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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Dropbox makes constant notifications on your desktop about upgrading alongside emails. I'd have considered paying for them if they weren't like this but now I never will. Maybe they'd have an easier time being profitable if they didn't push away all their long term users.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I loved Tresorit but it's camera upload feature didn't transfer files correctly from my wife's iPhone - it left them corrupted and unopenable with no warnings or errors whatsoever.
Unfortunately because of that alone I dropped them completely. I'm using Dropbox now because I haven't found a better alternative for syncing between iPhone/Android/Windows/Linux.
Sadly Linux users are like 1% of the market, non-ext4 is even less (and I am a full-time Linux user and big ZFS fan). They actually restored support for several non-ext4 filesystems over a year ago[1].
Syncdocs has been working reliably for me for years. They seem to focus on the core file-syncing stuff, which works fast and reliably, rather than blingy features.
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. :)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This scares the shit out of me. Long story short: I work for a company about to go public...this year to be exact. It sounded exciting at first but as I dug deeper I realized some companies start dying slowly after IPO. I guess I’ll have see it to believe it :(
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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!
For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their rigid pricing structure, £7.99 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 £1.99 which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
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.
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-$2 a month thing. I wouldn’t.
Works for a Titans like apple and google because they are making money in other ways..
That minimum fee has recently increased. Like 1-2 months ago. You are not going to negotiate that down with VISA/MC. Talk to a bar/restaurant worker, who gets to see the transaction fees.
I own an MSP and we have wide latitude to set rates with our customers. The numbers that were in the example ($.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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 £7.99/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 £5 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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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! :-)
> 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.
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.
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
I actually just made a little app yesterday that converts share urls into direct HTTP download URLs that are usable by cURL, etc. Not sure if this solves your problem:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Dropbox is profitable and has been around for a decade. That's more than most businesses can say. How long do they need to be around for your "blessing"? A century?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
688 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadSpecifically they say they're cutting back some kinds of support staff due to office closures, and growing some product roles.
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.
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?
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.
That's because they are absolutely bloated company given the relatively simple service they provide. In 2019, they employed 2300 people.
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.
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.
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.
If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big, I don't know what will.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're just ramping up into the consolidation period now.
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.
For most people, consolidating many services into one is just more convenient, even if it means using a "good-enough" version of that feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I prefer having access from my devices without the replication.
I do back up my Steam library, btw, because occasionally they remove games. That folder is at about 4TB.
//inside joke if you dont know.... Data Hoarders only every have Linux ISO's....
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.
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.
Shining examples of unicorns? Then they need to prove they can indeed exist in real world. They shouldn't be treated differently.
I generally use Dropbox for personal files and Syncthing for business. It's a great setup to keep those things separate.
Unfortunately because of that alone I dropped them completely. I'm using Dropbox now because I haven't found a better alternative for syncing between iPhone/Android/Windows/Linux.
1: https://hub.packtpub.com/dropbox-walks-back-its-own-decision...
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. :)
What Dropbox is selling is something that will be bulk commodity. They will never be able to settle and get good revenue.
"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.
Selling to Wall Street is the "final sell": once it's done, you need to convince that profits grow, not just revenues.
- 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
But then again, it's hard to compete against free for $0.10/user margins. Way easier catching a couple of big enterprise fishes.
Dropbox is their product and? There's "Corporate Dropbox" and that's it?
Jobs was right, Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
Also people forget Box.com exists and does an even better job with corporate storage than Dropbox with much better features and UX.
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.
Can Zoom survive?
Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is this such a huge problem for you? Seems super minor?
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.
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.
It's not impactful by itself, but the more impactful things are less reliable as signals anyway.
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.
Every time I encounter this I reconsider my Dropbox subscription.
[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.
https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/
Figure out what you want from the page.
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 £1.99 which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
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..
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.
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.
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.
For a £7.99/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 £5 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.)
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_dropbox_...
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.
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.
It feels really seamless to me.
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.
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.
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...
That spooked me.
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.
Hmm... you may not be Dropbox's most typical consumer! :-)
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.
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.
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.
https://apitman.com/apps/droplink/
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And those are?
riley@standardresume.co
Did they consider the "painful, but necessary" step of not paying the CEO $110 million salary?
It feels an awful lot like double and triple dipping to me.
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.
I stopped using dropbox many years ago over this one issue.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210910
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!
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.
(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.)
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.
If my employer offered additional desirable insurance to replace an equal amount of pre-tax salary, I would gladly except that extra compensation too.
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.
You're right, healthcare has no business being tightly coupled to employers -- or employment, in my opinion. Everyone should have healthcare.
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...
COBRA and supplemental insurance as primary are great late stage capitalism for sure