
| how awful Dropbox is, or talking about internal politics to
| the press.
|
| There is a good chance someone would even pay her for that
| information, so she has leverage by saying "you're going to
| cut off my future income, how much is that worth to you?".
|
| Or a situation where there was some questionable behavior
| and there could be a lawsuit about wrongful termination.
| Usually the severance comes with a waiver where you waive
| your right to sue the company. So it's a negotiation of how
| much that waiver is worth to both you and the company. The
| higher up you are, the more likely there is room for
| negotiation there on the value of a possible lawsuit.
| beefalo wrote:
| Maybe for a key hire with a specific skill-set. Principal
| engineer level probably can leverage severance since the
| hiring pipeline at that level is much slower
| xtracto wrote:
| > That's the 64,000 dollar question, isn't it? It seems like
| three months is pretty typical. When someone gets six months
| most people call them "lucky". When someone gets a year
| people call it "unheard of". No whether that's fair or not is
| anyone's guess.
|
| That's an interesting take from the point of view of the USA.
| They address international DropBox employees in passing in
| the letter. For Mexico, by law companies have to pay 3 months
| severance when they decide to lay off an employee. Sometimes,
| when the person is fired for having bad performance the
| company can negotiate for less than that. In theory when an
| employee is fired for some cause attributable to him, the
| company doesn't have to pay the severance but the burden of
| proof is in the company, and it is very difficult to prove
| so.
|
| That "at will" employment culture in the USA looks crazy
| ruthless for someone living with these protections.
| jedberg wrote:
| As an American who has friends in sane countries, I feel
| the same way. But keep in mind we still have unemployment
| insurance in the US, where the government pays you for a
| few months after you lose your job (although it's capped
| pretty low). Also sometimes the way the USA does it makes
| sense too.
|
| I was at a company that did a layoff once where they wanted
| to get rid of some underperformers in Europe, but Europe
| had such strong employment protections, the company was
| forced to get rid of good people in the USA instead to
| maintain cash flow.
|
| After the layoff, I had coworkers in Europe who literally
| just stopped showing up, but had to be paid for six months
| anyway.
|
| If the US had similar protections, the company would have
| just closed up shop and put 200 people out of work, instead
| of just a few.
|
| Now if the US could just get a decent social safety net,
| then the way the US did things wouldn't be so bad.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > why do employers give it?
|
| Because employers want you to sign a general release of claims,
| non-disparagement agreement, and/or other agreements when being
| sent off, and those aren't binding contracts without something
| in exchange.
|
| And because, in many industries, to avoid hard feelings--if you
| aren't being let go for cause, especially if you have networks
| in a high-demand field, they want you giving positive or
| neutral referrals, not negative ones. And as things shift, they
| might even want you back.
|
| And because the practice maintains the incentive for loyalty
| when company performance gives reason to expect imminent
| layoffs: if you don't give severance, the financial cost of
| quitting or being fired compared to being laid off is smaller.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Employers give it for one of three reasons:
|
| 1. It was negotiated as part of your job offer. (It is too late
| to try to negotiate it at any other time.)
|
| 2. It provides a lever for future behavior. "By accepting this
| severance payment, you agree not to sue THE COMPANY for any
| reason, and not to disparage THE COMPANY, and ..."
|
| 3. It makes the employer look reasonable to current and future
| employees. "Laid off 11% of the workplace due to economic
| conditions; 3 months of severance and various benefits" is much
| more conducive to hiring than "Laid off 11% of the workforce
| with no notice, no severance, no nothing".
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| While severance benefits may help with company goodwill or
| assuage the feelings of the survivors, I believe the real
| reason is mostly number 2.
|
| Exit aggreements almost always come with
| liability/discrimination disclaimers and usually new or
| updated language related to disclosures, company equipment,
| digital access, IP rights, non-compete language, and so on.
| Tying the exit agreement to new money provides the necessary
| consideration to establish a valid contract.
| lovecg wrote:
| Having your income suddenly reduced to near zero is a
| significant financial shock to a lot of people. Rents/mortgages
| are due, etc. I suppose you can make it optional and have each
| employee negotiate but that will either end up with no one
| getting it, or a lot of people opting out and then surprised
| with the sudden drop. Kind of what happens with health
| insurance.
| mdoms wrote:
| Because it's the right thing to do. Fin.
| [deleted]
| thenightcrawler wrote:
| Keep on thinking of Steve Jobs saying companies like these are
| features not products
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I sure hope not. Every vertical company wants my files locked
| in their walled garden, but _I_ want my files to be
| horizontally portable. This is a fight where it 's nice to have
| a $10B company in your corner.
| weeboid wrote:
| In the near future, storage will be a home appliance, with
| networking and command-and-control. As simple to use as a
| microwave, unlimited storage with service plans similar to
| changing water filters.
| qmmmur wrote:
| Is this sarcasm?
| triceratops wrote:
| 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?
