Dropbox basically decimates workforce, COO logs off: Cloud biz promises to be 'more efficient and nimble' Dropbox is close to decimating its workforce, firing 11 per cent of staff in an effort to become “a more efficient and nimble” company, its CEO announced on Wednesday. In a blog post, Drew Houston said the decision to sack 315 workers was “one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make in my 14 years as CEO,” and that he was “ …
Decimate - As frequently actioned by IBM Management on the workforce
(Posted 3 days ago...)
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/01/08/something_for_the_weekend/#c_4183626
Also technically decimation in the Roman Legions meant the other 9 co-workers beating the 10th to death. It wasn't a simple execution. It was murdering someone who'd perhaps spent a decade living beside, it was collective punishment, not just for the person with the short stick..
89% of Dropbox's workforce will be largely untouched by these changes.. except IT who will obviously be expected to pick up "the slack" with fewer resources.
In recent years, Dropbox has tried to move itself from a biz that simply provides cloud storage for companies to one that they use for online collaboration.
I don't want all this bollocks, I just want to synchronise, backup and sometimes share some files. If Dropbox continue to lose this focus then people will just move away.
On the other hand for business they have a plethora of options most of which bundle in other capabilities into neat little package ie google apps or microsoft 365. Whilst there are some that might just want a cloud drive and the ability to share files most organisations seem to want more than that and currently the big drive in organisations is for convergence of services instead of having 100 different providers and having to manage multiple contracts and having to somehow integrate hundreds of apps they can goto a handful of vendors.
But don't expect users who aren't interested in all that bollox to fund you while you do it by automatically doubling their annual fee by increasing their storage quota when they aren't even close to needing it.
Also, maybe, if you must come up with bollox, maker sure it's useful bollox that people want... Instead of a web browser in a file syncing app. We already have plenty of web browsers.
Exaxtly.
And when they decided to drop Linux users unless they use an outdated filesystem, it didn't even do that anymore.
They could have just ceased "official support" for other filesystems. But no, they decided to make their software try to force Linux users to migrate their filesystem. To me as a paid customer, that was aggressive, pig-headed and rude.
So Rather than migrate backwards from Btrfs to Ext4, I migrated from paid Dropbox to FOSS Syncthing, and never looked back.
Exactly, even.
What has been missing from their strategy for a long time has been the stepped upgrade path. A few gigs free is handy but the SOHO user, who vastly outnumbers the corporate, wants neither in-your-face adware and reminders of what they are not paying for, nor excessive annual fees and UI complexity of the "WTF did I do just then?" variety. What is needed is an intermediate user level offering ad/nag-free storage up to half-decent levels for maybe $5-10 per gig per year.
Then, the influencers on any corporate buy are more likely than ever to be Linux fans and use it at home if not for work. Dropping support was massively short-sighted and has lost a generation of Dropbox advocates.
Oh, and requiring cross-site javascript just to frickin' log on via the web is particularly mental for anybody who aspires to "secure" services. For the little guy at their remote desk it's about privacy, for the big corporate itself it's about MITM/injection/yadda yadda.
Dropping support was massively short-sighted and has lost a generation of Dropbox advocates.
They would be so lucky as only losing that generation, they turned them completely to advocate against Dropbox.
Oh, and requiring cross-site javascript just to frickin' log on via the web is particularly mental for anybody who aspires to "secure" services. For the little guy at their remote desk it's about privacy, for the big corporate itself it's about MITM/injection/yadda yadda.
Another truly stupid move pissing off another set of advocates (though there is overlap).
This is my problem too, value.
Dropbox just can't seem to compete with alternatives and rather than realising it's the root cost that's the issue they think throwing useless fluff on top will tempt me. Not going to happen.
I just want the basics, so why can't I have somewhere to backup to cheaply on their service and pay for what I use, rather than what they want to sell me? That's fundamentally the issue - value for money, it's better elsewhere.
And they have the oddest packages. Smallest and cheapest I can get is 2TB for €9.99/month if I pay yearly. How about 100GB package for €1.99/month, because frankly, that is all I need.
My photos are at Google already, my documents and backups are at OneDrive - but since a lot of my family seems to like simplicity of Dropbox and its sharing, I would happily pay a bit for them. But not €120 for service and size that I don't need.
TL,DR: offer useful package size and don't try to be anything but online storage.
Despite already being uncompetitive, they increased the storage allowance at the bottom rung in a mad attempt to increase apparent value. When many were using way less than their existing allowance. And applied a considerable increase in price charged.
