Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff
blog.dropbox.com> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more.
Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.
> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox
snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge.
It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product.
To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep insight about AI that, say, a software engineer who has worked in that field might have.
But hey, if in a few years Dropbox launches a popular AI-based feature I'll gladly eat my words because I'll probably be using it. They could benefit from enhancing their search functionality, for example -- but that's just a nice-to-have feature, not something revolutionary.
I'll add my 2c because I'm getting a little annoyed that folks who only have familiarity with Dropbox's consumer offering seem to think they have any idea what they're talking about.
In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in particular excels at sharing documents with others outside your company, but that is also where there is obviously the most risk.
Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use. There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. It's not hard for me to see how AI tools could help improve this situation, and especially to provide additional capabilities in the DLP (data loss prevention) space that would make it easier to detect misconfigured access.
> There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox.
This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.
> This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.
Yeah, last thing I want when trying to share a file with people outside of my organization is some opaque kafkaesque chatgpt-wannabe model telling me "I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that".
The AI doesn't need to be the end-all-be-all of defining permissions. But it's not hard to imagine a couple of areas where AI could help:
1. Letting users enter desired permissions setting in a natural language, and then the AI recommending checkbox settings, and, importantly, explaining these settings.
2. Useful as a monitoring/alerting system for DLP. Most DLP systems already use some sort of machine learning for identifying sensitive docs.
3. Easily running "test scenarios" to show to admins who can and can't get access to particular docs.
There is a huge chasm between "AI owns all my permission settings" to "AI can make it easier and more robust for me to understand what my permission settings should be."
There is a reason permissions are not defined in natural language. Language is imprecise and that is why security is so hard to get right
"I'm 99% certain that you're a poodle, and poodles are not allowed to share that document. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
Needing strong AI to manage permissions on a file sharing program sounds like something out of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like the sentient AI stuck operating an elevator.
Have you used Box? Dropbox offers editor and view levels with some additional options to add a password, set an expiration, download or not while Box is over here with 7 different sharing levels. I've managed Box environments and I've managed Dropbox ones and the amount of data leakage coming out of the Box environments was not only more often but much grander on scale because people kept picking the wrong level of access.
How does AI tooling help with that? "The AI tool said I could grant this user access this way" is not something that would pass compliance.
I wonder what the compliance process would think of the telemetry that is adding stuff back to Dropbox and can’t be turned off.
> Dropbox in particular excels at sharing documents with others outside your company, but that is also where there is obviously the most risk.
> Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use.
These two sentences were one after the other. So which way is it?
Dropbox can be at the same time the best solution and nevertheless hard to use, if the other solutions are less powerful or more confusing.
You are exactly right. And to address the concerns about errors made by the machine, we are not looking in my organization to have the machine automatically make decisions on things like access. It would ideally warn us when we've likely done or are about to do something wrong. An auditing tool at least.
There are many good use cases for AI, however, permissions is not one of them. The current gen AI makes things up and would likely give a member of the cleaning staff super admin to allow them to clean the data.
People aren't arguing that AI alone makes all the permissions decisions. It's not hard to see a big leap from DLP solutions, which currently already make copious use of machine learning, to permissions auditing, monitoring and recommendations in the first place.
> look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product
That’s only because it failed (and the jury is still out on that). If it works they’ll conquer an entirely new market right from the start.
Certainly a much better long term strategy than hoping they can keep up their advertising revenue.
It won't! That's the most galling aspect of this gigantic waste of money. That you're calling it a "new market" is precisely the problem --- when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back.
The "metaverse" is ironically set up to be Facebook's walled garden. It has no other use, it cannot be repurposed or made modular in any way. It's not a standalone product that say, integrates with Google Ads, something that they could try to offload to some other company.
It's Zuck's baby, and in the middle of slow and protracted crib death.
The metaverse is their shot at the next OS (or platform, but that's too vague). He who controls the OS controls everything (Apple for their specific desktops, Microsoft for every other desktop and laptop, Apple and Google for mobile, Google for the web - yes, the web is for all intents and purposes another platform/OS).
Facebook has their own platform but it's built on top of others so it can be choked off. Facebook wants its own OS.
>when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back.
The last 15 years of tech says otherwise. Tesla is the most obvious counterpoint to this example. I don't think the Metaverse is useful, but my issue with Facebook isn't that he poured 30B into what was essentially R&D.
Tesla is an automotive company whose finances and stock valuation work on very different principles compared to an ad company like Facebook.
if it were actually valued as an automotive company, it wouldn't have anywhere close to its current valuation
Or Amazon.
> If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product.
That's just your hindsight bias. Lot of companies have spent billions of dollars chasing apparently worthless product ideas. Some of them turned out to be big hits - electric car in 2009, social media based on 140 characters posting limit, online bookstore, a website to check out pics of your classmates and poke them etc.
I like the fact that Facebook was audacious enough to spend 40B dollars on trying out something new. If successful, it would have opened up a huge new field for tinkering, just like the wave of social media companies in 2009-10.
I’m genuinely surprised/impressed both Box and Dropbox still exist since they’re single-product-line pure plays, for enterprise only (no way do enough consumers pay for either to matter), and both are competing with what is either free or very cheap to bundle alternatives from MS and GOOG (and what company doesn’t have either 365 or G Suite already?? I know Dropbox tried to make its own office suite a few years back but I’ve never heard of anyone using it. So, it’s a testament to some amazing sales guys that they’re even alive.
Seriously it’s embarrassing how leadership in many companies has ZERO vision for AI right now. Too focused on buying houses, drinking wine and riding horses. I think these people need to retire already.
Snark aside, this is something that's always kind of baffled me.
If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach.
Why anybody would want to continue to work when they already have enough wealth to live an extremely lavish lifestyle without working ever again is beyond me.
Re: extremely lavish
Is probably extremely boring - I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me
How long would I be able to sit on Maui sipping Mai-Tais? Getting massages, ... and more ... whatever I want, whenever I want it ... that is a curse actually.
Surrounded by fake people everyone wanting a piece of the wealth trickle down to them.
On a personal experience, I was a lot happier when I bought my first house, a rundown estate that was the cheapest on the street that then I had to work to improve upon it, ended up replacing most inside and out, some parts I learned to do myself - I ended up remodeling it piecemeal but so, so satisfying
My second house is very respectable, newer, larger, technically incomparably better, it is not even the same ballpark ... yet my new house never provided me with the same joy.
Be careful what you wish for.
> I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me.
I'm fairly sure that there are many people like this out there, but for others that just... isn't a problem?
Personally, I quit my last job because I felt like I need to learn some new technology, work on a few personal projects, write blog posts and so on. Since, I've done a little of the above (in addition to improving the security of my homelab and running my own CA), but also took a month off to just enjoy watching videos, reading articles, playing video games, as well as do physical labor around the farm.
And frankly, everything feels enjoyable so far - both intellectually stimulating tasks, physically intensive labor like cutting trees and chopping firewood, as well as passively consuming content, or even zoning out a bit occasionally and having a slow day. Though I can't comment on how long each of those would be satisfying for, that also depends on the person.
I can easily imagine someone enjoying a lavish and relaxed lifestyle and never getting tired of it, though.
Unfortunately I think the answer to "why keep working if you're already rich beyond the dreams of avarice" is "because it means you can keep being ultra-rich and powerful and famous". All your material desires will be met regardless, but you won't get to feel as important if you stop working.
Because no matter how many experiences you accrue or how much leisure you have, you're already dead on the geologic time scale.
With that perspective, the best thing to do is keep on pushing. Despite whatever pain and headache that might bring, it's one act our short lives can use to push against entropy and the dying universe.
If I ever come into such wealth, I'll spend it all solving as much as I can through my direct involvement.
Yeah.. but do you think most ultra-rich elite are pushing against entropy or contributing more to it or at best staying neutral while further growing their wealth?
By actively working to make the world worse and increase the sum total of human suffering, à la Musk and Bezos?
If I ever came into such wealth, I think I'd spend my time going back to college to study linguistics. Maybe document some dying languages. Try to contribute to humanity a bit.
This is what always frustrated me about people like Steve Jobs. Don't you like, ever enjoy stuff?
Oh he very much enjoyed pestering his employees.
It’s just because you don’t here about all the wealthy people who already quietly did that.
>That would be it. I won capitalism.
Pet hypothesis: A lot of us say that, not being in the position to. But when you finally exit the working class and are no longer required to work, people tend to work on passion projects instead. Sitting on the beach gets boring after a while.
A passion project I completely understand. What I don’t understand is what the vast majority of wealthy CEOs are doing: let’s get 5% more people to view our ads, let’s get people to spend 10% more on cheap disposable crap etc…
> If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach.
There is strong correlation between people who find themselves in 9 figures (outside of inheritance) and people who have completely opposite worldview from yours. If you make money to retire to Maui, you will take the first off ramp which allows you to do it which is way before you get into 9 figures.
Having an executive job confers high status. Being retired does not.
Wouldn't want to be Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer, Jack Welch, or Howard Schultz.
> the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing
Literally every company. That doesn't mean that a strategy doesn't exist and is actively curated and maintained by people whose full-time job it is to do so. It's always an educated guess at best. But it's pretty silly to come into a thread like this and be like "psh they store files what could they possibly do with AI".
I think Dropbox is, like a lot of companies right now, is struggling to find new revenue with new features added to their existing product lines and is divesting themselves of new work on mature products to focus on new markets. AI just being something exciting in general that has everyone hyped.
I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.
You had me until that last sentence. I have no idea what you're referring to with Wi-Fi.
The fact that Dropbox likely is going to stop constantly messing with their core offerings.
add in an equivalent to https://www.glean.com/ to enterprise dropbox and you have a new AI product that actually solves large org problems
Use-case: ask anything you want about files stored in your Dropbox account (like https://chatpdf.com but for more files)
> But hey, if in a few years Dropbox launches a popular AI-based feature
Ooh betting on a failure? That is the easiest bet ever. If I bet on everything failing, I would win 99% of the time.
I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI.
