- Dropbox fires 500 employees
- The company blames the pandemic in particular for having negatively impacted its growth.
- Its founder wants to focus on new products
The company’s CEO, Drew Houston, announced it himself: Dropbox is preparing to thank about half a thousand of employees, i.e. almost 16% of its teams. In question, the founder explains that he suffered the full force of the crisis and had to adapt to economic changes, while developing new products that required skills lacking within the company. Among these, we find in particular the key subject of artificial intelligence, which continues to make ink flow in the specialized journals since the advent of ChatGPT.
With this is the pandemic of coronavirus which would have caused Dropbox to reorganize. Sanitary conditions would indeed have had a considerable negative impact on the publisher and, despite recovering in 2022, the recent dire statistics of the recession have probably taken a heavy toll on its finances as well. It will then have been necessary to bet everything on the activities core business, leading to the elimination of the least important positions for internal growth. We can therefore assume that it is above all the marketing teams that are affected by this backlash.
Consequences for users?
If you are a Dropbox user, free or paid: don’t panic. In concrete terms, the accounts should indeed continue to be supported, and even improved over time. In short, there is nothing to worry about and neither the interface nor the overall service should suffer from these events. Be aware that other big names in the cloud have also had to dismiss significant parts of their workforce. This is particularly the case of the American Google, Amazon or even Microsoft and Cisco.
To reassure, Houston also explains that its technicians will now work to improve the speed of execution of its app, so as to offer a better experience to those who host documents there. It now costs 9.99 euros per month to take advantage of 2 TB of memory with an annual subscription, but a free and limited offer of 2 GB is also offered by Dropbox. For comparison, Google Drive contrasts with its 15 GB, where Mega, once king with 50 GB on the counter, is now confined to 20 GB “only”.
The next focuses
For the rest, its leader explains that Dropbox will invest more in AI, but not only. Of the additional features should thus see the light of day very soon on mobile as on computer, and new collections of products are to be expected. Today, the Dropbox group, which is worth more than seven billion dollars on the Wall Street stock exchange, offers much more than simple online storage packages, with, for example, a DocuSign-type electronic signature solution for their sides.
In the meantime, employees who are laid off have the right to keep their professional computer for personal use, and still leave with no less than sixteen weeks of salary as well as support in finding a new job. Something to bounce back quickly.
