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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

• nobleach 6y ago
  I was JUST seeing job opportunities in my LinkedIn from these folks. That's just careless.
  • danpalmer 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  • Taylor_OD 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Right, it's all about the optics. It smacks of desperation.
  • amateurdev 6y ago
    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.
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    I don't understand why you think cutting some jobs means they can't possibly also need to hire for other jobs?
    • nobleach 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
• s3r3nity 6y ago
  > 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?
  • Semaphor 6y ago
    It’s not really buried, it’s right at the top as one of the two "key points".
  • dave_sullivan 6y ago
    Gotta blame someone and it's not going to be the CEO...
  • busterarm 6y ago
    I'm not even sure that pulling someone from Google Cloud was a good idea to begin with.
• jimmaswell 6y ago
  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.
  • djitz 6y ago
    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.
  • dralley 6y ago
    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.
    • perlgeek 6y ago
      Dropbox is also to blame for user's expectations, because they did offer more in the past, for free.
    • The_Colonel 6y ago
      > 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 6y ago
        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.
• raiyu 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    • aNoob7000 6y ago
      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.
• msoad 6y ago
  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?
  • raverbashing 6y ago
    By not innovating in new products would be my guess. Dropbox is their product and? There's "Corporate Dropbox" and that's it?
    • judge2020 6y ago
      They should have gone all in on Dropbox Paper and building out an office suite to compete with GSuite and O365. Didn't happen.
      • mschuster91 6y ago
        Why? It's almost impossible to keep up with Microsoft (as LibreOffice shows), it's definitely impossible to write one from scratch.
      • toomuchtodo 6y ago
        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.
        • judge2020 6y ago
          https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ is a thing, so there's probably a market, but it would be extremely hard to pull off.
        • manigandham 6y ago
          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.
• threatofrain 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • yoz-y 6y ago
    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.
• msoad 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
• whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    • themodelplumber 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      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.
      • disantlor 6y ago
        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.
• tlogan 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
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• liminal 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    How well does OneDrive work for files that aren't MS Office files?
    • rhacker 6y ago
      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).
    • fakedang 6y ago
      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.
    • mrlala 6y ago
      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.
• howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
  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.
  • itsoktocry 6y ago
    >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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        "Innovate or die" seems to ring true here.
        • treis 6y ago
          I'm not sure I agree. A magic folder that syncs across all your devices is going to be useful for the foreseeable future. Eventually maybe Dropbox dies without real innovation but I think that fundamental concept could last for decades.
          • grumple 6y ago
            > A magic folder that syncs across all your devices is going to be useful for the foreseeable future. This is exactly why they must innovate. Their core tech is useful, but it is also replicable; so as soon as someone has magic folder PLUS more useful features bundled together (as some already do), Dropbox fails to be as worth having as a separate service for users that prefer the bundle. Which is why they have issues at present.
• rileyt 6y ago
  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 https://standardresume.co. riley@standardresume.co
• demygale 6y ago
  >“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 6y ago
    Thats not his salary, his salary is about 700k I guess.
• cecida 6y ago
  Microsoft Office 365 with 1TB of OneDrive storage per person for up to 6 people for €69 a year is almost impossible to compete with.
  • stunt 6y ago
    Microsoft Office 365 convinces some companies to use Azure over AWS. Eating Dropbox lunch is plain sailing for Microsoft.
• deleted 6y ago
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• fortran77 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    The only trouble is that the last time I checked there was no sync client for Linux.
• josefresco 6y ago
  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.
  • SteveGerencser 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      I think Google Drive and Mega do (they definitely used to).
    • ffpip 6y ago
      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.
  • latchkey 6y ago
    > I don't like how files shared with me count against my quota I stopped using dropbox many years ago over this one issue.
  • getpost 6y ago
    On iCloud, "A shared folder only takes up space in the owner's iCloud storage." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210910 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210910
• F00Fbug 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    I think Fedora is using Btrfs now. Does Dropbox not support Fedora and RHEL?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• verteu 6y ago
  Will SWEs be cut? Or is this primarily because their "Virtual First policy means they require fewer [people] to support their in-office environment"?
• neil1023 6y ago
  Is no one going to talk about how Drake posted this article? /s
• rossdavidh 6y ago
  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.
• codeulike 6y ago
  ... but then they will re-appear at the next sync.
• megamike 6y ago
  COBRA? COBRA is a sad expensive joke
  • smeyer 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        That's exactly what they mean. 6 months of cobra subsidization.
  • clra 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, is there something lower cost/better that employees who have recently quit or been laid off should look into?