However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, but good enough), I can see AI replicating if not even augmenting such functionalities.
> we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT
I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.
Well Meta tried to make its own crypto currency on the block chain.
And they pivoted from that to instagram NFTs, which also failed.
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/introducing-digital-collec...
"tried to pivot", that's very different. Maybe it should read "announcing that they would try to pivot", but you get the idea.
I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.
"Dipped their feet" might've been better description.
"Made some BS PR headlines, while not even having a clue how to do anything with those things, and surely not anything worth their customer's while" is an ever better description.
Which shouldn't surprise anyone in an economic environment where the money fountain dried up. Every company is desperately chasing new revenue sources over growing their existing ones right now.
In case of NFT, I would round the number of companies that tried to pivot to it to zero.
Blockchain there were a lot of hiring and experiments for sure. Actually to try to pivot a company to it after these experiments, very little.
I believe all of these are either dead or almost dead:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2023/01/04/square...
https://decrypt.co/121872/ubisoft-rabbids-nfts-sandbox
https://vanguard-x.com/blockchain/nfts-are-coming-to-youtube...
Eh, I worked for a video analytics startup in 2016 and we had investors (and a CEO) who were desperately pushing to do stuff with AI because everyone was doing stuff with AI. Needless to say, the startup ended up alienating their customers and eventually failed and “exited” for a five figure sum.
The current “wave” of AI and deep learning and whatnot has been going on for almost a decade, longer than blockchain and definitely longer than NFTs if you ask me. Not saying that it’s not overhyped, but it’s definitely not a new hype.
"AI" (or whatever you want to call it) is real. I'm still on the fence around whether LLMs are as transformative--at least over the next few years--as some people think they are. But they're useful even in their current state.
I also had a batch of photos to process from an event and updated my Lightroom. The new Denoise did a really nice job with these relatively noisy/highish ISO pics. And the Adaptive preset to punch up the subject (speakers at an event) was pretty nice too.
Not game changing IMO but a nice workflow addition.
NFTs on the other hand always felt like beanie babies. Blockchain in the enterprise distributed ledger sense felt like it had some potential use cases although I was always pretty skeptical which seems to have been justified.
My take is that there has been an ongoing "AI/ML" hype cycle, but this latest craze is a more specific LLM hype. I expect to see a chatbot that can help you derive insights from everything you've uploaded.
For Dropbox, I predict that this will go exactly the way Dropbox Paper went.
The new hype is generative AI, sparked by image generators like Midjourney and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
I'm pretty sure Google is already using plenty of "AI" behind these functionalities. Heck, image classification was the very beginning of the current "AI summer" a dozen years ago!
Not nearly everything in AI is ChatGPT, not quite all is NLP for that matter, there's still plenty of interesting things which are improving. Dropbox might well be pivoting to improve their e.g. photo/video offering with AI, but they might as well have started that 5 years ago.
Blockchain and NFT brings no real value to most people.
My non techie wife and all her friends love ChatGPT and use it daily. My kids friends use it to do all their homework. Which is pissing off my kids as I won’t let them use it.
Good to know some parents still care and make an effort. I realy dread the day all new juniors comming from uni will be AI/chatgpt users and lack in a lot of other important areas.
They key to success will be AI driven block chain with machine learning crypto.
Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it.
LLMs do. Guess we'll see if it's really flexible enough to fit into a lot of business models, but it's not exactly the same thing.
I don't see it as the wildest thing that say, a corp using cloud storage might want an LLM trained on all their documents so instead of searching for where X employee who left the company 3 years ago stored some information that was on page 9 of a document from 2017, you just ask the model and it pulls the info and links you to the source doc.
> Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it. LLMs do.
Well Blockchain promised a lot. I remember that in the beginning, I found it interesting and thought it would be the next big thing. Now we have had more than a decade to realize that Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies (and it's not clear if we want cryptocurrencies).
So yeah, I could totally imagine that many promises of LLMs today are similar to those of Blockchain back then. Let's see how it evolves in the next few years, I guess.
Bitcoin as "digital gold" that's easier to procure, store, move around, and split into pieces is clearly a "killer app". Gold has intrinsic value but it's market cap far exceeds that - it requires a "shared delusion" to accept that it's a store of value. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin as a store of value has society wide acceptance but 1T market cap is still very significant. I keep reading on hacker news that crypto bros lost all their money in the bubble that's now over, but the bitcoin I bought just 2 years ago is still way up. The real losers were the tech stocks I bought - maybe paying engineers 500k a year was the real bubble?
Then again, never try to convince someone of something when their salary depends on believing otherwise.
Uniswap likewise has billions in daily volume. Again, that's significant. I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can see a piece of technology that enables something completely brand new - decentralized market making - getting used daily to move billions of dollars around and say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Maybe you think there's no killer app because you hang out on upvote-centric site like hacker news and reddit where people downvote the hell out of things that contradict their narrative. Hacker news is a groupthink bubble.
There's many other examples. Look at how often people brought up energy usage and GPU shortages when NFTs get brought up. Then look how often it gets brought up when LLMs get brought up. It's night and day. None of these people cared about the environment. They didn't like crypto so it was a talking point against it - that's it. Because now, ETH is on proof of stake but everyone and their dog are buying 4090s so they can make waifus with Stable Diffusion. And all those "you're melting the planet people!" are conspicuously quiet.
What exactly is the killer app of LLM? A bunch of writing tools for SEO spam? Does anyone seriously read what ChatGPT writes and think this thing could do real literature or journalism? Everybody wants to use AI to write, nobody wants to read what AI writes. The only real "killer app" I'll give it is Github copilot. Most everything else is froth.
When NFTs were trendy, I read constantly on here they were beanie babies, that they were naming a star, whatever. You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work. Go read Grammy award winnner RAC's twitter - he addresses people saying he "scammed" people by @ mentioning those he sold NFTs to and asking if they feel scammed. Fans of his bought the NFTs so they had a digital collectible representing his album, he got money to make art.
When Babe Ruth signs a baseball, it's still just a dingy baseball, but it has emotional significance to people. NFTs were the digital equivalent of that. I'm not surprised techies that have no art in their lives struggle to wrap their head around that.
But what is disappointing is that now Stable Diffusion takes a bunch of art that real humans tirelessly made, uses some neural net to rejigger it, and tech bros will die in the trenches making sure we legitimaze this quasi-plagriasm. For all the talks of NFTs being scams and generative AI being substance, I see one technology that incentivized real humans to make real art and another technology that does the opposite, takes money out of artists pockets so people can use algorithms to lift their style.
I'm not trying to oversimplify these topics but it gets tiresome reading the exact same tired talking points about generative AI being substantive and web3 being all scams when there's strong arguments indicating otherwise. It's just impossible to read them when on sites like these they get faded out because you're not allowed to have divergent opinions without a bunch of defensive dorks downvoting you into oblivion.
There's one last important point I want to make. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News and especially mainstream media are unduly influenced by big corporations. True blockchain use cases give power back to the individual. Sure, there's plenty of VC pump and dump shitcoins in crypto such as Solana and NEAR but the long term real utility is about the individual. Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations, the same massive corporations that can influence the media you read. If a journalist wants to write an article about crypto energy usage, they'll write it. If they want to write about LLM energy usage, you have some of the richest, most powerful people in the world with some of the premier PR firms in the world who can influence that journalist and that publication in all sorts of ways. So critical stories about AI are more likely to get buried than critical stories about crypto. Keep that in mind.
To me, the biggest difference between the AI hype and the crypto hype is that crypto had the skeptics and the critics in the room - as it should. But AI is badly, badly lacking those skeptics and critics.
I saw far far more artists hating NFTs than loving them.
And the idea that an NFT has any "emotional resonance" is just weird.
Disclaimer: I think that we should not use blockchain (here we disagree), and I am not a big fan of generative AI (I think we kind of agree here).
> I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can [...] say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies that was not solved better before. But that leaves this one thing: cryptocurrencies; blockchains does enable cryptocurrencies in a way that was not possible before.
The problem I have with cryptocurrencies is that I don't want them. That's not a technical argument, that's more a preference of what I believe society should do.
So there is not nothing, but web3 is bullshit IMHO.
> You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work.
Well, it's hard not to be excited by something that you don't really understand but that may bring you money. Doesn't mean NFTs are desirable. BTW you talk about them in the past, so somehow you do realize that apparently they were not desirable enough to survive, right?
> Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations
I totally agree with that. I don't want Big Data to steal my data, use it to train models, and sell that back to me. I wish there would be a way to account for copyright and licensing in a decent manner, but I fear that the rich will win (that's capitalism, right?).
Just as much as I believe that Bitcoin made more harm than good, I believe that generative AIs have the potential to make more harm than good. The problem is that companies don't think about whether they should do something - only whether it is profitable. And people typically love to not think about it and just happily try and support all those cool techs.
You should call yourself lucky - I search in my Google Photos for something generic like "sunset" and I get 2 pictures if I'm lucky. No idea why... :(
Try "sunrise" instead.
Maybe you need to keep objects centered when you take pictures :)
Yes, but Dropbox Photos still:
It's difficult for auto-tagging to add value in the presence of unrelated dealbreakers. Laying off people working on unsexy features does not inspire confidence that they have these priorities in order.Lacks an exclusion mechanism, so icons leak in Includes STL files as photos and fails to display them Sometimes misses photos for no obvious reason> Laying off people working on unsexy features
You guys are reading way, way too much into this press release.
People here are acting they've abandoned their existing product and is betting the company on AI, when it could just as easily just be what every single major company has said recently ("we're exploring AI").
Also maybe it sounds better to say "we are restructuring to move to the next cool thing" than saying "we are laying off because... you know... things aren't going that great right now"?
What generates 80% of the revenue usually comes from 20% of the customers. What I’m trying to say is that those 20% DGAF about Dropbox photos.
This isn't about photos, it's about walking before you run and Dropbox failing to walk, firing their physical therapist, and talking up their big plans to hire a running coach.
> Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge.
I worked at a similarly sized company to Dropbox, and when I questioned product decisions I would often receive similarly smug put downs. How could you possibly think you know more than the CEO?