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I agree. This week I set up my Nextcloud on a remote server
| and will probably get a home appliance eventually. I don't
| detect any sarcasm. Am I naive?
| johnbrodie wrote:
| I did the same thing over the past few weeks, along with
| some other self-hosted apps to get rid of as many SaaS
| dependencies as possible, DropBox being one of them.
| Fairly easy to install, but someone would need to write
| the "glue" to piece everything together for it to really
| take off.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| Hmm can you share more about this? It makes sense on the
| surface but it would be great to know what the context was.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > In 2009, Steve Jobs wanted to pay more than a hundred
| million dollars for Dropbox. As Houston later told Forbes'
| Victoria Barret, when he politely turned down his hero's
| offer, Jobs declared that Dropbox was a feature, not a
| product. Jobs was right: To do what we all want it to do,
| syncing has to be baked in to all the gadgets we use today.
| OS companies are warming to that notion--and they don't need
| Dropbox to do it.
|
| https://pando.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbox-
| is...
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Other folks have said it was in context of trying to buy
| Dropbox, which is true.
|
| I believe Steve already saw the fully realized platform of
| cross device computing in 2001. iPod illuminated the idea
| that context can birth new device classes, so naturally if
| you're going to have the same person use multiple devices,
| their context should morph to the device while being
| consistent in a global user state. This means that a file
| syncing (and by extension file sharing) feature is absolutely
| required to be fluid and desirable as a consumer product.
|
| Firewire was created in part because of this desire for the
| file sharing to be seamless - now Dropbox had a real-world
| tested wireless and continuous implementation running on
| Apple hardware, of course it's an acquisition target (I'm
| just surprised he didn't go higher knowing how much trouble
| MobileMe / iCloud accounts were at the time).
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Actually this goes way before the iPod. At NeXT they
| already had a (pretty standard in Unix environments) setup
| where you could login to any machine on the network and
| have access to your personal Home folder. I remember
| reading this was one of the reasons he didn't right away
| change over to using a Mac when he came back to Apple.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Do you remember in what context he say that?
| [deleted]
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Apple was trying to buy Dropbox to incorporate into the OS.
| lend000 wrote:
| Dropbox has executed its business well. While I'm certain they
| are working on some things unrelated to their core business, I
| can't imagine you need thousands of employees to keep things
| running smoothly and make incremental improvements to their data
| compression and deduplication scheme.
| rahul_nyc wrote:
| Starting this Google doc to help these people who laid off today.
| If you or someone you know has lost their job today, add your
| details below
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hqa6XQEodjs4JkwPcsls...
|
| To individuals: If are looking for any employment and are open to
| sharing it to be discovered, please put your information here:
|
| To companies: If you are looking to hire, please check out and
| reach out to any of the talented individuals below.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I just paid money for managed NextCloud hosting last night and
| was starting my transition today. If all goes well, then $27/year
| is going to be a lot better than a kneecapped free tier or a
| $120/year paid plan.
| layer8 wrote:
| How much storage do you get for $27/year, and where? (just
| curious)
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Cloudamo. 100GB. I was managing something like 9.2GB on my
| Dropbox, so it'll be a big jump. They say you can upgrade
| storage space but I don't know how the pricing works for
| that.
| layer8 wrote:
| Thanks. I checked, and it costs $15/year per additional 100
| GB. Hence it reaches Dropbox's $120 at 720 GB. Of course,
| you also get a managed NextBox instance for that price.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Thanks for sharing what you found!
| shuckles wrote:
| I think the "build sustainable business" crowd should understand
| that part of what they imply is "don't employ lots of people."
| Layoffs reframe that idea in an interesting way: not employing
| lots of people also means not offering a job someone might want.
| nobleach wrote:
| I was JUST seeing job opportunities in my LinkedIn from these
| folks. That's just careless.
| amateurdev wrote:
| I too was planning on applying to them in the next few days.
| But I will first find out who exactly is being cut out. This
| article says that its some support staff (I assume these are
| mainly non-technical people), but it does raise some concerns.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Lot's of companies have to make cuts in some areas while
| continuing to hire in another. Especially a company the size of
| Dropbox where there are many products and teams. However I
| agree that its a bad look and often tough to hire when you are
| in the news about layoffs.