So they lost me. Yet I still use their "free" option for convenience. (Lots of people had links to some files on Dropbox. Easier to allow that to continue than to try to force them all to change.)
I dumped them a while back since they counted files shared with you against your quota. I'm not sure what their policy is now but I doubt they are offering anything compelling enough to make me give them another try. If they offered e2e encryption with a client supported by my NAS then that would be a different story.
Sure... I gave up when I could no longer sync files that synced fine months prior. I didn't even use it much, I synced once about every 3 months. They claimed nothing changed, but once files start timing out in queue places where they once didn't, they just can't state nothing has changed... unless... they want me to believe I'm stupid and it's user error by not understanding how to use my own device and I should go find a Apple/BestBuy agent to help poor little me... that's the feeling I got.
Or does anyone else think Dropbox is the most anal, complicated and pointless way of sharing anything? I have several clients who insist on using it, and I have not, in like 3 years or more, figured out how it works, or how to organise things. Each time I start it I seem to end up in a different view, the lack of "buttons" on the inconsistent interface to actually do anything is appalling. I have no idea which clients can upload or download to where. If I download more than a couple of files I cannot download anymore without logging out and back in again.
The people I have discussed it with all seem to have the same opinion that it is a pile of steaming dog turd, and that running an FTP server 25 years ago was better organised and more logical.
I can only imagine the whole concept was dreamed up by 6 year olds with no clue about computing to share cat videos with other 6 year olds.
I will not miss them one little bit when they go under.
Yep, it confuses the hell out of me.
Worse, it doesn't just act as a repository, it seems to want to peek into files. We were using it to pass around a moby (~50MB) Excel spreadsheet. Rather than just let me download it, it insisted on trying to open it internally and create some kind of Javascript display of its output. Which, being moby, basically croaked the browser and didn't make the computer itself happy at all. And it thus failed at its one simple real task. I had my collaborator turn it into a ZIP file or rename it something like .docxno just so that Dropbox wouldn't try to open it.
"I can only imagine the whole concept was dreamed up by 6 year olds with no clue about computing to share cat videos with other 6 year olds."
Not so many years ago Dropbox actually worked very well indeed. I'd guess that was because it was still mainly a company run by people who knew what they were doing (i.e. not marketers, managers or financial "wizards")
In the past four or five years maybe everything has changed - forcing the use of one particular filesystem on Linux was the screaming siren that told me the company really was on the way out.
Another thing was the way they treated resellers (including me) outside the US - we ended up being fobbed off onto Ingram Micro and from there on it has been one long sorry mess of random invoices for random amounts and total loss of clarity on access to customer Dropbox accounts.
I don't it's great for one-off sharing but for friends and family it's pretty good: just set up the right folders and forget about it. A bigger PITA was the restriction in the number of clients.
Fortunately, because I got Dropbox early and Samsung did a deal with them, I've got a free account that is big enough to be useful. The paid tier is far too much to be interesting and also carries the risk of lock in.
Their software is a nightmare, particularly the Linux client. We are pretty heavy users of their business subscription, and when Dropbox decides to have an arbitrary meltdown, it sometimes takes literally /days/ to re-index the 200,000 or so files in our repository. It clearly cannot cope with what it's designed to do - after all, we're using less than 10% of our total space allocation!
So the vaccinated then become transmission vectors to pass the virus to their unvaccinated friends and family? Nice.
There have already been public statements that being vaccinated does not appear to prevent transmission, it merely significantly lowers the risk of becoming infected, and of serious problems from infection.
Even if such a policy were enacted, here in the UK that still means waiting around 12 weeks for the second jab, then another few weeks for that to fully take effect. Vaccination is not the quick and easy solution it might seem, even for those who've already had their first jab.
Also consider that most shops, offices, factories, entertainment, hospitality etc. won't have enough staff to open safely, or at all, for at least several months, due to vacine rollout phases. So even though people who're fully vaccinated might be able to safely use retail, hospitality etc, there won't be anything open for them to use.
His company Megaupload was shut down with prejudice by the authorities, and many customers who relied on the service simply lost all their data.
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Just work out how it takes to RECOVER terabytes (petabytes) across the network if you think your "cloud" provider might shut up shop without warning.
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Makes "on premises" and Iron Mountain backups sound pretty attractive, doesn't it?
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What am I missing here?