And then I watched over the next few years as the product strategy floundered, reorging many times without shipping anything concrete.
I suppose what I’m saying is that while your comment shuts down conversation quite effectively, it can still be wrong. Sometimes - quite frequently, in fact! - there is no man behind the curtain. Sometimes, when product decisions seem questionable, they really are questionable.
(Sorry if I have an annoyed tone; I think I'm subconsciously venting against all the times I've heard this from others in the past.)
The difference is that you worked there. You knew the company. You knew the industry. You knew what the actual current strategy was!
This is just some rando internet person making reductive statements about a company whose current offerings they are unaware of and future product roadmap they have never seen.
>snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge.
Snark incoming. Imaging a society so shitty that you have to try to "understand the product strategy for a 14 year old publicly traded company"
That is, one society in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold.
> in which companies dont go about their business, aiming for sustainable growth and a healthy profit, but pivot to whatever unrelated technology (or, more often, bullshit fad) comes next, to prop their stock or to increase their valuation when they're sold.
Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society.
"The future is now old man."
>Meh. You could've said the same thing about companies leveraging dot-com, or going mobile first. All these were a net gain for investors and society.
You'd be surprised.
>"The future is now old man."
Well, September 4, 476 AD was also "the future" of much better pasts for Romans.
I don't really understand what you are saying. That companies shouldn't have product roadmaps? That product roadmaps are mutually exclusive to sustainable growth or healthy profit? That companies using new tech are only doing so to prop up stock prices?
Something else?
What I'm saying is obvious:
1. that companies should have specific product areas and focus, and not pivot all over the place, as mere profit-seeking machines.
2. that companies embrace all kinds of BS trends, hyped technologies, and empty vacuum BS solutions looking for a problem (from NFT, web3, metaverse, blockchain)
3. that companies (as in this case) also embrace valid technologies (like LLMs) that have no real application to their products, and will just retrofit them in some ugly BS way nobody asked for, just to send the signal "we're still cool, we're getting on the next bandwaggon, buy our stock"
4. that the current behavior (actually, for decades now) is not about "sustainable growth and healthy profit" but about stock market games, and about endless unsustainable growth that destroys their core offerings and alienates customers
1. Just a strange take. Companies can do whatever they want. If they fail, they will fail. Companies are mere profit seeking machines. Perhaps you are thinking of non-profit orgs?
2. So what? People embrace all kinds of trends. And companies are made of people. This is basically a tautology...it's only a trend of people are embracing it. Also zero of your examples are the topic here.
3. This goes back to my original post...we don't know how they plan to use LLMs. It might be useful, it might not be.
4. Just pure cynicism. Some of what you're saying happens at some companies. But not most.
>Just a strange take. Companies can do whatever they want.
Yes, and I'm saying they shouldn't.
>If they fail, they will fail. Companies are mere profit seeking machines. Perhaps you are thinking of non-profit orgs?
No, I'm thinking of the idea of the civic responsibility of companies, and of a market that serves society, not just maximizes profit. Perhaps the barbaric 2023 is not ready enough for it.
>So what? People embrace all kinds of trends. And companies are made of people.
Yes, including BS trends, detrimental to them, their families, or their communities. And, like companies, should embrace less BS trends and more good trends.
>This goes back to my original post...we don't know how they plan to use LLMs. It might be useful, it might not be.
We do know it has nothing to what people got into Dropbox for: simple file sync and offline copies.
>Just pure cynicism. Some of what you're saying happens at some companies. But not most.
Simple starry-eyed market fanboyism. See how two can play the ad hominem game?
Saying your comment was cynical is not an ad-hominem. But regardless, it sounds like you've taken my comment and applied your desire for a complete alternative reality to it. Which, I guess.
As a customer, I don’t care much what their strategy is as long as my file storage keeps working. I do care if the company that I’m using for file storage is going to start treating that as a ‘legacy’ business while they chase something unrelated in an attempt to expand their market, none of which helps me. Also, the hint that a service like this is even considering reading my stored data and training AI on that would be a huge red flag. Sounds like executives chasing investors at the expense of customers again.
I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership.
I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking"
14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, when money flowed easy from both investors and customers. There has been zero market pressure to put thought into building products.
In the case of dropbox in particular, any long term customers (such as myself) can confirm that there has clearly not been a coherent product strategy for at least the last few years.
Super weird comment. I've worked at tech co's for ~15 years on sprint teams and directly next to the CTO and everywhere in between...and they've all had product strategies.
Maybe DBX sucks at executing theirs. Maybe their strategy sucks. I don't know. I'm not claiming to. All I am claiming is that there is some strategy at the leadership level right now at DBX that appears to involve AI - and any comments beyond that are purely speculative.
remember dropbox "Paper"... what was that?
The most real HN comment I've seen in years.
HN is becoming a meme, kind of like how HN used to write off Reddit.
It's so far in it's own butt that it thinks it's normal to go get 10M to raise money to build a hot dog/no hot dog AI app, or a crypto picture of a monkey.
I like playing this game where I count the amount of tech buzzwords per top comment in a post and try to guess before clicking on it to see how close I was.
here come the elitists
Off to lobste.rs then?
I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.
Have tried a few times, it's not my kind of place. Would appreciate other suggestions, though.
I'm trying to spin up the lobsters software on a forum. It's meant to be a pseudo comment section for my blog, as well as a place to discuss anything that is intellectually stimulating.
If I succeed, do you want an invite?
Imagine thinking that because Big Company Does it it must be sensible and logical because they are Big Company so they don't make blunders like that.
I never said anything of the sort. DBX using AI might be a horrible flop. Nothing I said had anything to do with the [potential] success of their roadmap. Only that they have one (which, I guess, is only an assumption), and the OP doesn't know what it is but is commenting as though they do.
It's a public company, isn't it?
So we can just point out it's strategies on it's latest 10k filing, where it's investments have been and where it's gets it's money from?
It's not invalid to ask whether companies are making real, strategic and well-thought moves or just jumping on a bandwagon.
Many of us have worked for long-standing public companies with thousands of employees that have embarked on product strategies that were not particularly valid.
Facebook comes to mind, for example, and its Metaverse boondoggle. Or Google and half a dozen things. Evernote, though it's not a public company, also comes to mind...
Did anybody need "insider knowledge" to know Google's Stadia was DOA? For that matter, Dropbox has tried pivoting to mail and apps (Carousel + Mailbox) in the past, and I don't know whether insider knowledge was needed to predict that failure.
I can imagine use cases for AI + Dropbox. Whether they are urgent use cases where customers see a real problem they're willing to throw money at is another question entirely.
We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.
There's a thing I saw on LessWrong a while ago where he says, "Before declaring a thing impossible, ask, 'Have you put 5 minutes on the clock and just brainstormed?'"
In that spirit, here's me doing this about AI at Dropbox:
- Get consent from users and train a personalized AI on user files, to answer questions like, "Where is my meeting with Thiago?"
- Provide built-in support for number crunching on unstructured meeting notes: "How much revenue did we make, from last quarter's notes?"
- Automatically fine-tune a model using your own writing so that ChatGPT talks more like you
- Apply an AI to recognize security threats in your files("Hey you might have stored a secret in plaintext in file Y. Do you want to encrypt it?")
Even being able to train a personal model on the user’s handwriting to digitize the notes will be a big hit. I would love to have that. I’m this close to train my own Tessaract instance to do it.
Those are great applications of AI. Still doesn’t explain about how DropBox canning 1/6th of the company will help them do that.
I can see DropBox making some interesting features for their products around AI. That’s going to require manpower to do it. Manpower that’s probably a little nervous about staying at a company that just did layoffs.
You’re thinking about AI from a Dropbox customer POV.
What if it’s more about using customer data to Dropbox’s advantage? Combined with the telemetry you can’t turn off, they can mine the shit out of users.
YOu forgot:
* find someone that will actually want to pay extra for their subscription on that.
And deliver it at a sufficiently better performance/utility to price ratio than Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon/Meta can, and they might price it at zero.
> organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.
This is genuinely blind to anything that's happened in AI over the last 6-12 months. The data that is the most valuable to AI is exactly all of the random, unstructured data (product requirements, decisioning documents, engineering designs, process documentation, etc etc) that has been shared across teams.
> I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff.
requiring a layoff no, certainly me neither. There is definitely a bit of "compliment sandwich" happening in this letter. The layoffs were likely just a long time coming for a company that has been rather stagnant for quit some time.
Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals.
> It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
What could go wrong in dropbox invading their customer's privacy to scrap out a few pennies mining their data?
> Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals.
I have no idea what their strategy is. Neither do you. Neither does OP. That is all i said.
> Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge.
Imagine I'm a shareholder and the product strategy is either bad or being communicated to me unclearly.
> It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here.
It's also not much of a reach to imagine the same breathless magical thinking about AI which is happening everywhere taking over the management at Dropbox.
So far I've seen a lot of potential and exactly 0 effective applications of AI at scale. So I know which my money is on.
I'm definitely betting on AI, but the way I'm betting on AI is betting on AI companies building better AIs. I'm not betting on companies whose only involvement in AI is that they suddenly have to have it because it's the latest buzzword.
Wouldn’t you be in a shareholder meeting instead of a HN post? I mean, if you are a substantial shareholder, or this are only for private equity? Honest question.
>DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
Snark incoming - if somebody at Dropbox reads this they might have an AI strategy now. I think your idea is amazing. But I think that a lot of publicly traded companies are now "doing something with AI" like a headless chicken without any deeper though on why.
But your idea is good!
Yea I don't understand all these responses. I'm not commenting on the quality or viability of DBX's AI strategy. Because I don't know what it is! I am commenting on the OP, who is acting like they know what it is.
>It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.
They were also non-E2E encrypted for like most or all of those years. It was the main reason I didn't use it for personal backups. I use SpiderOakONE (paid) instead, which is.
So yeah, they have a fuckton of other people's documents. 100% chance. Even I admittedly use one of their free documents as a simple todo list at work. That's probably really nice data for them too.