| nobleach wrote:
| Right, it's all about the optics. It smacks of desperation.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't understand why you think cutting some jobs means they
| can't possibly also need to hire for other jobs?
| nobleach wrote:
| For the reasons stated in other places. Seeing a company
| that's cutting a large portion of their workforce is just bad
| optics. Yes, YOU may perceive it as wise business, but those
| who are looking to have a job in a year might not feel good
| about hiring on with a company that just had a layoff of a
| significant part of their workforce. What's to stop them from
| laying you off when their new plan doesn't work out as well?
| Companies that are doing well do not do large sweeping
| cuts.They tend to do smaller more precise cuts. This one
| seems like desperation.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If you need to make people redundant for business reasons
| then you need to do it.
|
| It's not careless to do something that needs to be done.
| What should they do instead? Try to conceal the layoffs? I
| think that's illegal in most jurisdictions.
|
| And they also cannot stop hiring.
|
| All the actions here are rational and as carefully done as
| they could be.
| danpalmer wrote:
| What were you seeing them for? The article quotes them saying
| that this cut is partially to allow them to expand some roles.
| That's not really careless if that's what they're doing.
|
| Specifically they say they're cutting back some kinds of
| support staff due to office closures, and growing some product
| roles.
| nobleach wrote:
| I was seeing them for engineering positions. (Front end if I
| recall correctly). As I've mentioned elsewhere though, the
| release of a significant portion of their workforce as
| "deadwood" speaks of a company that'll drop you too. These
| current times are not the best times to say, "hey, come give
| us a shot, we'll lay you off if things aren't looking so
| good". People are looking for a bit more stability. I get
| that Dropbox can't just keep a bunch of people around if it's
| doing nothing but costing them money. It just looks bad to
| let people go while still hiring.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I stopped using Dropbox and starting using Microsoft OneDrive.
| For the same price, I get the same amount of storage, plus an
| Outlook account, Office 365 on-line, the iOS and Android apps,
| and installable desktop versions of the Office Suite.
| adiM wrote:
| The only trouble is that the last time I checked there was no
| sync client for Linux.
| capableweb wrote:
| Dropbox 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 (where some
| been around for more than one thousand years), is this really
| what we should aspire towards?
| [deleted]
| santoshalper wrote:
| I don't think they've been a startup for quite some time. They
| are a mid-sized tech business, and sometimes businesses have to
| lay people off. It's the cycle of nature and inevitable as the
| competitive landscape changes.
|
| Dropbox was a great startup, and is a mediocre corporation.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The point of taking others' money really isn't relevant, as
| those investors have had their exit when Dropox IPO'ed almost 3
| years ago. Today's announcement is a product of the company
| Dropbox is today, not then.
| xseparator wrote:
| It's absolutely relevant. The need for those investors to
| even have an exit is what set them on the course to IPO.
| Today's situation is a direct result of investors herding
| them in this direction.
| josefresco wrote:
| Clients share files with me using Dropbox so I need a Dropbox
| account. My Dropbox account is now close to full and I have to
| "manage it". I don't like how files shared with me count against
| my quota and I don't like having to babysit a service my clients
| use to share files. I wonder how many business owners "just pay"
| to make the nag messaging go away.
| latchkey wrote:
| > I don't like how files shared with me count against my quota
|
| I stopped using dropbox many years ago over this one issue.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| Very much this. I don't use Dropbox personally. But I have
| clients that use it extensively and when they all share large
| files with me I am suddenly in the pay tier just because
| someone added me to a folder with 100 10 minute videos in it.
|
| It feels an awful lot like double and triple dipping to me.
| DixieDev wrote:
| Not a Dropbox user myself, but this system of counting shared
| files towards your quota seems pretty awful, and I'm surprised
| I've not seen more complaints about it. Do other cloud storage
| providers work this way?
| toyg wrote:
| I think Google Drive and Mega do (they definitely used to).
| ffpip wrote:
| Google doesn't do it as long as you are just adding a
| shortcut to drive.
|
| However, when the original person deletes the folder/file,
| you lose access to it since it was only a linked to you and
| not added to your drive.
| getpost wrote:
| On iCloud, "A shared folder only takes up space in the owner's
| iCloud storage."
