Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AOL Lays Off 450 In California

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-luck dept.

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?"

11 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. Does affect Nullsoft by RussGarrett · · Score: 4, Informative

    Two Nullsoft employees (Brennan and Aus) were yesterday. Winamp will continue though.

    1. Re:Does affect Nullsoft by RussGarrett · · Score: 3, Informative

      Those RCs are very incremental changes. RC6 was of release quality, but Justin keeps improving it while AOL sort out whatever problems they're having. As I said, "imminent" is defined by AOL.

  2. Re:Woah! by PipianJ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, it's 2% of their workforce.

  3. About the layoffs... by Clay+Mitchell · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  4. Re:Math by *weasel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?"
  5. Re:Hope Justin is still employed by ActiveSX · · Score: 4, Informative

    If I remember correctly, Justin quit Nullsoft a while back. Ah, here's the link.

  6. Re:Hope Justin is still employed by RussGarrett · · Score: 4, Informative

    Both NYTimes and slashdot jumped the gun there, he certainly does still work for AOL. Read his .plan.

  7. Winamp 3 shelved by Mr_Silver · · Score: 5, Informative
    Interesting quote from Russ on the winamp forum:
    How about "never". The official line is that Winamp3 development is now stopped. Shelved. At least temporarily. And here I am sitting here trying to look optimistic. It's not "soon" any more, it's "maybe".

    The golden rule of customer service is: Give the customer what they want. The customer didn't want Winamp3, that much is clear. The customer didn't care about the most powerful API this side of, well, anything. They didn't care about platform independence. The average Winamp user is only vaguely aware of what Linux is, let alone how to use it. Much less than 1% of Winamp users want Linux support.

    Find it here.

    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.

    --
    Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
    1. Re:Winamp 3 shelved by RussGarrett · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hmm, that'd be me. Being rather melodramatic.

      I was rather more optimistic about things until yesterday. Most of Winamp3 is now open-sourced (except the skinning and scripting engine), and there are people working on a fully open-source version of Winamp3, now known as wasabi.player (and much improved since the old, old release which is still on the winamp.com frontpage).

  8. Arizona Sites Also... by malelder · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  9. Re:surprised? by thales · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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