If they aren't doing some ML based on that data, somebody at the company is not doing their job.
Especially because they've already at least partially solved one of the big challenges: People already trust them with their data. As long as they do nothing to betray that trust (such as e.g. training models on the private data and making them accessible outside the organisation) they have a massive starting advantage over organisations that will need to convince customers that it's ok to upload sensitive information to somewhere new.
Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do?
Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited?
Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph?
Understanding product strategies are part of many users day to day lives. Don't dismiss everyone and put them on your level of understanding.
> Your message is you couldn't possible understand a public product strategy where they just released a press release explaining what they are trying to do?
My message is that OP doesn't know DBX's product strategy. I don't either. I never claimed to.
> Then you go on saying this is a common strategy and is well suited?
Sorry, where did I do that?
> Do you understand the strategy or is your comment as worthless as you suggest in your first paragraph?
No, I do not. I never claimed to.
Yeah I mean who else is going to extract all the data stored in customer drop boxes and feed it into a generative AI for drop boxes benefit? First you gotta fire everyone who sees a conflict of interest and a problem with invasively scraping all their customers private data entrusted with you.
Meta showed us that business pivots don't have to make sense to anyone but the CEO...
They're a *backup* service.
snark incoming - so you're saying that you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge?
No, GP was just saying we should give Dropbox the benefit of the doubt, because Dropbox understands the product strategy more than any of us do. Including GP.
Compared to my mindset a decade ago I've become so cynical about the whole SV tech scene. There's value there, of course: Dropbox was a fantastic service when it first came out. But these companies are incentivized to keep expanding until they occupy the entire universe. Now Dropbox wants to be my word processor. Next it wants to use AI to touch up my photos or whatever the hell because AI is the New Hot Thing tech companies must do to please Wall Street. I'm tired of closing modal boxes promoting a service I never asked for.
You aren't cynical enough. This incentive structure is what keeps us employed and our salaries going up and you should encourage it (assuming you're a laborer). If companies weren't doing this they'd hire to build a product with a minimal feature set and then layoff at a much larger rate once it was done.
In other words, encourage this mindset wherever possible, it's going to be what causes the next wave and spike in demand for SWEs.
Honestly there are just to many SWE then. FAANG just paid moonsalarys and lot of bad SWE joined the space who ofcourse never get to FAANG or only for 1 axed project but still are in the space not needed at all with I worked FAANG on cv. We can't all be SWE. The skilled will survive it no doubt.
Agreed. The field has become flooded w/ bad talent. I in large part blame leetcode hiring. Folks that are used to "cram cultures" just cram for that test but have zero idea how to engineer and architect good software and systems.
Totally agree… I wish I could buy Dropbox’s minimal feature set: syncing files. And that they’d improve that feature rather than adding features I don’t use or want.
I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/, it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).
Searched for the iOS client, first hit answer by the maintainer
>I remain unconvinced of the usefulness of the Syncthing sync model on iOS
https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-for-ios/16045/4
So basically it's not an alternative at all to Dropbox
well to those of us, not using iPhone it is*
And to be honest, most of the files I sync, I never access on a phone anyway. So it would still be useful even without Android support.
Not sure how common my setup is, But I have desktop both at home and at work. And I use git and synching, to sync most of the stuff seamlessly. That said I mostly work from home nowadays, so I mostly use my work comp to speed up compilation, or run tests, dockers, databases, etc.
* Not trying to be an asshole. There are plenty of iPhone only app, that I sometimes** wish I could use, so I know how you feel.
** But not too much, otherwise I would switch by now :))
I actually want a central server, because the main thing I'm worried about is a fire or flood taking out both my computers at once, in which case the sync to a central server works as a backup.
(I don't have proper backups beyond Dropbox, because I'm pretty happy for stuff I've actually deleted to stay deleted. Just, in case of a hard drive failure or something similar, I can sync back from Dropbox. That's all I feel I need. Maybe there's something better?)
Syncthing is not end-to-end encrypted. It's peer to peer TLS encrypted.
With end-to-end encryption you can transfer data with an untrusted server as intermediary, which syncthing doesn't support.
Syncthing supports transferring data via untrusted relays (used when two nodes cannot communicate directly) and also supports storing data encrypted on untrusted nodes (those nodes cannot decrypt the data)
Second this. I De-Googled/De-Dropboxed my life about 15 months ago with the help of Syncthing, and a third-party cloud backup provider (the '1' in my 3-2-1) strategy, and I haven't looked back.
I can’t recommend it enough. Install your own directory servers, and you’ll have true invisible infrastructure.
I prefer seafile because it actually scans immediately and has a functioning android client.
There's always rsync, you know...
What if I told you you could replicate all of that with proven battle tested technology… for free.
"you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
It’s a testament to the Unix philosophy that after all these years, Dropbox has grown and morphed into something that people no longer enjoy, and yet if you simply followed that advice years ago, you would still have a system today that works exactly as you intended, and in 50 years when Dropbox is long gone as a company, that system will still be working as built, and even after you die, that system can be inherited by your children and grandchildren and still work as well as it did on day one. This is the timeless way of building.
I wish I shared your optimism that any kind of server I set up in 2007 would still be fully functional today without any kind of maintenance, let alone that it will still be around to serve my grandchildren.
An FTP server already wouldn't serve my needs given that there's no such thing as mobile sync to an FTP server.
That's a fair criticism of the approach but I also think it's one of the strengths - protocols never change. So today with new requirements you'd need to figure out a new way to do it, but the old way still works, even if it doesn't meet your needs.
The irritating thing with a lot of software is that they start out like a hammer and in 10 years it's a multi-dimensional VR rangefinder with email. Well that's super cool but I want my hammer back.
And the iPod will fail because it doesn’t have wireless and has less space than the Nomad…
what if i told you i know that, but i don't want to do the work or ongoing management of that myself. i just want somebody else to do it for me. for money that i pay them, and not for money that some VC or data broker pays them
Then I’d tell you I have a very particular set of skills, skills that could keep your files stored safely for a very long time. For money you would pay directly to me, in perpetuity.
iCloud
iCloud is perfect if all your machines are made by Apple.
It really isn’t.
The time macOS changed my default to having all my files in the cloud rather than local was a truely scarring experience.
The price is high and ‘family sharing’ is a minefield.
That’s a small sacrifice to make.
They are now
As long as we stick with the economic incentives we have in quarterly stakeholder capitalism, it will forever be this way. You can’t fix it by appealing to people’s sense of bettering the world.
You’re not the target customer. A lot of people do use those tools, although most of them are outside of the tech world.
You’d probably be better off using a different service if it bothers you so much.
I stopped using Dropbox a long time ago (though switching cloud storage services is not trivial!). My point is a more general one, that today's tech companies can't just be, they must expand and expand.
To butcher a quote from Grandpa Simpson:
“I used to be ‘the target customer’, but then they changed what ‘the target customer’ was. Now I’m not ‘the target customer’ anymore and ‘the target customer’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!
> today's tech companies can't just be, they must expand and expand.
Isn't it in the nature of tech industry though? If a company "just is", it doesn't need to do any R&D work, so it's not a tech company any more.
The key to attracting a Dropbox is to follow Rule 1 or Rule 2:
Rule 1: Be an enterprise account that uses the "Call us for a quote" option, and does not complain about feature changes or removals
Rule 2: Don't break Rule 1
We’ll I just realised I can use iCloud or Google drive for like 1/10th the cost of Dropbox ?
Yes, I’m also not their target customer for all those add on features that I don’t want… I would be using a different service if there was one with similar or better syncing capabilities that works as well as Dropbox…
Customers want a dumb pipe. PublicCo can't go up the value chain as a dumb pipe and starts adding bells and whistles. It's a story as old as Web 1.0
As an example: Dropbox can answer questions from the documents you've shared with them. They stand a good chance as anyone else to build a "personal chatgpt" / "enterprise chatgpt". Dropbox is also big on photos, I believe, the latest advancements give them a shot at taking on Google Photos.
But how can you be certain that the answer is actually correct instead of just sounding correct?
ChatGPT can come up with completely made-up answers that just seem right.
That's basically as good as the average coworker in most companies, and more useful still than the lower end of coworkers I've had.
I describe AI as a new intern or assistant. Pretty useful, but don't bet your company on their answer.
By citing references? which were used to generate the answer.
Most companies work that way already, even small ones. Doesn’t end the world (doesn’t make it a perfect place to live in either).
and yet it keeps being a useful tool.
I actually love this angle. Personally trained models based on our own data. They have the storage infra. They also have a means of distributed compute since they are installed on so many PCs. If they werent an annoying and aimless product I would be excited!
> Personally trained models based on our own data.
This leads back to one of the AI promises if the earlier Internet, before WWW when Usenet, Gopher, and a number of other ideas, were where we were heading, and for a time after WWW's popularity before search engines hit certain quality/coverage levels: an intelligent search agent trained on information about you that would go off and scour the various data resources for you and return an optimal set of results after a while, perhaps even idly looking around and finding things you might search for but hadn't thought to ask it for yet.
This reminds me of the first 25 seconds of this clip from The Matrix: https://youtu.be/Smwrw4sNCxE
> and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.
Dropbox moved beyond basic file sharing long ago. I don’t personally use all of their productivity tools, but I know a lot of people (generally business/creatives) who do.
If you try to interpret this through the lens of “Dropbox just stores files” then it won’t make sense. However, there are a lot of AI opportunities in file management. Imagine something like an AI-powered search through your documents or an AI photo search. Would be much easier to find that photo of your family standing in front of the Grand Canyon if you could just type that in.
You may not want that product, but it’s unreasonably snarky to pretend that a big company is dumb for pursuing this obvious opportunity.
> Dropbox moved beyond basic file sharing long ago.
File syncing and storage is a feature rather than a full product, these days. Microsoft and Google have made sure of that. You need something more to compete. So, it makes sense that Dropbox went in that direction.
I mean, who knows, maybe they have a legitimate use for employees with skill in the ai field.
But it does smell like most tech bubble in history. Every publicly traded company has to somewhat fit the last au gout du jour tech in their announcement/roadmap/hiring to satisfy shareholder and bump stock prices. Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ...
