Dropbox announced Thursday it has laid off 500 employees, approximately 16% of its workforce, with company leaders seeing emerging challenges to its business model:
CEO Drew Houston announced the changes in a blog post on the company's website.
"First and foremost, I want to recognize the impact this decision has on Dropboxers who are affected and their families, and I take full ownership of this decision and the path that led us here," Houston wrote.
[...] "While our business is profitable, our growth has been slowing," Houston said. "Part of this is due to the natural maturation of our existing businesses, but more recently, headwinds from the economic downturn have put pressure on our customers and, in turn, on our business. As a result, some investments that used to deliver positive returns are no longer sustainable."
The company also said advances in AI will affect the company's future.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday May 02, @05:42AM (5 children)
It's a souped-up rsync, what do they have 3,000 people working on? And is "AI" the new dog-ate-my-homework of trimming bloated workforces?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02, @06:00AM (1 child)
A few engineers and many non-work positions like the ones that were cut at Twitter and other Sillycon Valley companies.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/google-worker-documents-a-day-in-my-life-getting-laid-off-in-viral-tiktok/news-story/3b7783fa98c85f229ab24c91ab72bd80 [news.com.au]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02, @04:00PM
When so many profitable companies are sacking people, you might be sacked too even if your company is profitable - just because the CxOs decide to follow the trend.
So don't visit youtube, FB, etc (and make those tech companies more money); and start refreshing your resume and looking for backup jobs?
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday May 02, @12:55PM (2 children)
If only it were anything like rsync. Most of the time someone's given me a dropbox link to a publicly available file it's seemed as though they're doing some dopey shit that makes it immune to programs like wget. Between that and lying about how they can't decrypt your stuff dropdox can suck it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 02, @05:55PM (1 child)
But they really can't decrypt your stuff. At least if you've encrypted it with a secure algorithm before storing it on Dropbox. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03, @03:36AM
Supposedly AES256 is resistant to differential cryptanalysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#Attack_mechanics [wikipedia.org]
So in theory others still shouldn't be able to crack it...
But I still suspect storing one copy only is safer than storing many copies of the same data encrypted the same key but with a tiny bit of the data changed...