    • derwiki 6y ago
      Lower cost, sure any number of options on the market. I used https://www.ehealthinsurance.com https://www.ehealthinsurance.com years ago between jobs
• BonoboIO 6y ago
  Dropbox suffers hard from feature bloat!
• jarym 6y ago
  Well at least it’s more upfront and sincere than some of the cut backs that have been happening.
  • superbcarrot 6y ago
    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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    • that_guy_iain 6y ago
      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.
    • gagglegoose 6y ago
      Dropbox is continuing to fail?
  • clra 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
  I was worried this was another tech Trump ban.
• joemaller1 6y ago
  Feels like they're setting up for an acquisition.
• someonehere 6y ago
  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.
• sharps_xp 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
    • xtracto 6y ago
      > 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.
• thenightcrawler 6y ago
  Keep on thinking of Steve Jobs saying companies like these are features not products
  • superbcarrot 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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-a-feature-not-a-product/ https://pando.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbox-is...
    • anonymouse008 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
• offtop5 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  "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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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 6y ago
          Employer health plans can't cover non-employees.
    • pnw_hazor 6y ago
      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 6y ago
• jedberg 6y ago
  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?
  • webwielder2 6y ago
    Why should they be going off like a rocket?
    • jypepin 6y ago
      more people are working remotely which probably requires more people looking for ways to share files more efficiently.
      • levosmetalo 6y ago
        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 6y ago
          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 6y ago
            Which would be OneDrive
      • dheera 6y ago
        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.
• gruez 6y ago
  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.
  • rainboiboi 6y ago
    same, i guess dropbox went downhill from the day they did the UI/UX redesign
  • willis936 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      That’s what the regular scroll bar should be for, instead of auto-hiding.
      • gruez 6y ago
        yet another instance of webapps going full circle when it comes to ui.
  • plzbo 6y ago
    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.
• tidepod12 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    I use Paper and have to say I quite like it - I started using it at my current job where it seemed common and hadn’t heard of it before. The main thing I like it for is quickly putting together group TODOs - you can create checkboxes with [] and can tag people’s names to items and add deadlines. That combined with some indentation is exactly the level of structure I like to organize such things. I’m surprised to find out here that it seems so unpopular.
    • thisisbrians 6y ago
      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.
  • apendleton 6y ago
    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.
• flyinglizard 6y ago
  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.
• webwielder2 6y ago
  Dropbox as a small business makes sense. Quality syncing, a few productivity tools like Paper. Along the lines of https://readdle.com https://readdle.com Dropbox as a publicly traded global megacorp does not make sense.
  • b3kart 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
    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
• staunch 6y ago
  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.
• saos 6y ago
  Not surprised. Perhaps Im wrong but their price offering compared to Google Drive and iCloud is a bit much right?
• xnx 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
• mdoms 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    If no emotion was expressed, I think they'd face criticism for being cold and calculated.
    • edoceo 6y ago
      It's with a heavy heart I deliver this difficult news to my team and our investors... Emotion. But, not centered around the individual
    • mod 6y ago
      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.
  • tickthokk 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
• Brendinooo 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    How much storage do you get for $27/year, and where? (just curious)
    • Brendinooo 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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 6y ago
          Thanks for sharing what you found!
    • benhurmarcel 6y ago
      On my side I've been happy with Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
• capableweb 6y ago
  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?
  • santoshalper 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• 3guk 6y ago
  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...
• jhu247 6y ago
  As someone who was impacted by a past round of Uber layoffs, seeing this kind of messaging from the top is refreshing.
  • catacombs 6y ago
    Everyone is at risk.
• 0xFFC 6y ago
  I didn’t skimmed the article. Quick question, is it only Sales and Marketing or layoffs does include engineering too?
• stuaxo 6y ago
  Part of me expected the message to be "Your storage is running out, upgrade to dropbox pro"
• notwhereyouare 6y ago
  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.
  • lacker 6y ago
    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.
    • capableweb 6y ago
      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.
    • mprovost 6y ago
      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-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
  • jiveturkey 6y ago
    more importantly, it won't get you the precise 11% you want to get rid of.
  • frivoal 6y ago
    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.
  • 6y ago
• abyrvalgg 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Electron will do that to you...
    • gruez 6y ago
      I thought they used python?
      • toyg 6y ago
        I doubt that gargantuan UI is now python.
  • jasonv 6y ago
    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.
  • hs86 6y ago
    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.
• ProAm 6y ago
  Was the COO a bad fit? She was only in the role for ~1 year.
  • paxys 6y ago
    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.
• yawboakye 6y ago
  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.
• snicksnak 6y ago
  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.
• jdavila90 6y ago
  Everyone is integral to the company until they are not. Only founders and investors win at the end
• draw_down 6y ago
  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.
• rahul_nyc 6y ago
  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/1Hqa6XQEodjs4JkwPcslsq4a2PAG9F3zHcDafaWVQex4/edit#gid=0 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.
• rahul_nyc 6y ago
  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/1Hqa6XQEodjs4JkwPcslsq4a2PAG9F3zHcDafaWVQex4/edit#gid=0 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.
• whoisjuan 6y ago
  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.
• avrionov 6y ago
  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.
  • aeturnum 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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
• davis_m 6y ago
  > "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 6y ago
    How do you find out if you are getting laid off from the article exactly?
• AnonC 6y ago
  > 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)?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bjoernw 6y ago
  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.
• thebiglebrewski 6y ago
  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.
• rogerdickey 6y ago
  The writing has been on the wall for many years. Unpopular opinion: Zoom is next when everyone else improves their codec.
• aborsy 6y ago
  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.
• lend000 6y ago
  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.
• math0ne 6y ago
  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.
• thenightcrawler 6y ago
  steve jobs said that these are features not products and well.... he hasn't proven wrong yet imo.
• heshiebee 6y ago
  They should do hosting for conservatives :)
• secfirstmd 6y ago
  It will be interesting to see if Sia or Filecoin can compete in this tight market.
• d33lio 6y ago
  In other words, they fired the bottom ~ 10% of people incapable of being productive (to their definition) while working from home...
• jack_riminton 6y ago
  Should've listened to this guy all along: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
• ronyfadel 6y ago
  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).
• shuckles 6y ago
  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.
• themagician 6y ago
  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.
• apple4ever 6y ago
  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.
• gnicholas 6y ago
  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 https://www.dropbox.com/plans
• plondon514 6y ago
  And yet, they are still hiring for many positions: https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/all-jobs https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/all-jobs
• h7t_peloton 6y ago
  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%A0%C2%A0%C2%A0%C2%A0%C2%A0%C2%A0%C2%A0New%20York https://www.onepeloton.com/careers/software?city=%C2%A0%C2%A...
• woeirua 6y ago
  At least in the customer space, I think Dropbox's main problem is that they have refused to offer lower space / lower cost packages. I can get 100 GB on Google Drive for $2 / month. The lowest package on Dropbox is $10 / month for 2 TB. I barely even fill half of the 100GB that I'm using on Google Drive. Why would I pay 6x as much for storage that I'm never going to use?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• rangibaby 6y ago
  I’ve been a Dropbox paid subscriber for many years (since it was Dropbox Pro). I’m not going to renew it. The constant upsell nagging is too much. Dropbox would be perfect if it just STFU and synced files. One of my clients opening files I shared by Dropbox on their mobile phone successfully got dark patterned into signing up for a paid subscription. That was a fun mess to clean up. Mission accomplished?
• loehnsberg 6y ago
  Unlike others in that space (I am looking at you, Slack), Dropbox is still innovating. Dropbox Paper is the best collaborative writing tool that I have at my disposal (O365, Gsuite, Overleaf being the others). I use it with coworkers all the time to draft things or just to keep notes. And hey, the .paper files are actually on my computer.
• m3kw9 6y ago
  Dropbox is just one of those services that got turned into commodity as tech caught up to them over the years especially for regular consumers
• ulfw 6y ago
  Dropbox hasn't innovated in years and when they did they went into the wrong direction. I'm an existing subscriber for many years and will be dropping off when my subscription runs out in May. For an app that does one thing and one thing only, they sure are sloooooow in developing something. Case in point: Dropbox is still not native on ARM Mac. For god sake even Microsoft Office is and Adobe Lightroom. Not exactly small apps from small companies. There's so much that could be done with storage. I have 50GB of images taken over the last 20 years. Do I really have to upload them to Dropbox file sync (I like to keep original files) AND to Apple/Google Photos just in order to be able to see them nicely on a mobile device. Yea the dropbox app kind of allows it, but it's a mediocre experience and not very fast either. Dropbox dropped the end customer, but also didn't really get big in Enterprises (who often run a homogenous ecosystem, e.g. based on Microsoft or Google and thus just upgrade to Onedrive/Google Drive). So then... who is the core audience? Is it big enough? Is it served well with existing offerings?
• shirro 6y ago
  I liked dropbox early on. There was nothing radical about what they were doing but it was very well executed and simple enough to recommend to less technical people and share files with them. Even with the big companies offering cross subsidised platform integrated products I probably would have kept using them but they never innovated their pricing and products enough. I waited years for a family plan and decided it wasn't worth paying multiple individual subscriptions. They were basically double charging for family photo storage so I bailed on them and never looked back. Apparently they introduced such a plan late last year and I never noticed. Now I have multiple streaming services, hosting and other things competing for my money. Many files which I used to protect and share with Dropbox are in a private git repo now. Photos are going into specialised photo products. And people tend to share files over different services.
• nojvek 6y ago
  Dropbox should have remained lean. From what I heard they had a hiring frenzy, they were dipping their toes into many products. Dropbox paper is “meh”. Other than the core syncing product, they didn’t get anything solid that was top of its class. Also agree re: anti-competitive behavior from MS and GOOG. The law ought to be simple: you can’t bundle things as free into other things just to fend off competitors. Goog is taking its ad money and probably the worst offender.
• javchz 6y ago
  Dropbox probably has the best client sync across platforms (no GDrive, icloud, or onedrive for linux yet) but I find their plans too much for me. I was using their free plan and used for sync custom config and bash files between OSs and distros, I would love to buy one of their plans, but 2TB it's too much for me. After their 3 devices limitation, I lost trust of investing into their plans, I would hate to pay a company that makes a bait and switch of their main product. Anyway after the bait and switch, I migrated to a self hosted solution with an old laptop and syncthing, and works great. But I miss some of the dropbox features, but not that much to pay for 90% of storage I will never use. Yeah, selfhost it's more expensive than their plans, and I'm responsible for the reliability; but I have more control and better features, so not so bad so far.
  • XCSme 6y ago
    I agree, not only their pricing is high but I also tried to upgrade to the lowest plan to use it for my one-man company, but I couldn't do that as they don't provide a business invoice and you can't add a VAT number for their "Personal" plan. So I did actually purchase the plan than contacted support to refund me as they can't provide a proper invoice.
  • XCSme 6y ago
    Which self-hosted solution did you go with? I am looking to switch from Dropbox to NextCloud.
• vibrant_mclean 6y ago
  I use dropbox for saving import documents/receipts/statements. Being early adopter, have 5GB storage. All I need is a peace of mind that I don't loose important stuff if my computer breaks down or temporarily becomes unavailable. I don't need any other feature. If I had to pay about $10 per year, I would just use it happily. But their minimum plan is >$100. I occasionally use file-requests feature. If it was like pay as you go type, that would be good too. I think reasonable low tier pricing will get them consistent long term revenue.
• rexreed 6y ago
  Why does Dropbox need 2800+ employees? I remember visiting the Dropbox HQ and Twitter HQ in 2017 as these companies were growing like crazy. There were so many people doing... not much? At the time I wondered why these companies needed so many employees. I still wonder.
• bgorman 6y ago
  I was a pretty early user of dropbox. One of things I used dropbox for was storing some of my college homework assignments. I estimate that these assignments occupied ~10 megabytes at most. Dropbox deleted my stored files due to account inactivity. Yes, they sent me an email (to a email I do not actively monitor anymore) saying they would do so. Storing 2GB worth of files on S3 Glacier for 20 years would have cost dropbox less than 2 dollars. They lost me as a customer for life, and do not deserve sympathy.
• randomsearch 6y ago
  Dropbox are providing a commodity that is included by MS and Google for free, essentially, as almost all businesses have to buy office and/or gmail. Unless you can differentiate significantly, you’re dead. What does Dropbox do? It allows me to access my files anywhere. That’s a pretty basic product. They’ve tried different features but failed to produce anything winning. Best plan is a quick exit to salesforce before dropbox go bankrupt.
• psmithsfhn 6y ago
  Dropbox locked me out of my account years ago and I'm sure they have locked out thousands of other people too. I suspect loss of trust helps a company go into decline, especially when the company holds a vital assets.
• blntechie 6y ago
  I don’t remember a single product or feature they have built in the last 3-4 years which I found extremely useful. Steve Jobs was not wrong. Also I have been ready to pay them $2-5 for like 50-100GB of storage but they only want $10 for 1TB which I don’t want. I just compromised and use OneDrive which comes with my Office 365 instead.
  • mr_gibbins 6y ago
    I went all-in on Dropbox Paper to write up some research I had been working on for my PhD. I ended up having to split into three Paper files(?) because the lag on each keyboard press degenerated to 500-1000ms or worse. I eventually realised it was completely unusable and ported my work back to traditional word processing software. My supervisor proclaimed it a fad, and he was right.