Although I get that the idea behind is that nobody want to miss "the next big thing", so if you can afford it, might as well invest in it, and if it is a flop, oh well, but if it does end up being the actual next big thing, you might have saved your company.
> Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ...
CIOs love this one weird trick to boost shareholder value!
Really tired of how everyone is always trying to take over the world.
Can a utility just stay a utility?
Not if company is publicly traded or has investors.
Only companies where owner is top boss can, sometimes. The moment boss has to answer to investors, growth is required.
Not convinced this is because of investors. Investors want high returns on invested capital and these growth initiatives are often the opposite of that (see Meta's Metaverse play which investors hated). Executives want to empire build at the expense of both employee stability AND shareholder returns.
> Can a utility just stay a utility?
Only small indie utilities.
For most other things, to grow initially to serve the intended functions to as much of the target audience as possible, requires investment. Investors want that growth to continue, even if it makes little or no sense to the original objectives.
shareholder primacy. it’s not the only strategy, but it is the most common.
Not without regulation, and the US decided to do away with those for some reason. It's just too much money to abuse your position in market A to pivot into market B.
Capitalism - regulation => utilities's entire point is to capture a monopoly to then abuse it.
A Norwegian cloud storage company - JottaCloud - just released an AI-powered search engine[0] that lets you search all your stored images based on descriptions instead of meta data.
This is an _excellent_ use of AI, in my opinion, because even if the search results are slightly wrong (they mostly aren't), you're OK with it, and you didn't have to do anything yourself except paying for the service.
[0] https://docs.jottacloud.com/en/articles/7262803-ai-powered-p...
It's nothing more than fan service for Wall Street. They like hearing about cost-cutting measures and new hotness ("AI! GPT!"). It's just like slapping "blockchain" onto arbitrary things in 2018 to stim your valuation.
Dropbox has a problem that's been brewing for a while. As services like Photoshop, Office, and G Suite have moved entirely to the cloud, Dropbox's value proposition is less interesting. Even a decade ago, Box was beating them in the enterprise market. On the consumer side, cloud file storage is a freebie with offerings from Apple, MS, and Google.
I guess they have Paper, but last I used it, it felt like abandonware.
Maybe it is about search ?
I could see value in using a chat-like interface with dropbox:
> "Give me the budget for the R&D team from 2019"
I can't see this being their moat though.
Google and Microsoft can do much outcompete them with their storage SaaS products.
- search your stuff using very fuzzy searches? Imagine looking up documents that are related to all your car purchases? - image search based on a person's face, like google does - build recommendations based on your documents, in general, just start using your documents to help you, in a privacy aware way, rather than just storing them.
It's almost like companies are doing whatever the hype cycle demands. Two years ago it was all about having a huge headcount. Now it's about being "lean" but also "all in on AI". Smart engineers will take a 6 week bootcamp on ML and go right back to work.
Two years ago, it was Dropbox thinking that people really needed a word processor, so they built "Dropbox Paper"
That was 7+ years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_Paper
Dropbox also never hired at a rate beyond their rate of revenue growth.
I thought Drew’s email was fairly poor written as these things go. Trying to Amp everyone on the future of AI for the company at this moment seemed odd.
Also I always hate “to those departing…” as if it was their idea. These emails always promise fully owning the decision but they never deliver.
> I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.
"Mr. Robot, categorize our customers in a monetizable way by inspecting the data they hold in their accounts."
this is a good argument for e2ee for a non technical audience.
It's probably best not to think of Dropbox the company as being about the product "Dropbox." It's a huge company and as with all megacorps their goal is to become bigger through whatever means they have at their disposal.
Maybe they'll come up with something of value to bolt onto what they do today, or maybe they'll add a totally different product to their portfolio, or maybe they'll pivot away from their current business entirely, or maybe they'll just waste a bunch of money chasing the current fad.
I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.
I can think of plenty. Text-based image search, "find the latest TPI report last modified by so-and-so", etc.
Which isn't to say that Dropbox won't spend most of its efforts thinking up features that most users plainly don't need or want, and in cranking out buggy versions of these non-features at the expense of their core product. Like all these companies, once they get sufficiently long in the tooth.
Maybe they want to develop something that allows organizations to better utilize the information on their Dropbox account. Feed that to language model and let people ask questions.
> requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI
Yeah, well good luck finding people with actual AI experience right now because everybody's looking for them. They might have been better off to retrain some of the folks they're going to layoff. Hiring people with these skills can take a while. Maybe they could be bringing some folks up to speed in the meantime?
I think their mindset is considering the "storing files" product "done" and doesn't need more features.
Now they're creating completely new products to include with the same subscription that have little or nothing to do with the original product.
Document writing and signing, password storage, screen capture, video review/approval process, invoices (beta)...
I could see how it might be used as a "memory" to some of these AI-generated workflows. As content is generated, having it stored, indexed, and easily discoverable would be important. If the users of these AI tools are individuals and small groups more than big corporations, there may be a market here for Dropbox to tune its product line towards.
What if they had a little animated AI assistant that watched what you were doing and would say helpful things like “Hey! I see you’re writing a document, perhaps you should store that on Dropbox?” or “Hey! I see you’re making a meme, want to share that using Dropbox?”
This would be a great meme if they fired 16% people to make an chatgpt microsoft bob.
In the AI world, files will be created at a volume never before seen. Personal collections of files will matter less in this new limit. Dropbox probably sees the writing on the wall and may want to reconfigure itself to catch the upside.
Imagine selling Rolodex in the post-email era.
If it somehow be able to answer prompts like "show me the picture of Jeff from that trip we took 4 or 5 years ago" it might've been mildly useful. No idea whether worth the price of research tho
Something as simple as creating tags and summarys for documents, pipelining automatic PII handling are some features I could see being useful from the 28 seconds I spent thinking of applying AI to dropbox.
> We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more.
How many of the laid off "team" members could have been retrained?
Good luck finding people with AI skills these days. Its seems possible that AI could be useful for accessing your files. Or having a chat using the files as expertise.
Everyone is cutting off these days, however i have not seen any saying, we are cutting directord bones and cutting theier salaries. Any trie leader will do that
They're too busy downvoting your comment to discuss ways to cut back themselves.
I imagine that leveraging AI to answer questions about documents, or helping with documentation composition, could be an expected feature by DropBox customers.
Why would you need ai when you can just sort your files yourself, manually inspect your files for the one you want because normal search is inadequate...
AI is the perfect match for Dropbox. Search only finds relevant files. AI trained on my data can help me extract actual insights from the files.
What if they make an AI that hallucinates something that looks like your file so they don't have to fetch it for you?
LoL - you won't need files in the future.
ChatGPT will just generate your documents on the fly from prompts you memorize.
> ChatGPT will just generate your documents on the fly from prompts you memorize.
These generated documents are presumably files? And the long list of prompts would ideally be stored somehow, likely in a file.
It was sarcasm
It allows them to mine your data better... if you store anything on dropbox, its been catalogued and read.
they will harvest your data with "AI" (everything is called AI today) and sell it to insurance companies.
combined with the biden depression, this makes it a good idea to fire employees and gain this new source of income.
A box where I drop all my documents and then I can ask questions. Seems useful.
Its bs.
If every company is doing AI it sort of sounds similar to the ICO/coin phase of crypto hype curve and the every company having a dotcom/ecommerce department of the dot com boom/bust (which is actually the case nowadays). Because AI has more respect in tech circles than crypto did I suspect people aren't calling BS as much. It could very well be that in X years a lot of companies have AI doing bot types of work. It could also be a lot of if..then..ifelse or document search index stuff with "AI" lipstick on it.
I imagine things like this are underway: https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles
Honestly I think it's actually a pretty fantastic development if that's the direction. I don't use Dropbox much, nor have I used aifiles (due to sending all of your data to OpenAI) - but the idea of being able to not have to manually and tediously look over terabytes of files to completely reorganize all of your files into a better directory hierarchy, and tag each files with meaningful labels, etc sounds phenomenal.
Obviously there are some implementation details for this to be not awful - for example: 1) only local models for local data, 2) making the changes on e.g. ZFS (to allow rollback) or as some type of optional 'overlay' view to switch back and forth from the original to ai-organized, etc. and 3) having thresholds and logic for what may be considered 'duplicates' to be removed, and how to better compress data
As for the de-duplication and processing: this could be very good for dropbox in that, e.g. if a person wants to completely re-encode all of their image files or video files with AV1, the resulting data could be cut in half or more - which saves Dropbox storage space. After which, neural perceptual hashing could be done on all of the files and a threshold of similarity could do de-duplication on a perceptual basis (for example, keep the bigger size file that is 99% similar to a 2x downsized version, and re-encode it). User preference to keep things like tiff files completely intact or any other lossless encoding of their choosing could be good options as well
There's definitely a strange disparity between the computation cost for deploying a decent model to do this compared to the storage cost - but if a (perhaps even non-LLM!) small model is created to be able to plow through data at fast rates could be deployed it may make sense.
Or perhaps the type of semantic compression that LLMs do are of interest for making a new type of lossy compression algorithm of which Dropbox is interested. It is certainly interesting that even the largest LLMs we are aware of contain only a few hundred GBs of weights, but have information on various topics from Pokemon to electric engineering, to cellular biology, to cake decorating - yet one instance of the best compressed pubmed database I can think of (only containing the small fraction of cell bio and med part of the LLM - perhaps 2% of it) is like 60GB with Zstd compressed (yes, yes, I know lossy vs lossless - but still) - which would be probably more like 1/2 or 1/4 of a typical SoTA LLM. So clearly lossy compression via including semantic info is hugely beneficial over typical lossy compression techniques (and perhaps one could argue, what often lossy compression algorithms try to model in the first place, in a very rudimentary way).
> use ai to store files better?
I mean I wanted to store some old tax returns, medical bills and crap in DB, AI comes in and decides "bah, this is crap!", delete files silently to make space for more exciting stuff. Everyone is happy now!