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210910
| plondon514 wrote:
| And yet, they are still hiring for many positions:
| https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/all-jobs
| liminal wrote:
| I recall someone who worked there describing people being paid to
| do nothing, just so they wouldn't be hired by anyone else.
| Sounded like they had fat to cut.
|
| Regarding their product and viability, I've always relied on
| their product and have found it to generally perform better than
| OneDrive or Google drive. But I can get 1TB of OneDrive for
| $70/year with all the Office apps and I need Google drive for my
| phone's photos, so I've never seen the point of paying DropBox.
| Their value prop was commodified.
| passthejoe wrote:
| How well does OneDrive work for files that aren't MS Office
| files?
| rhacker wrote:
| It's still a disk integration like DropBox. That aspect works
| pretty well. So yeah, for me, it's like similar pricing as
| the others but, hey office on Mac or PC on 5 computers
| (family plan for me).
| mrlala wrote:
| OneDrive probably works just fine for a personal setting with
| limited files.
|
| But as of about two years ago when we tried to migrate to it
| for business purposes.. it was an insane nightmare. It simply
| could not handle a filesystem with a few hundred thousand
| files AT ALL.
|
| I think this was still at the time where OneDrive Business
| was technically a different product than OneDrive personal,
| and some bastardization with SharePoint (which I know nothing
| about).
|
| But anyway- unless things have changed, OneDrive Business is
| not usable with a large amount of files.
|
| Dropbox has been rock solid for years with a LOT of files.
| Although, recently I have been experiencing issues where
| dropbox just keeps getting stuck and has to be restarted. I
| also loathe their windows explorer integration.
| fakedang wrote:
| One Drive works perfectly. I've used it to store game saves,
| photos, videos. Anything works. The only advantage MS Office
| compatible files have is that they can be edited online in an
| online session of word, excel or PowerPoint.
| fakedang wrote:
| Tbh, how hard is it to create a Dropbox equivalent with today's
| technologies? Like how many people would be required to do so?
| I don't think it's anywhere near to 2300.
| bjoernw wrote:
| I know these letters are probably hard to write but when you do
| have to write one I think referring to people as "people" instead
| of "resources" would be better.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| As a longtime Linux user I felt snubbed for when Dropbbox decided
| that ext4 was the only file system that they were going to
| support. God forbid that Red Hat decide that XFS was the default
| file system in RHEL7 and Dropbox couldn't make the effort to
| support the premier Linux distro?
|
| I'm 100% on Syncthing these days. It's not perfect, but it gets
| the job done and I'm happy there's no big company involved. I set
| it up my way!
| passthejoe wrote:
| I think Fedora is using Btrfs now. Does Dropbox not support
| Fedora and RHEL?
| AnonC wrote:
| > I realize this is incredibly hard on the Dropboxers and their
| families who are impacted, and _I take full responsibility for
| this decision._
|
| What does it even mean to say you take full responsibility for
| the decision? Is the CEO taking a huge compensation cut for
| having arrived at this stage? What difference does that make for
| the ones who are let go (other than perhaps an official letter
| that they weren't fired for cause)?
| offtop5 wrote:
| Just my personal observation, I think Dropbox is the perfect
| example of a company whose time has passed. Between Google drive,
| and OneDrive being pushed by Microsoft, Dropbox just can't do
| things all that much better to justify most people using a
| separate service.
|
| Slack mainly because Google can't figure out which chat service
| they want to sell, somehow continues to buck the trend and sell
| itself as a standalone service.
| tptacek wrote:
| "6 months of COBRA" presumably means Dropbox will pay 6 months of
| COBRA premiums for departed team members? COBRA has a statutory
| duration much longer than 6 months.
| blinkingled wrote:
| They could have just said continued healthcare for 6 months -
| that's got to be a lot better than paying for 6 months of
| COBRA.
| tidepod12 wrote:
| It's the same thing. COBRA means you continue any healthcare
| plan you had while employed, with the only difference being
| you pay the full premium rather than your company subsidizing
| it. But in this case, it seems Dropbox is still subsidizing
| it (if that is indeed what that sentence in the letter
| means)... so it is just continued health coverage.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| It's not the same thing. Continued healthcare means you are
| fully on the employer plan and afterwards, the COBRA timer
| starts. Paying for COBRA means the timer starts now.
| tptacek wrote:
| Employer health plans can't cover non-employees.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| The group plan covers employees. Former employees are not
| going to be eligible. Though the company can pay the COBRA
| premiums for the same coverage fairly seamlessly.
|
| I was part of a group that split from a company, our new
| company paid COBRA premiums for our people until we set up
| our own group plan for the next year.