I used to pay them money, but they kept offering a new tier of service about once a year and, silently, donwgrading the performance of the lower tiers - not just the extra storage or features of the new ones. Number of API calls per second / hour / day etc. and their support just pretended that there was no changes. I stopped paying them money and instead just use an S3 bucket (yes, protected) with rclone for out-of-home backup with another on Backblaze. The cost works out a little higher but both of those publish their performance commitments.
Oh diddums. Don't you love it when a guy at the top tries to reframe the ruining of people's lives as all being about him? British prime ministers do this a lot too: "I struggled with this decision for ages and now I'm jolly upset about it; think about me me me me me me and my pouty lip, not about those I am casting into the pit of mid-recession unemployment."
It would help if they could just advertise their prices properly.
I went to dropbox.com which showed the Individual-Professional plan as 19.99GBP. Ouch! That's hardly cheap. There are some cheaper (per user) Team accounts but they have minimum of 3 users. These are Team-Standard and Team-Advanced.
I thought "I'm sure it's cheaper than that" cos I have friends who use Dropbox and no way they pay £20 a month. So I clicked the "Plans & Pricing" link to https://www.dropbox.com/plans
Now there are the three plans I saw before and a lower Individual-Plus account at £8.99. Most people would have left before finding this price!
Oddly, the other prices are all different than the previous page. They look like the same prices without VAT but it doesn't say. I hope that £8.99 is including VAT.
Given the business focus I thought I'd try a private window. The opposite of my expectation happens - it becomes even more businessy. The same homepage URL now says it is "Dropbox Business" and the price link is now called "Compare plans" linking to: https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
This has Individual-Professional, Team-Standard, Team-Advanced, and, here's another plan, Team-Enterprise.
How the hell is anyone supposed to navigate this crap?
Why do companies seem to want to diversify their product into so many different areas? Teamviewer is another one, I don't want to use them for video conferencing, just to remotely log onto other PCs. Same as Dropbox, all I want to do is synch files over multiple computers and servers. If I want to share a spreadsheet with somebody. I'll use Office 365 or Google.
Why diversify? Likely because they feel that they have to in order try to remain vaguely relevant and to have a business in five years time. Certain monopolies have moved into their space and are actively pushing them out. For example, Windows could have come with a file sync/remote storage API allowing users or administrators to deploy the solution of their choice equally, however instead Microsoft embedded support for OneDrive in at a low level and made it much harder for competing applications to provide anything similar.
DropBox changed their free tier to limit it to just three devices allowed to connect, and advised me to move to a pay tier. I killed all but two connections, and removed all items from my DB folders. Now I use DB strictly as a way to move items onto the iPad (Marvin, the ebook reader I use in preference to Apple’s ebook reader, because it’s less annoying, grabs books from DB; I put an EPUB into DB, import it into Marvin, remove it from DB) and not a bloody thing else. No, I’m not paying them a bloody penny. Yes, I’m on to the Marvin devs about putting in support for OneDrive or iCloud.
All I ever needed was to share files with various people and to get pictures from my phone to my PC as I took them. DB was ideal for that (and still is). But their interface sucks and I am very limited in what I can upload and the picture syncing is so flaky it's untrue.
Now I have my NAS Synology boxes with terabytes of free space and can do everything for me. Shame, DB was brilliant in the early days, but it's been overtaken.
One of my things is photography. On the discussion boards within my genre there is often talk about services to deliver images to the client. Nobody seems to believe me when I write that if they have a proper hosting service, they have FTP space they can use to deliver jobs. I think it looks better when I can send customers a link that from my own URL. It's also easy. I just upload the file(s) to my FTP space and send the customer a link they can click to download the photos. How simple is that? The best thing is that it costs me nothing extra for that. If I were to get really busy, I might need to bump my plan, but that would be far cheaper than subscribing to DropBox or any other dedicated service. I also keep my portfolio and some other documents available in case I need them, forms and such. I have several portfolios that I can send a link for so a customer or potential customer can just download the whole thing to review later rather than having to be online to see them.
Another aspect is that I control the data. I'm not uploading to a server that's a big fat target. I'm not all that worried about my work or any file that I have online getting me in trouble, but there could be a day when there is. I do have images (not nudies) that I have never released and may never release of a traumatic nature from my journalism files. It's all been registered with the copyright office, but a leak may not point to somebody that can be sued. I can't trust AWS, M$ or any other service to take care of those images. They don't care.
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