9mo ago

Dropbox lays off 20% of staff, says it overinvested and underperformed

arstechnica.com

22 comments

Q3 2024 earnings report drops
record profits
CEO gets fat raise
- Don't forget, from 2014 to 2021, they had George W Bush's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on their board of directors.
  
  As soon as I read that, years ago, I thought "Well Dropbox. That was a very poor choice."
  I haven't considered it since.
  "You can use it with Dropbox!" they say.
  Yeah, nah.
Fuck DropBox. They've always promoted bait and switch plans and implied functionality that doesn't exist unless you upgrade to a higher tier. They were deceptive as fuck to consumers for years and stole an unknowable amount from the public with their shady marketing lies.
I hope DropBox sinks to the bottom of the deepest ocean. All they had to do was be honest with consumers about offering something solid, but they still just can't bring themselves to tell the truth about a single plan they offer. Shady motherfuckers.
Edit: Fuck Google and Microsoft as well. Sync.com has been cheaper, more honest and more reliable than any of these lying megacorp dickheads.
- Wow, Sync seems almost too good to be true, as they are significantly less expensive. Have you experience with it? Are there any drawbacks? Slow speeds or bad integration into Windows Explorer?
  
  I have been using Sync for a few years now. When I first started, there were a couple weird issues. When I reported the issues, they responded immediately and actually fixed them. I have zero complaints about them so far. I don't use Windows Explorer so I can't comment on that.
We continue to see softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business
Maybe if you didn't raise your prices to finance dumb investments, the demand for your core business wouldn't falter.
If anything I think people's poor economy is forcing them to get rid of luxuries like Dropbox, and the way for Dropbox to stay relevant is to let prices follow the economy of their customers down.
Why does dropbox exist. For the same money Microsoft offers equal storage, plus office.
- Dropbox had the first mover advantage. Onedrive lagged behind it for years. You can argue it still does.
  
  OneDrive is so fucking confusing to administrator.
  The files exist on your physical drive ...except it doesn't?
  You can't remove the files....except when it does it on its own.
  You can't move a file without some sort of synching issue.
  You can't fucking disable it without going into the registry!
  I legit tried it in the early days of Win10 and it was a nightmare. I literally had to reinstall Windows and disable it upfront before things worked the way I expected.
  
  Fair point. Still their proposition is underwhelming imho.
- One advantage of Dropbox is that it is not that integrated into Windows/office.
  I use Dropbox, albeit I have an old free account with much more storage than their 2GB base.
  
  I have 20 gigs free from when they had free permanent storage upgrades by referrals. I referred a bunch of "friends" with temporary email and virtual machines since it checked it wasn't just being in stalled on an existing machine.
  This was over a decade ago and it's still the highest storage free tier.
  
  What do you mean? Dropbox is integrated into Windows using the Cloud Files API, which handles dynamically downloading files as needed, the ability to mark files so they're always available offline, etc.
  Or did you mean a deeper integration like how Windows shows ads for OneDrive?
- For the same money Microsoft offers equal storage, plus office.
  Plus email! Same with Google (Google Workspace).
- It's good to have competition. Dropbox has to rethink their plan if they want to keep existing
  
  Yes!
- I always wondered this too. It was a good idea 15 years ago. But, they don’t offer enough to justify the price. Literally everyone offers cloud storage now and a million other features too.

22 comments