| heyoni wrote:
| Isn't Cobra usually paid for by the member?
| santoshalper wrote:
| Yes, it means Dropbox will pay you the cost of 6 months of
| COBRA. So let's say your premium is $1500/mo, Dropbox is going
| to give you up to $9k.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Dropbox:
|
| - CPU runaway consumption on OSX.
|
| - Annoying off-on drive storage paradigm.
|
| - Annoying integration with other apps (eg. Excel).
|
| - Little differentiation from competition.
|
| - Poor integration with their other offerings (eg. Paper).
|
| But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and
| innovation. There are 5 or 6 initiatives they could implement now
| that would turn the tide.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I'd add lack of flexibility as a huge downside for me. No way
| to sync external drives to Dropbox, even though their common
| 2TB plan is way bigger than most laptops' builtin storage. And
| no way to sync any files on your primary drive outside of the
| main ~/Dropbox folder. I always want to sync certain
| configuration settings so that if I use the same apps on
| multiple computers, or get a new computer, everything just
| works the same way. Syncing symlinks used to be a decent
| workaround for this even though it was never officially
| recommended, but they killed that ability and never replaced it
| with any other solutions.
|
| Now I've switched to iCloud, where I can more easily back up my
| full machine, and which syncs my Documents folder by default
| which is where a lot of Mac apps have started putting some
| configuration files. It's also a better replacement for Google
| Photos which is shutting down its free storage soon.
|
| It always felt like Dropbox was too eager to play "me too" with
| all the other cloud service offerings, and not only did they
| not particularly succeed at that, but they kind of gave up on
| their own core competency to do it.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and
| innovation._
|
| I dream of the day when people will link the "Why use Dropbox
| when you can just..." HackerNews comment unironically.
|
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| It seems like a failure of expectations. Dropbox created a
| market and delivered an extremely well executed product to
| meet it. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the expectation of
| growth that VC funded businesses have.
| grumple wrote:
| "Innovate or die" seems to ring true here.
| oblio wrote:
| > 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?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _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.
| oblio wrote:
| > There are 5 or 6 initiatives they could implement now that
| would turn the tide.
|
| And those are?
| rileyt wrote:
| If anyone who lost their job at Dropbox (or anywhere else) is
| reading this and needs help making a resume, email me and I'll
| give you a free month of https://standardresume.co.
|
| riley@standardresume.co
| themagician wrote:
| Dropbox solved a problem that we all had 10 years ago.
|
| Today, for new users, it isn't much of a problem because every
| platform (Windows, Android, Mac, Adobe, etc.) gives you free or
| integrated cloud storage. Many have multi-platform clients.
|
| There is just no growth path left for their original product.
| It's not a solution to a problem that new users have.
|
| I still use Dropbox occasionally, but now iCloud handles 99% of
| what Dropbox did for me. I didn't even choose to use iCloud. It
| was just there one day.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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?
| simplemen wrote:
| At one time, Dropbox was the easiest and best solution if you
| were using Android, MacOS, and Windows. I used to pay for 1TB
| account although Apple offered 2TB for same monthly fee. But
| the Dropbox destroyed their simple UI to this ugliness
| clusterfuck. That was the motivation for me to cancel it and
| move 100% into Apple's ecosystem.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm still not sure what I could migrate to that would give me
| solid and trustworthy sync/access across Windows, Mac, iOS,
| and Linux.
|
| I'm happy to pay whatever I pay for Dropbox -- I don't
| actually remember what it is -- but I'd rather they stop
| throwing in bullshit kitchen-sink features.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I still use Dropbox because I care about what you
| mentioned, but I think the next best thing is Seafile,
| however it has bad symlink handling.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Nextcloud. You can buy the service directly at various
| providers, such as Hetzner.
|
| Another solution is Google Drive, adding Insync for desktop
| sync.
| voisin wrote:
| I made the decision to migrate away for exactly the same
| reason. I think they are desperately trying to be more than a
| "feature" (as Steve Jobs correctly labelled them) and in this
| desperation they are obfuscating the very feature that
| brought people to them in the first place.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Why should they be going off like a rocket?
| jypepin wrote:
| more people are working remotely which probably requires more
| people looking for ways to share files more efficiently.
| dheera wrote:
| I imagine that sharing files would be the same regardless
| of whether you are remote or not. Even in a real office
| people don't usually hand USB sticks back and forth.
