I keep thinking the same thing. When it was all happening, I kept thinking that maybe the frontline troops were green and just in shambles but surely they had real troops in the ranks that would step up. It turns out they had like one group of real troops and that was it.
I mean the other option would have been to keep these staff and leverage them to drive innovative solutions with your product or possibly close open feature requests and bug submissions. I mean, these 500 people could have worked towards new initiatives to grow the business as they are keenly aware of the drop box business already and would be able to execute quickly on new initiatives. There are so many interesting places that drop box could expand into and they are instead choosing to layoff staff that could get them there.