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Dropbox To Cut 11% of its Global Workforce (cnbc.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the cost-cutting dept.
Dropbox is cutting its global workforce by about 11%, the company said in an 8K filing released Wednesday. From a report: The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day. "The steps we're taking today are painful, but necessary," Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said in an employee memo Wednesday. Dropbox committed to preserve job security through 2020, but Houston said that looking ahead to this year "it's clear that we need to make changes in order to create a healthy and thriving business for the future." The company said the job cuts will help it focus on its top priorities for the year, which include evolving the core Dropbox experience, investing in new products and driving operational excellence.
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Dropbox To Cut 11% of its Global Workforce More

Dropbox To Cut 11% of its Global Workforce

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  • Use this as a chance to get back to basics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dbrueck ( 1872018 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:48PM (#60938960)

    Dropbox was decent back when it just did file backup and sync. Now... I don't know what it is now, but it's a mess and I'm actively evaluating alternatives.

    • Re:Use this as a chance to get back to basics (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @01:51PM (#60938970) Homepage Journal

      Dropbox was decent back when it just did file backup and sync. Now... I don't know what it is now, but it's a mess and I'm actively evaluating alternatives.

      Same here, when I read this: top priorities for the year, which include evolving the core Dropbox experience....

      My first thought was...what experience?

      I move files in there and out of there, what else is there to "experience"?

      • My first thought was...what experience?

        I move files in there and out of there, what else is there to "experience"?

        My guess is that "evolving the core Dropbox experience" will involved adding even more nag screens to push you into upgrading to their paid tier.

      • I move files in there and out of there, what else is there to "experience"?

        How about the experience of getting an email saying your dropbox is full because someone has shared a folder with your and their folder counts towards your limit? I've never seen emails quite like that. It was an amazing experience, lots of emotions went through my mind which juggled many adjectives mostly those beginning with the word "fucking"

      • Function -> experience is pretty much like movie -> franchise. Your question sounds rhetoric, but from that I read that the "experience" is more ways for dropbox to convince investors that since their product rocks, they can attach to it useless functionality that they can monetize. More functionality, more monetization, lots of $$$ aw yeah that how it'll work I'm sure

    • Re:Use this as a chance to get back to basics (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:37PM (#60939144)

      I got an email saying I used up my 12GB free space ... because my father shared his photos with me. I left Dropbox the first time I got that stupid email (which was many years ago). Yes *someone else's* shared folder counts towards your storage limit.

      Back when they were the first cloud sync service you may tolerate that kind of shit. In 2020, with all the alternatives including Seafile and Owncloud, there's no reason to put up with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      It's all over the industry, companies reaching for that ever-so-desirable 'value add' because they demand growth and doing your core competency well will reach a plateau.

      It's aggravating because they inevitably screw up their core competency in the attempt.

    • Holy cow. I had no idea Dropbox was still around? The last time I thought about Dropbox, the Black Eyed Peas were still in the charts.

    • Sadly the only alternative that works like Dropbox (local folder that is a folder) is OneDrive.

      google drive stream is some mounted crap that in macOS brakes pretty much everything.

      iCloud drive is some strange folder somewhere so if you want to directly access it you need to go super deep in some secret folders.

      Honestly, Dropbox works for me, I just ignore all the other stuff they try to push.

      Sync data runs like it run the first time I used it.

    • Agreed--- I think this is what sometimes happens when you try to be "good" at too many things. At the end, its always best to stay focused and improve what you are good at....Juggling multiple balls always leads to trouble....

  • Only thing I use dropbox for is to sync Joplin. To actually visit them with a web browser is a horror I'd sooner avoid.

    • I keep PDFs on there that I use as a reference. I try not to use the apps and instead prefer the web browser. That way my Phone doesn't get bogged down with a background app when all I wanted to do was access rules for a board game, or a manual for a synthesizer.

  • SalesForce should buy DropBox now. SalesForce seriously could become a major competitor for enterprise solutions to MS, Google and IBM.

    • Re:Should merge with SalesForce (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ranton ( 36917 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:29PM (#60939100)

      SalesForce should buy DropBox now. SalesForce seriously could become a major competitor for enterprise solutions to MS, Google and IBM.

      SalesForce would be better off buying Box, whose market cap is a third of DropBox. Box also focuses more on large enterprise customers than DropBox, which was even mentioned in DropBox's own SEC filings. So all around Box seems to make more sense for an acquisition than DropBox.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        All of that is probably true, but I wonder what real value there is here other than the name and the current customer portfolio.

