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AOL Lays Off 450 In California
bmarklein writes "AOL has laid off 450 in California. The former Netscape campus is going from 675 employees to 300. The San Francisco office, which they obtained when they acquired Spinner (now Radio@AOL), and which housed Nullsoft after their acquisition by AOL, is being closed along with an office in San Diego. 100 employees have been offered jobs in Virginia or New York. No word on how this affects products like WinAmp. Justin, are you out there?"
Two Nullsoft employees (Brennan and Aus) were yesterday. Winamp will continue though.
Actually, it's 2% of their workforce.
I heard from a friend who works for AOL - their entire internal support staff is being moved offshore (to india).
i have no idea if this is the same layoffs though...
675 is the number of employees at the netscape campus that is being reduced to 300. == -375 jobs
as you point out. but that is only 1 of the 3 california offices being hit with layoffs in California. 450 refers to the number of total jobs lost in the entire state.
This leaves the balance of the 450 lost jobs (the 75 missing from the nestcape-alone tally) to come from the number of non-re-located employees from the sanfran complex (housing spinner and nullsoft), and the san diego offices.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
It has all the features WinAmp2 has, minus quite a few :-)
Seriously, though, it's awesome.Has replaced all audio playback players I've had/used.
/. Where the truth
The logic behind numbering it 5.0 is that it takes the best features of 2.0 (most everything) and 3.0 (the improved music library, dynamic skinning), and Winamp 2 + 3 = Winamp 5.
Oops, I meant most populated! I know very well that California is the third biggest state (after Alaska and Texas). It's early.
From what I heard AOL rushed out the release of Winamp 3, which is why it was such a piece of shit. But the Winamp 5 Beta RC 10 seems to have combined the few redeeming features of Winamp 3 with the functionality and non memory whoringness of Winamp 2....while being compatible with plugins and skins from both versions.
If I remember correctly, Justin quit Nullsoft a while back. Ah, here's the link.
Both NYTimes and slashdot jumped the gun there, he certainly does still work for AOL. Read his .plan.
Personally I don't want Winamp 3 because every version I tried was horribly unstable and I had to end up uninstalling it. The only really cool thing about it was the media library and that ended up in 2.x. So, I never saw any need to migrate.
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They have also layed off people at their Tucson, Arizona support site...so that should be up to about 2.2% of their work force. So you AOL'ers have a longer wait time on hold for your 7 minutes of support now (;
Yuma, AZ...You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
Your exatly right. Around here its a standard roadrunner connection and has all the crap expected from dialup aol, thier software, startpages, 'content' etc. Oh, and it costs $10 more a month than standard roadrunner.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Well, he's still around for now. http://www.winamp.com/team/finger.jhtml?who=Justin : "June 21 2003 @ 12:10pm
Been back for a while now, got all the work stuff sorted out. I'm at least content now to get Winamp 5 out, we'll see how it all goes from there."
Winamp 5 is nearing release, and these layoffs (as regrettable as they are) will not effect the Winamp 5 release.
The nullsoft members who were laid off were working on streaming media.
I believe that with the advent of winamp pro (for full speed cd ripping and burning and mp3 encoding) which will cost a small amount of $. We will see winamp having a steady revenue stream that will hopefully keep the core winamp team safe.
"You consider millions, I repeat, MILLIONS of customers damn few real assets?"
AOL dosen't OWN those people. A Subscriber list can't compare as an asset to TW's Copyrights to Time Magizine, to Warener studios, to Turner Broadcasting. There is no way in Hell that the AOL subscriber list was equal in value to the very real assets that TW held.
AOL has always had an attrition problem, of people leaving because they didn't like the service. There are Millions of former AOL subscribers out there. They were able to paper over this retention problem during the big growth phase of the internet when they signed up new customers faster than they lost old ones, but that phase is over.
AOL juggled the books during the merger to hide that a large part of thier claimed customer base were reciveing AOL for free, either thrugh the inital free offer or through extensions of free service that AOL sales reps gave when people called to cancel after the inital free offer expired. You could get AOL for free for several months just by calling to cancel and a lot of people knew it and took advantage of it by signing up for a new free account as soon as they couldn't get free extensions any more.
You are assuming that the present decline in AOL subscribers will stay at a static 5%. It won't it will increase as low cost dial ups eat at the subscriber list from below, and the cost of Broad Band access falls and eats at the subscriber list from above.
AOL also did some creative bookkeeping to make it look like ad revenues were higher than they actually were.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
I just tried Foobar2000 and it's not bad on paper -- it has most of the features that I'm looking for. But, its interface just seems a bit plain for me :-/. So, I think I'll stick with Quintessential Player (which also supports Ogg).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire