Dropbox to shed another 500 staff, CEO takes 'full responsibility' Cloudy file-shifter Dropbox has axed about 20 percent of its staff, its second round of layoffs in less than two years. CEO Drew Houston said some parts of the business are booming, but cuts were needed where the company had over-invested or underperformed. In all, 528 staff will be let go. "As CEO, I take full responsibility …
As others have said, what does "take full responsibility" mean? If all I have to do to take responsibility is say that, then it's both easy and worthless to do so.
Exactly how one should take responsibility is unclear and unanswerable. The classic penalties, reduction in salary, losing authority or a job entirely, etc, are sometimes sensible. In other cases, doing that would cause more harm, or the negative event is not large enough to justify them. When those apply is something that people will never agree about. However, saying that someone "takes full responsibility" is about as useless as "we take your privacy very seriously". At most, it's nice that they don't actively want to hurt you even though they are going to, but more likely, it's meaningless words said because it's the convention to say them.
He's probably on a huge bonus based on share price, so he's spending the company's cash reserves (or, even worse, borrowing) to prop up the share price so he can cash in a multi-million dollar bonu$.
It's what they do.
Then he'll quit, and watch it crash and burn from the sidelines.
He may not even "quit". Rather, The Board[tm] may end up asking him to leave (pre-arranged and agreed-upon, mind) so that he can collect his huge golden parachute severance package on the way out the door.
He may even serve a term on The Board himself, e.g. "mentoring" his replacement, before choosing to "spend more time with family", perhaps sitting on a few other Boards here and there for a while, writing a book ("memoirs"), maybe a (paid) speaking tour, and so on. Eventually landing the top spot again at some other outfit. All this in spite of how badly the previous one was bungled.
Once they get their ticket punched, they rarely have to get off the train. The executive class looks after their own.
I've got a client that insisted on moving all their file shares to Dropbox. I was even told to not maintain a local backup, that everything would be in "the cloud" now.
Needless to say I set up a local backup of all their files, complete with network shares already set up to make dumping those losers as quick as possible. The VPN is ready, all the accounts are configured, all I have to do is tell them it's there and ready to use. Already told one guy when he was having trouble getting Dropbox to work on his desktop, he's effectively already switched back to in-house. When Dropbox screws up again, they're gone.
First. although I initially got mad at the CEO for the firings, he did give them 16 weeks of severance and, what impressed me, let them keep their office equipment assigned to them (I am assuming that means laptop and desktop computers). Yes, it still sucks, but during my career as an engineer I got laid off several times with freakin' zero of anything.
The other thought is the stock buybacks thingy. Yes, corporate has been using the smoke and mirror thing for years. I think the can has been kicked as far as possible. The next time it is kicked, it will fall down into the quarry!
Between those and the endless election finally coming around, the next few weeks will be most "exciting". You know, the kind of excitement when a car strikes your motorcycle and you are about to hit the pavement, that kind of excitement.
Thought 3 - over invested and ‘big bet’ on AI with it’s Dash AI search tool, which it has developed in partnership with NVidia.
So it’s spaffed tens of millions up the wall on a pile of NVidia AI hardware … with little effectively to show for it as a Return on Investment.
I’m still as surprised as last time that a 1 trick Pony like Dropbox has a 2,500 staff pool to cut from.
Yeah, buyout is what I started thinking.
I'm lucky that I got 11 GB free storage from DropoBox. 15 years ago that was a big thing… but now I have two different Google accounts (fully legimitately, one for work, the other private) that both have more. I still use Dropbox as a convenient way of synching photos from my phone to my computer. I think it remains the easiest "cloud" storage system to use and share stuff universally, but that's not much of USP.
"what impressed me, let them keep their office equipment assigned to them"
With an ever shrinking workforce they have no further use for them and it would probably cost more to collect then and sell them 2nd hand than they'd get back. I doubt they'r doing out of the kindness of their hearts.
I think you missed something here. They're not cutting people and expecting those units to improve. The units did badly, and they've decided not to bother having them anymore to cut their losses. The people who used to work on the things they're going to give up are going to lose their jobs because Dropbox no longer plans to have the things they were building.
Someone tell me how the following sentence got through any kind of quality check…
CEO Drew Houston said some parts of the business are, but cuts were needed where the company had over-invested or underperformed. In all, 528 staff will be let go.
Some parts of the business are WHAT? Dolphins? Biscuits? Worthless? Please, I cannot handle the suspense, tell me now…
And f the staff were being let go does that mean they were being held against their will before?
I smell AI written articles a lot on this site recently - Absolutely Idiotic!