Hopefully the AI would come in and shame you for storing tax returns in cloud storage.
Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".
Anyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.
Yes, I feel especially sorry for fired_employees[498] and fired_employees[499] who were just added to make the round number!
Or maybe happy for employees 501 through 504 who were on the chopping block, but because Round Numbers Are Nice(tm), got to keep their jobs!
But they went from comfortable but low performers, to literally the worst 5 employees in the company.
There is a number N for each employee where considering the top N employees, they are the worst.
So I wouldn't feel bad about having a "low" rank in deliberately selective sample of humanity.
180 jobs would have been saved if we counted in base 8!
Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.
The idea that some sort of complex algorithm should be used indicates a misunderstanding of what business management actually consists of.
It is much more social science than engineering.
>Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.
Yes, in this case the corporate goal is to fire 500 people as a sacrifice to the finance gods.
If the goal was 'refocus strategy', you'd probably want to actually assess your business and determine who is no longer necessary, and you would doubtfully end up at a nice round number
I think you are still trying to treat it as an engineering analysis.
The question isn't "who is no longer necessary".
The question is "do we think we can cut 500 roles (Y/N)"
The 2nd question is a reasonable and useful business assessment. The first question is not relevant and has no real answer.
1st is optimizing your org, 2nd is a financial decision.
yeah, and even for the 1st, it isn't a matter of calculation. Every employee in the org will have a different answer to the question and opinion.
That can't be right. If you think you can cut 500 roles you then have to answer the first question.
It isn't a driver of the decision. Who gets fired is a detail that gets worked out after the fact.
Leadership, based on their understanding and information make the decision to cut 500 and create a mandate to make it so. Then management is forced to decide who gets the axe.
It would basically be impossible to drive the decision the other way. You can't asses every individual for necessity. What would the threshold even be? The threshold depends on the number of people you want to fire.
There is no super computer that can calculate the outcome from firing \ 499 workers vs 500
There’s also a high chance they just rounded the number for the press release and it doesn’t reflect an exact amount.
There is a threshold of number of employees let go (maybe at location or total, I dunno) where they have to do certain things, called the WARN act. Companies aren't putting out press releases about layoffs because they want to.
What makes you think that 500 is the actual, exact number? It's probably just an approximation used in that PR piece.
Layoff numbers are imprecise and somewhat arbitrary, so any number that isn't divisible by 10 is probably intentionally chosen to seem less arbitrary.
The article says “about 16%”. I don’t think the number in the article should be taken as an exact count.
> it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".
Any big layoff involves, or is possibly the result of, shifting goals. Company goals change, especially as changing economics makes them more or less possible.
When one number is given as exact, and the other prefixed with "about", your intuition is that the exact number is not in fact an exact count? That is very odd.
Because it said "about 16%, or 500 employees" - the "about" prefixes both things. I understand how you can read it otherwise, but it is how I read it.
What were you expecting? Scientific notation with error margins? "We fired 5×10²±5 employees"?
> "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods"
Specially important since company was founded and grown to employ thousands of dropboxers without any money from finance gods.
> Nice, round number.
500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.
Come on. I've worked with engineers of all stripes and virtually none of them consider 512 a 'rounder' number than 500.
I've worked with lots of engineers too and virtually none would consider 111110100 rounder than 1000000000.
Round number (whichever base is rounded off to) also shows it wasn't some company-wide movement to cut some fat but someone come up with the number beforehand and told underlings to make it happen
Of course you decide on a number first. Do you think the CEO has any idea what the names of all their peons are? Much less which ones would be reasonsble to get rid of.
Exactly this. Unless the sum of payroll cut roughly equals the increase of interest payments in their debt load, I call absolute BS on the "challenging market dynamics".
They're just following the trend, or listening to the ridiculous demands of investors following the trend.
> They wondered if it could be possible to fire 500,000?
> I thought from one of the smaller companies no one would notice.
> Like one of the cab companies.
>> Fire one million.
> But 500,000...
> One million. Fine, sir.
> Sorry to have disturbed you.
So hopeful. People are so hopeful that AI will pan out favorably for them, even when their arguments are a stretch.
On this thread, there’s the following sentiment… “Dropbox has access to your data so they are well positioned to do some AI stuff on your data.” But also you have your data so you could work with really any party you want, and Dropbox has few advantages by being an existing custodian. Custodian status probably is not the differentiating factor in a race to build AI tools.
AI optimism. I just don’t see the argument. I don’t see how it is good for Dropbox, or the enthusiastic pundits, or even me! (I use the tools, too, but my income and quality of life have not skyrocketed.) My suspicion is that things like Dropbox laying off 16% becoming part of the AI optimism narrative – and AI optimism in general – has little to do with the prospects of AI and much to do with the reactive patterns of opinionated storytellers.
Specifically, I think people enthusiastic about AI prospects are enthusiastic because it is the one empowering (encouraging) response they can take… not because it is warranted. That’s not criticism, just an exploration, and I’m well-aware that I could be wrong.
This is a layoff announcement. We shouldn’t expect any AI realism from it.
On the broader point though, there certainly are some companies that have access to unique datasets that they can take advantage of. Meta and Google come to mind as obvious ones, probably Microsoft too. Apple I'm less sure given their privacy stance. Any others?
Apple's stance of "it never leaves your device" seems to be working so far.
> But also you have your data so you could work with really any party you want
As a private individual, yes. However if you are a company you might not be legally able to send your data to just any party or it might be a hassle to set up. If you have a contract with Dropbox already…
"These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to best position ourselves for the future and unlock our full potential."
What has AI got to do with me putting my files in the cloud so I can sync them across my devices?
I’d love to be able to just ask dropbox what my passport number is, or to find the file my auditor gave me last year with recommendations.
Do you think the ability to recall private information like that will more valuable to you, the user, or to data aggregators, advertisers, and service providers? Is there enough extra revenue in expanding services to Dropbox users, or will they inevitably become another data scraping company (perhaps with a veneer of "anonymization" to supposedly protect your privacy)?
As of now I trust Dropbox not to use my information or sell it to anyone else. In fact I pay them pretty penny not to. Is there any evidence that they’re violating that assumption?
There is in face public evidence that they take good care of data, even when building an in house OCR engine, https://dropbox.tech/machine-learning/creating-a-modern-ocr-... :
> We began by collecting a representative set of donated document images that match what users might upload, such as receipts, invoices, letters, etc. To gather this set, we asked a small percentage of users whether they would donate some of their image files for us to improve our algorithms. At Dropbox, we take user privacy very seriously and thus made it clear that this was completely optional, and if donated, the files would be kept private and secure. We use a wide variety of safety precautions with such user-donated data, including never keeping donated data on local machines in permanent storage, maintaining extensive auditing, requiring strong authentication to access any of it, and more.
I can get my passport number by pressing the Windows key, typing "passport" and pressing Enter. I don't know if I'd want AI to come into the mix, or even Dropbox for that matter.
There is no substitute for being organized.
There is absolutely a substitute for being organized :) ask me how! Dropbox plays a big role in it ever since it started indexing pdf contents.
Would you use the passport number without double checking it ?
If it looks mostly correct, yes.
if it's in your iphone photos library you can just type "passport" and then copy/paste the number out of the image.
I'd love to be able to ask questions about technical documentation, code bases, contract PDFs and so on, without having to worry to send my data unprotected to another company that doesn't have a Enterprise contract or can assure us of SOC 2 compliance.
If the AI can interpret what I mean, find the file, link me to the sources and distill the information and context, it will be major productivity boom.
I believe nowadays most of Dropbox's revenue comes from their Dropbox Business customers. Or at the very least they see growth in business customer revenue as much more promising. (from my glancing over their SEC filings)
So while as a personal user you might not see much potential for AI (though I do), I'm sure there's huge opportunities for their business customers to use AI tooling on the many corporate documents and files they already stored on Dropbox. Also if you look at DBX's current offerings you can see they've branched out from just storing files. Signatures (HelloSend), "DocSend", password vaults, etc. Focusing on the potential for AI to solve problems for their business customers makes sense to me.
Dropbox is a place where people put data. AI is built on data. A simple use case is something along the lines of, "Put all of your technical documentation in Folder X, then deploy Folder X as a Generative AI chatbot you can ask questions to".
They will use AI to scan your files so that they can do things with the resulting harvested data.
EXACTLY
AI is allowing for massive monitization of what was previously "flat file" style data.
Dropbox, as I mentioned, has always 'not been you friend' - now they are just a more powerful 'not your friend'.
That's why there's Cryptomator
Probably advanced Q&A chatbot trained on your company’s documents. Imagine how that could improve onboarding if you can ask AI how things work in your company.
I recently migrated from Dropbox to Google One. I find Dropbox's personal pricing really baffling: you get 2 GB for free or have to move all the way up to 2 TB and pay £100 a year. 100GB for £16 via Google is a much more sensible offer.
My perception is Dropbox is trying to shed personal users to shift to enterprise accounts.
Yes. What are their nag screens about, if not to convince me as a free user to leave?
Google One's tiers are better, but they're still kinda nonsense. The first 2 paid tiers are 100GB and 200GB which are fine. But then you have to jump up 3.5x the cost to 2TB. Why can't they just offer finely-tuned increments of 100GB? Or even 50GB or 25GB.
I'm mindful with what I put on cloud storage (mainly photo/video backups with Google Photos). I'm fine bumping up as I use more, but I don't feel like you suddenly deserve to pay for 2TB cause you went 3MB over the 200GB limit. And for how cheap as storage is these days, I think the pricing models should be reconsidered.
I never understand this kind of moralistic thinking about pricing. If you get more storage than you need for a price you're willing to pay you should be happy. You get the storage you need and then some.
I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.
Every time you buy a piece of software or hardware you get features you don't care about. Do I get angry that these features are included? Of course not. I just don't use them.
But somehow when it comes to quotas people feel like the price should somehow correspond to the cost of delivering the service. But it doesn't. It's just price segmentation, and as long as the pricing tiers are clearly advertised I don't think you have any right to be mad.
Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually giving you 2TB of storage space if you're using all of it.