| jypepin wrote:
| I have no data, but more remote people either has 0
| impact, or impact on more data sharing online. Lots of
| businesses still work a lot on paper (think lawyers,
| notaries, etc) especially while working with clients, and
| are not forced to share docs differently.
| levosmetalo wrote:
| Most of the people do need to find a ways to share files
| more efficiently, but hardly any sane company would choose
| Dropbox given their security proposal.
| Arainach wrote:
| For any given technology or service, given the choice
| between the cheapest consumer option and a reliable
| enterprise option that costs 50% more, most small
| businesses will choose the consumer option every time.
| chid wrote:
| Which would be OneDrive
| spoonjim wrote:
| All remote collaboration software is growing like bonkers
| during the pandemic because of remote work.
| MrRiddle wrote:
| How workflow changes regarding storage when employees start
| working remotely?
|
| People will just share the same way they shared while in
| the office.
| jedberg wrote:
| Because they are core piece of remote work culture, like Zoom
| and Box.
| MrRiddle wrote:
| They're a core piece of regular office work as well. Apps
| like Zoom were not part of the office life, while Dropbox
| was.
| CedarMills wrote:
| Their UX has become worse, questionable design choices, and 2
| GB limit is almost a joke. Chances are, if you're in the
| market, you just use something like Box which provides a lot
| more value for free.
| santoshalper wrote:
| I'm a long time user and when people talk about the UX (many,
| not just you), I am always puzzled. What UX are you speaking
| of? For me, Dropbox is just a folder on my hard drive with no
| real UX to speak of. It's the ultimate "gets out of my way
| and just works". Are you talking about the web site?
| remir wrote:
| Dropbox tried to branch out into the "collaboration space"
| with their Paper feature/product and since then, the web UI
| has got worse.
| cfeduke wrote:
| There's a challenging to use UI that has become part of the
| installation process on recent updates. Most of the time it
| tries to advertise to me that I need to use Dropbox Paper
| rather than making it easy to copy/manage folders from
| external sources. (I need to do a bit more than just manage
| files/folders, like handle external shares, so I have to
| use the UI they provide for doing this.)
| jarek83 wrote:
| I use only their online app and it's where their UX got
| much worse recently.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| It's a commoditized space and the competition has easier access
| to new users... Microsoft, Google, Apple... all offer similar
| services bundled in.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| I'm guessing because they solve interop problem between
| systems, which is going away.
|
| Great idea and execution, very valuable but seemed valued even
| higer than that to me (i.e overvalued). They were well-placed
| for app hosting - but lots of competition and it's hard to hit
| the jackpot twice (even google hasn't managed it, nor apple,
| arguably).
| cgearhart wrote:
| I think Box ate their lunch in the corporate sphere and they
| have a lot more competition in the consumer space from things
| like OneDrive and iCloud Drive. The only reason I still have
| Dropbox at all is because I don't have a reason to pull the
| plug--and it wouldn't have to be much of an excuse.
| soneil wrote:
| Their device limit gave me my reason to leave them. When they
| started haemorrhaging corporate customers, they attacked
| their consumer users. I can't say I find the result hugely
| shocking.
| shmoogy wrote:
| I actually just moved all my stuff from Dropbox to B2
| buckets. My December bill was like $0.09
| rolleiflex wrote:
| I'm interested in moving off Dropbox in the same way, and
| B2 sounds interesting. Is there an app comparable to
| Dropbox working with B2, or did you have to build that app
| yourself?
| shmoogy wrote:
| I used RClone to sync to B2. They've got an iPhone app
| that you can download to browse + download from the
| bucket, else the website itself.
|
| There might be further reasons for it, but I mostly use
| it as an offsite backup that my wife could upload to --
| so usability was a plus -- but not worth that kind of
| premium.
| pyrophane wrote:
| Not the parent, but you can do this with Nextcloud. It
| supports using object storage as a backend, and B2 is
| compatible with S3.
| surajrmal wrote:
| I wonder if the omission is due to HN bias of disliking
| Google, but Google Drive has the largest market share in the
| segment Dropbox competes in.
| cgearhart wrote:
| It was not meant to be a slight. I have Google Drive, but I
| primarily use iCloud and I was thinking in terms of desktop
| OS platform rather than major tech companies or market
| share; ie, I use iCloud on Mac, what's the one MS built
| into windows?
| mc32 wrote:
| They are consumer oriented. Companies scaled up their Box
| instances, so they are likely doing well. But Dropbox never
| really had the Corp customer.
|
| And with people having access to Box, why would they bother
| with Dropbox?
