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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?"

2 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

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    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).