For services like these, whether it's Google One or Dropbox, R&D is the major expense. Not hard drive space. In order to recoup the R&D cost you have to segment customers by their willingness to pay. When you charge per GB you leave a lot of money on the table.
Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Figuring out where my data went is too much work, so I subscribed. Other people will delete old photos/attachments/files so they don't have to upgrade to the next pricing tier. Price segmentation works.
I mean I'm not arguing that I shouldn't have to pay. I just think the tiers and prices are bad.
If I had a car that could hold my family of 4, and then I have another kid and my only option to upgrade from there is a school bus, I'm gonna be understandably annoyed. And you could just as easily say "well they don't make enough on cars so they need more people buying buses."
It’s pretty simple. Selling storage is a crap margin business. The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers. They only make money when you upgrade and buy more storage than what you use.
They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.
> The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers.
Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.
Yup - its 100 GB * 3 (well * 2.5 to 2.7 with erasure coding) + networking, power etc. etc. etc. Data is constantly being churned around as machines are serviced/die, disks are scrubbed for bit flips etc. and its not like you can put it on a tape on a shelf - the user expects it to be instantly accessible.
Google Cloud Storage is $0.02/ GB + a myriad of other charges for listing, accessing, replication etc. All while storage remains one of the lower margin offerings for the hyperscale clouds - they keep it cheap to attract high margin compute.
Now add to that the cost of building and maintaining the myriad of apps, APIs, integrations etc. for a consumer facing storage service and $2/mo for 100GB would be very very slightly profitable at best.
You want per mb pricing like AWS has per second billing on their EC2 machines?
I mean that would be ideal, if it reasonably scaled as I uploaded/deleted.
But I'd be fine with more reasonable increments in steps of X smaller amount of GB.
Do you worry about Google dropping and discontinuing the service ?
Not really for Google Drive. I feel like they have too many enterprise customers using it to be able to just pull the rug on it. And Google Photos is essentially just a photo-specific UI for Drive.
If they did actually kill it, I can always export and move somewhere else, though it'd be a pain in the ass. In the meantime, it's like the only Google product I think is actually good and worth paying for.
This is exactly why I switched to Google One.
I needed about 20 GB of storage. Why the hell should I have to pay for 100 times that?
Since I switched, I've slowly grown to 30 GB, but I still have plenty of room before I need to go to the next tier and pay another $1/month.
This is what got me to get rid of Dropbox. Used them for free for a decade, and they pushed me out by limiting the number of clients. I looked for a paid option for $10-$20 per year since I basically only need a few GBs of space, but they don't have that. So figured I might as well move to my own Nextcloud instance. It's actually still free since I'm using Oracle Cloud's free tier, though of course there's my admin time, but I actually sort of enjoy that.
Dropbox lost me years ago when they removed the 15GB or whatever limit I had with bonus space. I got the message about what they wanted and uninstalled when they started hounding me through app notifications to pay for extra space because I only had "__ MB" of space remaining.
Oh well, between Amazon syncing my photos as part of Prime and GDrive I have plenty of cloud storage for my needs.
Shouldn’t those prices be affected by moores law ?
I think I remember the tier prices being roughly the same since the service came out.
I get that salaries went up which adds to price, but over time it feels like storage price should go towards zero.
This comes up all the time regarding Dropbox, why can't you pay less for a less-storage tier?
The answer is you're not really paying for the storage. You're paying for the servicing. The application with its network connectivity and data transfer, plus the overhead costs of billing and support when necessary.
The proposition may look like "$100 for 10 TB", but that's not a ratio that you can halve or whatever. It's $100 for 10 TB and all the network servicing and support apparatus, which doesn't change if the storage amount does.
It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a tier for less than 100/year, it's that they don't want to. We around HN know about reducing headaches by avoiding pathologically cheap customers. Dropbox makes more profit overall by getting some of the would-be cheapos to round up to 100/year and letting the rest walk.
But that argument works the other way around as well.
If the software is already built, it would be the same dev cost to offer 50gb, or 10TB.
Sure there might be some customer support issues that don’t scale the same way, but then why not only offer customer support for higher tiers ?
They don't have the scale of customers to profit from £16. Compare how many people in the world use google per day vs dropbox.
When you have less scale, you need to charge a bit more for your initial level.
I’m thinking of doing the same, especially as the Dropbox app doesn’t sync on iPhone whereas google photos do. But Ive delayed the migration for years as its too much of a pain
I would recommend staying out simply because I trust google less with my primary data store backup than I do Dropbox. Especially with the risk of account locking.
Condolences to the affected Dropboxers. I think the silver lining for all of you is that amidst this turmoil, you're well positioned just by having Dropbox on your resume.
As someone laid off 2 weeks ago from a company with much less notoriety, I cringe at the idea of having to now compete with 500 of you.
Good luck out there.
Same here. I hate that my thinking has become so zero-sum, but after four months of this, the first thing I think now when I see another high-profile layoff is “great, more name-recognition resumes to consign mine to the trash.”
> You'll also have some time TODAY AND TOMORROW to wrap up and say goodbye to colleagues.
As an European, I don't think I will ever get used to the fact that in the US people can be told "go home, you're fired" like that, effective immediately.
As a fellow European, I used to feel that way. Having lived in Canada for a while now, I prefer short notice periods.
It means that I can be more flexible in pursuing opportunities. Businesses also tend to be more risk-seeking because the downside of hiring someone is lower. That benefits me as an employee because it is much easier to get hired.
I’ve been laid off, so I also felt the negative consequences. The key for me was building an emergency fund. Granted, if a person is in an employer's market, the short notice system is terrible.
The asymmetry between employee and employer is especially troubling to me. The socially expected forewarning for quitting a job is 2 weeks notice. In contrast, it's common for employers to terminate effective immediately. I get that it's technically not a requirement to provide notice when leaving, and this is a direct consequence of at-will employment, but it sure sucks.
They will likely remain on the payroll for many months. Tech company of that stature give very generous severance packages.
Over time I've switched from Dropbox to Google Drive to iCloud as my primary way of storing files I want backed up and/or able to be shared.
Replacing the Dropbox client with Maestral https://maestral.app meant a much happier system with a lighter application running. Also no prompts for the SD card to be uploaded.
When Dropbox limited an account to 3 devices, it made sense to use Google Drive more.
Google kept changing the naming and functionality of its client. The final blow, though, is the way that they insist on showing a screen of files instead of the folders that were carefully created.
A lot of people don't use folders very much or at all and that's definitely the trend. But it means that all the work somebody does in organizing their files is thrown out the window.
Google Drive seems like it's more and more forcing people into having a Google Account even if they use a hotmail or yahoo email address.
iCloud with a family subscription means that a family of 5 can have all of their devices and files backed up for $10/month. BackBlaze for laptops and desktops is $7/month these days so $10/month seems like a reasonable deal.
Dropbox decided that the business world was their market and that's reasonable.
For individuals, there still seems to be a market for file serving with no ads, good security and easy access for people regardless of their email domain. Say sharing photos from a family trip or the soccer games your kid played in.
500/0.16 = 3125
That's a much leaner headcount than what I would expect for a company with as large a market footprint as Dropbox.
And yet I can't help but wonder what they need that many people for? The core of dropbox is still file syncing with extra tooling to enhance that. Figma had just over 200 people when they sold to Adobe and that is a pretty complex application.
The HN rule of headcount: if you have to ask, it’s because it’s Sales.
Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x. Sales reps, account managers, CSMs, solutions engineers, forward deployed engineers, priority support, compliance...
> Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x
Can you expand on this. Why is this the case. Does it even mean increase in engg headcount, if so why. Can you link to somewhere if possible. Always had this question, and this pattern is very similar in other places. So maybe it works?
It does increase engineering headcount because you are expected to add a lot of features to your offering that end users wouldn't necessarily care about, like DLP, eDiscovery, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, admin controls, compliance with a hundred industry regulations (HIPAA, FINRA, SOX), key management, custom retention policies, data residency. The larger increase comes from the fact that large companies aren't using the checkout form on your website to buy the product, but expect a dedicated team to negotiate the contract and help with product rollouts and customization across their company.
Because you enterprise customers expect it. They pay large multiples above SMB to get dedicated (human) service
Dropbox's revenue is about $2.5B/year. They want to grow too. You need a lot of people to support that. Sales, marketing, customer success, etc. It's not just the engineers who build and maintain the product. You cannot ignore revenue and growth potential when comparing head counts between companies.
Sales, marketing and support probably make up a majority of their workforce.
The AI thing is transparently a fake excuse that will pass the sniff test for their finance department.
Also, what were these 500 people doing anyway? Dropbox has basically been the same product for years.
> Dropbox has basically been the same product for years.
I'm assuming you're just talking about your personal experience with their consumer product, because this statement is laughably false. Dropbox has made a tons of changes and acquisitions to beef up their enterprise offerings, which is clearly where they've been focused, and where the money is.
https://jobs.dropbox.com/listing/4987352
>Role Description We are looking for a technical leader to help shape the Machine Learning agenda for Dropbox’s new initiatives. This will involve developing high impact ML solutions that touch hundreds of millions of people and a lot of data. From images to documents in every language, using the full range of Machine Learning techniques from deep learning, interacting with modern LLMs (natural language), computer vision, etc. and executing everywhere from mobile devices to large clusters on our back-end infrastructure.
They pretty much don't know what they don't know and are looking for someone to build it for them.
If I had to hazard a guess at the strategy, they are looking to build an in-house multi-modal model to power enterprise search.
While there's "full ownership" meme but at least they make things clear:
* How many are going to be fired.
* When will employee know they are fired.
* Severance package.
No amount of thought and prayer are going to help, straight to the point.
"As the world moved from physical film to digital photography, or from land lines to wireless communication, or from DVD rentals to streaming, opportunity and disruption went hand-in-hand. Companies that embraced a new reality and took decisive action did well. Companies that held onto the past or tried to have it all did not.
These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud"
Key takeaway, CEO thinks shift to AI is as consequential to his business as the shift from landlines to cell phones Et al.