| weeboid wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > 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.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| This is not backed up by anything besides your opinion. The
| main chart you should look at is the increase in number of
| paying customers month after month.
|
| Dropbox is much more than just storage. They also have their
| own infrastructure and don't depend on GAFA. They made a
| decision to not compete on the consumer side. I didn't like
| it but you cannot blame them given the large pockets of the
| competition and the fact they can monetize those costumers
| with their other products unlike Dropbox. They compete in
| enterprise where price is not the main factor like it's for
| consumers and doing it successfully.
|
| I will ping you in 5 years... (they might indeed get acquired
| though. If that happens it's gonna be for at least double of
| what $dbx is worth today)
| rchaud wrote:
| It makes no sense not to compete on the consumer side. The
| enterprise side has enormous barriers to entry, like a long
| sales cycle, RFPs, security audits etc. Office 365 simply
| offers more, plus with a familiar interface that doesn't
| require extra training for end-users.
|
| Who is going to be championing Dropbox on the enterprise
| buyer's side? Employees that are satisfied consumers or the
| IT office that uses the same 4-5 vendors for everything?
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I don't say you're right or wrong, cause I don't know.
| All I can say is that you cannot say "makes no sense"
| because it's been working OK for them so far. They have
| ~15M paying users and the number keeps growing (not at a
| very high pace but still steady growth). Their revenue is
| growing at a higher pace than expenses. Enterprise sales
| is not easy but they have been doing it for a while now.
| They also expand their product line to be a more complete
| solution for team productivity and collaboration. They
| have been doing a lot of mistakes on the way. They
| launched many products that failed. Their vision was
| lacking. But overall their numbers show it's a healthy
| company moving in the right direction. It's just not been
| growing in the pace everyone was thinking they would
| after their IPO.
| edoceo wrote:
| They are switching from growth to revenue mode. It smells to me
| like priming for a deal.
| jshawl wrote:
| I churned when Dropbox started removing features and asking for
| more money. e.g. limits on number of devices, more frequent
| nags, forcing me to unlink devices that had already been
| linked. I'm not going to be bullied into being a paying
| customer.
| bluescrn wrote:
| When they limited the number of devices I looked at the paid
| plans.
|
| But the lowest-end plan costs about the same as Netflix, and
| I have too many subscriptions in my life already.
| apple4ever wrote:
| That's what a lot of people are saying up and down this
| thread.
|
| Limited devices (ugh) and high cost to unlimit (ugh).
|
| That didn't have to happen.
| dgellow wrote:
| 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.
| brightball wrote:
| 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.
| dgellow wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know this. Thanks for sharing
| brightball wrote:
| I been using Dropbox since the beginning and I only
| discovered it last week.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > Unless you're hoarding data or want to avoid Microsoft
|
| ...or have access to a licensed copy of the "real" Microsoft
| Office, the desktop app, which doesn't lag (that much), where
| all keyboard shortcuts work, drag-and-drop isn't too
| surprising, and you can use over a slow/metered/non-existent
| connection (bus, train, airplane), so you don't really care
| about Office 365.
|
| Or you use it for something other than Word, Excel and
| Powerpoint. I know plenty of people who do architecture,
| landscaping or design who use Dropbox precisely because most
| of the things they use it for don't involve Office (much).
|
| For lots of people, Microsoft 365 Personal is 70 $/year for 1
| TB and a bunch of things that might as well be Google Docs,
| which are free. 200$/year for three times more storage space
| isn't a terribly bad deal.
|
| Edit: yes, I realize Microsoft 365 allows you to use the
| desktop apps. That doesn't add much _if you already have the
| desktop apps_. Or if you don 't need either the web or the
| desktop version.
| dgellow wrote:
| > 200$/year for three times more storage space isn't a
| terribly bad deal.
|
| If you use the storage, then sure. But I would assume that
| you can then find better prices for 3TB.
|
| You can see it this way:
|
| - if you want an office license, it's 70$/year, and as a
| bonus you have a dropbox equivalent for free for 1TB.
|
| - if you want some storage, up to 1TB, OneDrive is
| 70$/year, and as a bonus you have access to the complete
| office suite for free (yes, you can download all the office
| applications to run them locally and up to date, and also
| have access to the web versions)
|
| I personally don't see how Dropbox can compete. The
| competition is cheaper, has more features, and offers
| almost the same user experience.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > If you want an office license, it's 70$/year, and as a
| bonus you have a dropbox equivalent for free for 1TB.