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When Dropbox first showed up I signed up for their free layer: IIRC, 2 GB storage, available to all my devices. Hoo-rah! 2 GB wasn't much compared to Apple (5 GB) or MS (15 GB) or Google (15 GB) but it worked _everywhere_ and while Google did too, I trusted them more than I trusted Google, it being impossible to trust anything less than Google. Over time I increased the storage to 2.5 GB or so, still pitiful but also still free and available to all devices. And then Interesting Things started happening. File transfer rates went down; this happened on Macs, Windows, iDevices, on different Internet connections. Apple and MS didn't slow down. Hmm. I don't think that the problem was at my end. The nagging to move to a paid level increased. And then they allowed only three devices to connect on the free level. I had been using it mostly as a file transfer system; being able to have just three devices, and being limited to under 2.5 GB, and the slow transfer rates made it much less useful. The fact that Apple and MS worked on everything that wasn't Linux meant that I used it much less than before. At one point sticking files on a USB thumb drive and sneakerneting them was faster. And it was cheaper to buy storage from Apple and MS than to move to one of their pay levels. When you're more expensive than Apple, you're Doing It Wrong. I have _terabytes_ of Apple and MS cloudy stuff. My Dropbox cloudy stuff is mostly empty; I put a file or two on it, transfer to another device, delete. I don't leave stuff on Dropbox. Their efforts to try to force me onto a pay level have resulted in business for Apple and MS and my not giving a damn for them. Frankly, I expect them to die, and have been expecting them to die for years and see no reason whatsoever to let them have even a penny. I don't trust Google, but GoogleDrive handles 15GB in the free level and also works on Linux.
The possibility exists that if they had not throttled my connection, if they had provided more storage, if they had not arbitrarily cut from all devices to just three, I might have given them money instead of Apple or MS, and might not have bothered with GoogleDrive; I was on Apple and MS's free levels for a LONG time before throwing money at them. Their attitudes cost them business.
Used to be illegal before Reagan got in. Market manipulation. You see it with apple, Boeing, Microsoft, Google...fire the staff, buyback stocks, enrich the board & watch the products go to the wall....
#enshitification is in full swing
This is why you should NEVER have an ounce of loyalty to your employer, NEVER do an ounce of unpaid overtime
After having some success with the cloud storage bit, they decided that they should try to do more things. After all, there is only so much you can do when you're just selling access to lots of disks. So they tried making collaboration software. People already shared work in Dropbox folders, so why not make the software that makes it easier for people to work on the same file from other places? They tried several other related programs. Most of these were canceled at some point, and I don't know all the things they tried. For example, the article indicates that they had hired some AI people, but I don't have a clue what they were doing. So no, it doesn't take that many people just for file storage, but that's not what all those people were doing.
When I read that they were making 528 people redundant I was amazed as I thought that they would only have a fraction of that number to start with. Given the limited nature of their technical offering I guess the bulk of their staff will be for sales and billing which admittedly are necessary business functions, but even so 2,500 for what they offer is incredible. Fire the CEO now for being fully responsible for having hired so many people.
Quite a few years ago Dropbox stopped supporting their Linux client on RHEL7 and/or NFS mounted home directories which pretty much killed it locally and a little later the institution (being mostly MS and lesser extent Apple) migrated to MS OneDrive dropping its Dropbox subscription.
One sorry Sad Sack had built some emacs etc automation around Dropbox folders and was frantic until we discovered Rclone for him. Because his new OneDrive folders, Dropbox and various other remote resources (davs?) could be accessed with Rclone, he was as happy as a pig in mud.
Even with Rclone I personally found Dropbox quite flaky compared with the MS, Google and other providers, at least under Linux. So would not be too surprised that the company might be a death spiral but they would not be alone.
Sure, the company doesn't need the devices and maybe the employees can use them. Seems good.
Until you remember that these same devices had access to corporate data, and for people who had been doing more detailed troubleshooting maybe even some customer data. What is Dropbox doing to make sure that these devices are wiped properly before they are wandering free in the world, no longer secured and patched by the corporate toolset?
Are Condoleezza (ex. big oil) Rice, and Robert (ex. head of the CIA) Gates still on the board?
I can't tell, 'cos all mention of 'em seems to have disappeared from Wikipedia's page on Dropbox.
ref. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/tech-giant-pressed-ditch-condi-rice-msna306461
Dropbox's problem is that what the customers want, and were willing to pay a little bit for, was space online to put files, where they could be shared with others.
What Dropbox wanted to charge a lot of money for, is some sort of office automation system. Either you need this, in which case your company probably has it already, or you don't, so you aren't going to pay for it.
I'm in the latter camp. Happy to pay $10 a year (say) for a bit of disk space and no more. Not going to pay $100 for all the other stuff. Fortunately, for most of my needs, the free version is sufficient, so they get no money.
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