Because AI is what you need to store your files...
AI is super cool, but at least for storage of my files in the cloud I prefer something "dumb" to be honest
The money is in enterprise and with all of a company's files they're well positioned to do something AIish on them. Not sure there's anything really there but also don't think they have much choice but to jump on the hype train
Google Drive totally changed the way I locate files. Instead of combing through folders, I just search.
AI is going to be extremely useful when I can query my files as a knowledge base directly. Like game-changer useful.
How do you look up all those files, though? Remember that picture from that thing with the guy? Back when all that other stuff was happening?
Why store if you aren't going to retrieve? If retrieval is important then making retrieval efficient and AI based is definitely useful.
Drew Houston needs to step down. The company has been aimless for a decade. The 'collaborative workspace' was an obviously bad idea that they sunk years of company-wide resources on (ask me how I know!)
Based on a older comment from wittekm "I was at Dropbox from 2015-2020"
For our industry "impacted" is going to be the word of the year
Anyone know why the ~15% number keeps showing up in recent layoffs?
The startup I was at recently laid of 15%. I'm pretty sure it wasn't for (public) optics, because the layoff didn't get any press coverage.
And based on the startup's business, I very much doubt the layoff was triggered by ChatGPT's success.
My best guess would be behind-the-scenes VC strategizing, but this is happening even with publicly traded companies like DropBox.
It's like a safe sounding number that cuts back on expenses but doesn't spook your existing employees and investors. Besides, you can always do another 15% in six months if need be. If you say, "we're laying off 70% effective immediately" it will sound like the ship is going down.
It's a plausible theory.
Is there evidence that this is the specific reasoning that companies are using?
Well, if the market hurts 15%, needing companies to find a 15%, wouldn't you expect layoffs to be around 15%, which would be similar for most companies?
Why is a digital storage company moving into AI? Personally haven’t used them for at least 5-6 years so I am out of the loop there.
Seems like a poor excuse to cut people.
Maybe they will have a peek at your images/files and train some AI?
I bet it's not to train an AI. That would be a disaster. Just use an AI for retrieval and chat based on your files.
Loads of data to steal and resell via ai. Time to move on to better suited image hosts or private storage.
Same reason everyone--even iced tea makers--had to have a crypto story several years ago.
I'd love pay Dropbox money and let them keep their workforce hired. I've used their free service for years, and WANT to sign up for a plan and pay them something, but their paid plan options are silly, I have 4GB for free, their starting paid plan is 2TB for $12CND... that's a big leap and way more storage than I need. I'd be happy with 100GB plan, or a 500GB (1/4 the size of their starting 2000GB plan), for $3 would be more storage than I need, and a much more enticing reason to sign up.
I've brought this up before to their support team. But I guess they aren't interested in small fish accounts and only want 2TB whales signing up.
This is why I use Google Drive which comes with 15GB of free storage. Even OneDrive has 5GB of free storage.
Looks like “focusing on AI” is the excuse du jour for short-term cost cutting to keep profits stable if this market downturn lasts a few more years.
Big thumbs up for at least mentioning it in the first line rather than burying it. Shameful we can't even expect that little.
It surprises me that Dropbox has more than 500 employees at all... that's a lot of people for a product that does one thing well that hasn't substantially changed in years...
To be clear: I'm a fan. Just sincerely don't know the benefit of what could be a very targeted and strategic company in having so much staff.
I'm curious the size of the companies you've worked in, and what sort of support, legal, finance, etc requirements they've had. Companies aren't just made up of engineers.
I see this same comment on every single one of these layoff threads and they always seem to be a bit disconnected.
Failed startups lol
They gave the employees who were let go the opportunity to clean things up and talk to their coworkers. It's weird how in this age that's considered shocking, but kudos to Dropbox for at least doing it the right way.
CEO says AI casualties
Would anybody else be content with mass layoff messages in JSON format? { severance, healthcare, perks }
I’m okay without the explanations or attempt at empathy thats partially designed for other stakeholders like vendors who want to know the company is healthy
Just take the media L and move on, I bet there are people that would like them for that approach and attract talent. Its pretty insufferable to be around employees that actually like the “family” coddling talk so if they’re not there to begin with then its a better work environment
As with other announcements, I'd like to know the job function breakdown. How much of this is sales, marketing, etc. Specifically I want to know how many were software developers.
Have other companies been blaming the potentials of AI as a reason for the layoffs? GPT is impressive but it seems pretty early to cut 15% of your workforce because of it.
There's something a bit discordant about using the Dropbox font to convey this message.
Feels a bit like having an illustrator create a corporate Memphis graphic of a layoff.
I can only imagine some giant long armed blue person dumping a bunch of tiny long armed blue people out of a bin, out of window.
There's also a paper-textured fern in the background.
Dropbox's art and typography style has always been dystopian and brutalist to me. Though it is just a smidge better now than it was.
Bummer, I always enjoyed reading about their engineering culture. Seems like a nice place to work.
Hopefully they'll figure this out and rebound from their predicament.
About the AI thing (assuming it's true and not merely a convenient excuse for layoffs):
Is every company just planning to feed all of their customer data through GPT / OpenAI, or will they build their own AIs? The first choice seems risky, from a business, legal and privacy perspective. The second one would require a large amount of capital and has many other risks.
Given the rise of foundational models the tuning/adaptation on top is quite a bit cheaper.
I imagine foundation models become a bit like cloud provider paas offerings vs rolling your own data centers.
Why does Dropbox have so many employees? Isn't it just a small program for synchronizing files? What are all those developers writing?
Just like clockwork, the "I have no idea what this multibillion dollar company actually does now, so let me comment on how they must have way too many employees and how it could be built in a weekend" HN comment is in.
I feel like HN should just autogenerate these comments now for stories like this (perhaps with a helpful response explaining what the corporation actually does do and giving some examples of corporate jobs that are a necessity at a certain size).
Companies adopting ChatGPT to add some useless chat bot is going to be the next “long island blockchain”.
I'm pretty excited for every company to have a better way to search their stuff, if it works out that way.
>> “ We’ve believed for many years that AI will give us new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work”
I’ve speculated that this is the rationale behind some of the recent layoffs. Finally we get some confirmation.
As a heavy OpenAI user, I think it is a premature optimization.
It didn't read to me that they're laying people off because they think ChatGPT lets them need less employees, which is what most of the fearmongering (which may in time be justified) has been about A.I.
From what I read it sounded like they're making a major shift to investment in A.I. technology, and dropping departments in their company that don't align with that new direction (while aggressively hiring in the A.I. field).
Companies have shifted focus all the time in the past, and axed departments that no longer align with that vision. Meta's doing that right now with enterprise VR as they're dropping that to focus more on A.I. as well (have to jump on that A.I. bandwagon to please them shareholders, after all, which I don't doubt is half the reason Dropbox is doing this as well). But this isn't exclusive to A.I.
So the new competition landscape will be: OpenAI, DeepMind, whatever Elon comes up with and DropBox AI? Seems like a jump.
>I take full ownership of this decision and the path that led us here.
There's the free bingo space!
Taking full responsibility seems to mean literally nothing nowadays
Yep, truly taking responsibility = returning comp to the company to keep more of these people on.
There's a reason they said "ownership", not "responsibility".
Oh nice catch. A subtle, but big difference.
The whole letter seemed pretty well written and as good as it could be, the severance and benefits are generous, all good except for this part. It reminded me of Gavin Belson laying off the Nucleus team. If you're "taking full ownership" but there's no financial effect on you, what does that mean exactly? You felt sad for a few minutes while you were writing the letter?
It means they are taking the credit for making a good business decision. When the share prices go up because of the layoffs, he wants to make sure everyone knows that he is responsible for it.
"Though I take full responsibility, unfortunately you bear the full consequences."
"It is I that must remain and bare the heavy burden of their failure..."
I take responsibility, you're fired.
Ugh, cant he just come out and say he feels the company is better off without them? Why does it always need to be a difficult decision.
Literally every company is doing the same right now. It seems like the decision was quite simple.
So much bitterness and resentment around layoffs. Why? It's not personal, it's just business. Everyone got paid great money to do easy work, and the world is still full of opportunity.
> In some areas, investments that showed promise before the downturn have more limited potential today.
Which areas? Which employment category are they cutting? Hard to tell from the message.
I guess things like dropbox passwords are going to get even less attention now. That’s a pity because I actually like it and think it has a lot of potential.
It's a wonder they survived for so long considering how many good alternatives there are and how many issues they've had with security.
I'm surprised that a company that effectively just provides a cloud-hosted object storage API even had 500 employees to begin with!
How the F does a document storage company pivot to AI? The rush to AI is starting to look like an episode of Silicon Valley.
To be fair, documents context with things like semantic search could be the upcoming bottleneck for a lot of industry applications.
Even though a hundred+ QA products doing this (Chat with your files vibes etc) haven't had much success, they are ignoring the fact that trust is key to document storage, and that we haven't mastered correct context/snippet amalgamation yet - for example, one may want to include both statements that have high cosine similarity, and also statements with clashing natural language inference similarity (contractionary sentences). This gives the context window the statements needed to correctly reason and use logic from different parts of the document. Small things like order (e.g. grouping snippets from different documents together in per-document batches, and also ordering by page number the statements within each document) matter greatly.
Dropbox have 3000+ employees according to Google fiance. do you need that many people to run a online file storage service?
It feels really shitty to me when companies that are profitable lay people off
Transparent communications, decent severance package, able to keep devices. 8/10
I dropped Dropbox when they put KindaSleezy Rice on their board.
> particularly in AI
What? This is a file storage service.
Dropbox has 500 employees?
What I'm really shocked by is that Dropbox had 3000 employees! I'd have guessed the number to be between 500-1000. It's not that they come up with new products/features at a fast pace. What do 3000 people do there?
16% is the new 6%.
I stopped using dropbox once condi rice took the lead... if there isnt a more telling projection of cointelpro as appointing condi fn rice as head of your data harvesting/mining company, the only other person least trustworthy would be the big dick cheney. Ill never use dropbox again, they cannot be trusted.