        I am not sure box or dropbox really have any technology salesforce could not replicate in house pretty easily. Dropbox probably has the more recognizable name, box *might* have a slightly better aligned custom portfolio. Reality is if this is a space Salesforce wanted to be in they probably don't need to buy either. They could probably just stand up their own competed better integ

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

          I would say, in my air-chair-quarterback style SalesForce perspective, Microsoft, Google and IBM are my biggest fears in the world. Could Salesforce just clone DropBox? Yes, but the name recognition matters. Just like how they purchased Slack. There is nothing about Slack that they couldn't build themselves in house, but the immediate name recognition matters for locking in customers quickly. The 2020's for them is going to be a hell of a war for the cloud. MS, Google and IBM have all caught up in terms of

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ranton ( 36917 )

          I am not sure box or dropbox really have any technology salesforce could not replicate in house pretty easily.

          IMHO large enterprises acquire companies instead of building themselves so they can gain instant credibility in a new niche. Who is going to assume Salesforce is best in breed in file storage just because they release a new set of features next year? But if they buy Box, they instantly gain all credibility in the marketplace that Box has now. That combined with faster time to market and an existing user base to cross sell to are compelling reasons to acquire.

          And you just removed one competitor as well.

  • Translation: "I have no clue what we're doing, but I sure do love the sound of these buzzwords that I remember from the last report I skimmed over while snorting cocaine of a stripper's tits"

  • Dropped DropBox (Score:3)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @02:19PM (#60939076)
    I ditched DropBox back when they decided to break all the links I made over the many years to my files. I was even a yearly subscriber to their 100GB plan. Learned my lesson there, I will never pay for a service like DropBox again. I host my own files on NAS equipment on site now. It's just too risky putting your hard work into the hands of companies that couldn't give a crap less about you even if paying for the service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WallyL ( 4154209 )
      Agreed. I haven't had that experience, but hearing it reminds me, if something is on my own equipment, it's up to me to support and use, and not anybody else!
  • Dropbox has a global workforce? What would those 315 people do all day?

  • If their prices weren't so outrageous, maybe this wouldn't have happened. They need to be more competitive with Google Drive and iCloud.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by psergiu ( 67614 )

      Yup.
      I'm not paying $240 a year for me & my wife to be able to share some files and a photo library of a few GB.
      I don't need 2 TB. I don't have a internet connection good enough to upload that data in a reasonable amount of time.
      If they offered something like a 50GB plan for $20/year/user/10 devices they would have my money and i'm guessing a lot of other people's money. They used to have such plans, but, greed ...

    • That's the number one reason I switched away from them. They have no nid-tier price level. It is now either really small free or huge and expensive. I used to pay for the plus service to get my 50GB or so for files and photos. Then they changed to a 2TB as the minimum level and upped prices by more than 20%. No thanks. With one sync I can change over to something like OneDrive for half the cost and still have plenty of room to grow.

  • Trying to figure out... (Score:3)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @04:34PM (#60939704)

    Trying to figure out what the major motive force behind this downturn is. In pandemic times, you'd think they'd be doing well along aside all other remote work tools.

    There's a couple of things they're fighting uphill against.

    Number one is Microsoft's now tight integration of its OneDrive services with windows 10, plus apple's iCloud for that small market share. It's 'easy' for casual users to just use what's already there.

    Second is their own 'improvements' which have made the product worse for people who just want file syncing and sharing and nothing else. The application has progressively tried to lead you more and more into using their own tool set which I have no interest in. All I want is seamless file sync in windows explorer. I don't need another UI to deal with. A lot of people here seem to share the same opinion, but we would be in the category of 'power users'. Perhaps that market segment just isn't glamorous and sexy anymore and now everyone's doing it, so Dropbox faces a crowded field full of built in monopolies from OS makers.

    I pay for the DropBox plus tier and I use it quite a lot to access files between my desktop, laptop and phone. It's still fine for that though I'm considering hosting my own when I upgrade my RAID array to a NAS unit. Now that I have reliable synchronous gigabit fiber at home, there is no speed advantage to hosting at a data center. There is a safety advantage in the files being mirrored at a remote location however, in terms of backup.

    The trade off in security is questionable in regards to being hacked on a service versus your own server, which you have to make sure and patch and keep up to date. Usually a service will win out in that regard despite recent high profile intrusions.
    a
    If they keep making the desktop software more and more annoying, it's a good reason to go find something else. What they need is 'DropBox light' which has the basic core file sharing functionality and nothing else. Messenger Lite for Facebook is a good example to follow.

  • I had no idea. I was sure they vanished over 5 years ago. I don't know the origin of dropbox but it always smelled like an academic who got funding and then made something where the tech chosen was more important than it working well and the actual needs of the customers are ignored in favour of theoretical benefits.

  • When DropBox raised its price I bailed, but I wanted a way to do off-site backup that would let me switch vendors more easily next time. I discovered rclone: https://rclone.org/ [rclone.org] . I have my own backup procedure which uses tar, gpg, split and rclone to create a set of encrypted files from a project and then upload them. I use several small files because restarting an upload is on file boundaries. The only other downside I can see is that Rclone is written in Go, but I can live with that.

    From the web sit

  • Dropbox should quit trying to develop new products. We're not interested in hearing ads and begs from our storage provider.

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