|
| My point was that if you already _have_ an Office
| license, it 's 70$/year for something you already have +
| 1 TB (on what, until recently, used to be a pretty shoddy
| Dropbox clone, rather than a Dropbox equivalent -- but
| maybe it's improved in the meantime). In that case,
| there's no bonus.
| chid wrote:
| You can still use office desktop with office 365
| nihilist_t21 wrote:
| > ...or have access to a licensed copy of the "real"
| Microsoft Office, the desktop app, which doesn't lag (that
| much), where all keyboard shortcuts work, drag-and-drop
| isn't too surprising, and you can use over a
| slow/metered/non-existent connection (bus, train,
| airplane), so you don't really care about Office 365.
|
| Microsoft 365 allows you to download the desktop app
| versions of Office. No need for an internet connection
| after that.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Until you get a message that you cannot save until it
| verifies your account again. Multiple people at my
| company including me got hit with it on OSX.
| [deleted]
| rapht wrote:
| I actually switched to OneDrive when Dropbox changed their
| pricing a while ago. Microsoft's offering was way more
| competitive on both price (EUR100/yr for 5x1TB) and features
| (Office access and integration, etc.)
| 2ion wrote:
| Yes, but I have 1 gbit uplink and upload speads are 3
| megabytes per second at best. Actually, I tried via rclone
| from VPSs at various locations also and no change. Frankly,
| that's shit. I've been paying the 2EUR/month 100GB storage
| plan simply because the OneDrive Android app does its job
| of offloading photos quickly well but that's really it's
| good for. That, and uploading 100K-1M Office documents.
|
| As soon as I noticed this issue, the deal of 1TB storage
| with a O365 subscription also went sour. 1TB I can't really
| use -- no deal.
|
| This problem is well known; it's all over the internet --
| OneDrive is a sloth. It doesn't affect downloads, btw.
| apple4ever wrote:
| That is exactly what I did as well.
| pyrophane wrote:
| Dropbox actually still has a $9.99/mo (if billed anually) 2TB
| plan for individuals. Still not the cheapest price-wise, but
| not unreasonable.
| apple4ever wrote:
| Which is crazy.
|
| Why not a $3.99 for 100GB? $7.99 for 1TB?
|
| A lot of people (myself included) said "That's too much
| money especially since I don't need that much space."
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's not bad, but these big companies can bundle it all
| together and drive the little companies out of business,
| for personal use at least. Apple is offering 2TB iCloud
| Drive, plus all their other online services for $30 per
| month.
| [deleted]
| dgellow wrote:
| You're right, I didn't notice that by default they direct
| you to business tiers and you have to click on a small link
| to switch to the "basic" plans. Their website has become
| such a weird thing to navigate...
| codeulike wrote:
| ... but then they will re-appear at the next sync.
| 3guk wrote:
| Sad to hear - I never quite realised how awesome Dropbox was
| until we were forced by our company to migrate to OneDrive /
| Sharepoint.
|
| I can't help but feel that 2021 is going to be full of companies
| who are re-structuring and announcing layoffs...
| s3r3nity wrote:
| > Dropbox also announced that chief operating officer Olivia
| Nottebohm will leave the company February 5.
|
| Interesting change of leadership that was buried in the article -
| she was only there for < 1 year after leaving Google Cloud.
| Anyone here have insight / thoughts on the move in the Exec Team?
| busterarm wrote:
| I'm not even sure that pulling someone from Google Cloud was a
| good idea to begin with.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Gotta blame someone and it's not going to be the CEO...
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's not really buried, it's right at the top as one of the two
| "key points".
| rahul_nyc wrote:
| Starting this Google doc to help these people who got laid off
| today. If you or someone you know has lost their job today, add
| your details below
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hqa6XQEodjs4JkwPcsls...
|
| To individuals: If are looking for any employment and are open to
| sharing it to be discovered, please put your information here:
|
| To companies: If you are looking to hire, please check out and
| reach out to any of the talented individuals below.
| msoad wrote:
| Can you draw parallels between Zoom and Dropbox? Users love the
| product but it makes less sense for the IT department to pay for
| them when Microsoft and Google are offering similar and "good
| enough" alternatives for "free"?
|
| Can Zoom survive?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Zoom didn't gain traction by being a pioneer in video
| conferencing, they gained traction by offering a far superior
| and easier experience, I agree some dark patterns are leveraged
| for that experience but at the end of the day a zoom meeting is
| easier to start and is of a higher quality than what Microsoft
| and Google have offered for years and especially in Google's
| case seemed to consider a solved problem.
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