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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?"

22 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hardly a surprise given their sudden lack of enthusiam for non-microsoft products, now they've kissed and made up with Redmond.

    Anyone would wonder if Winamp and Netscape were just tools to help them get their way.

    Go mozilla...

    1. Re:surprised? by thales · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When that merger happened I was amazed that the TW management was willing to trade stock that represented the very real assets that TW held for overinflated dot.com shares that had a lot of hype and damn few real assets behind them.

      All stocks went down after the 90s buble burst in 2000, but if AOL had remained independant it would have sunk like a rock instead of dragging AOL/TW even lower than the general decline. You might also note that the bloodletting included dumping TW people that played key roles in that foolish merger.

      None of that affects the key part of my statement that the turn around in how AOL viewed Microsoft came After TW people stagged their revolt and took over management of the AOL holdings.

      --
      Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
    2. Re:surprised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
      Winamp is small and unobtrusive. I like it so I can double-click an mp3 and play it if I'm browsing through my hard drive.

      iTunes is more like a jukebox/library/music database than just an mp3 player. You can manually create playlists, like with winamp, or iTunes can create playlists based on queries. iTunes has the music browser built right in. Want to listen to all your country music? double-click the country genre. Want to listen to all music by one particular artist? or just a particular album? Easy as double-clicking. With Winamp, you'd need to use windows explorer to browse, or manually set up playlists.

      with iTunes, I find myself listening to a lot more music than I did with winamp or with CDs.

    3. Re:surprised? by thales · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "they didn't 'screw' TW in the merger"

      The Merger rated AOL as being slightly more valuable than TW. There is no way in Hell that AOL was worth more than a fraction of the value of TW at that time. As to who screwed who, that was a joint screwing. Just how much of it was AOL screwing TW stockholders, and how much of it was TW screwing themselves is debatable, but the TW stockholders did get screwed and they blame AOL for the screwing.

      --
      Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
  2. what about other non aol user features? by inf0c0m · · Score: 2, Interesting

    what about other aol services that non aol people use? aka aol instant messenger, icq, etc etc?

  3. Hope Justin is still employed by Lshmael · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...especially since the new Winamp is supposed to come out sometime really soon.

    1. Re:Hope Justin is still employed by Barkmullz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      His .plan has a link to a picture of Winamp being used on the space station. woot.

      --
      Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
  4. XMMS by zoomba · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I wouldn't be surprised if XMMS suddenly got a whole lot of new talent on the dev team and it suddenly becomes the defacto media player if WinAmp is left to die.

  5. Tis the Christmas Season by demigod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Tis the Christmas Season, I got my notice yesterday,
    though I don't/didn't work for AOL.

    That drops our ratio of UNIX admins to UNIX servers
    from 1/200 to 1/400.

    --
    "The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
    Major Major
  6. Re:Does affect Nullsoft by RussGarrett · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A new version is imminent. Unfortunately AOL are still debating the definition of "imminent" (it's finished, just the actual release is held up for unknown reasons).

  7. America Online - Moving to India.. no F'n way by cybrthng · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For real.. Show you "buy american" spirit and protest or cancel your accounts or get your family switched off aol.

    Doesn't is PISS YOU OFF that not only are these workers being layed off and jobs being transfered out of america, but they continue to jack up prices, restrict service and push cheasy upgrades as major features. On top of that, how can any company keep the word AMERICA in its title and start transfering jobs overseas.

    The ISP land is already a joke. You can pickup AS5200's, Ascend Maxen and other terminal servers with high port densities for pennies on the dollar.. i know it certainly isn't IT expenses infringing on profits..

    Why don't they quit spending out millions of wastefull cd's and pushing stupid commercials..

    Is america litterly going to shop itself out of existance with a blind eye towards supporting our own economy and local jobs?

    1. Re:America Online - Moving to India.. no F'n way by los+furtive · · Score: 5, Interesting
      You got it right on the nose! "Buy American" crap is just racist protectionism. When a job goes to India, it still goes to a human being, and one who currently doesn't get to live the bloated American lifestyle. If Americans (in general) didn't have the need to lead such bloated lifestyles, they could get by on a lower salary, which would allow the company to keep its employees in its own country.

      Jobs going overseas allows other people a chance to own houses, computers, cars and televisions, but more importantly allows more tax money to go back into their own economy, which is then reinvested so that water can be treated and delivered to where it is needed, infrastructure put in place for better markets, better medical aid, better roads. "Buy American" is a great ideal, but it's far far from the trade deficite truth Americans live in. unless Americans are willing to do the same work for a lot less, it's not going to change, and that won't happen until Americans curb their appetites for just about everything. Mark my words, unless there is some incredible breakthrough in technology, the excess we currently live in wont last much longer, or will become available to fewer and fewer people, as the dichotomy of classes increase.

      As a side note to my second paragraph, I wonder if its accidental that the US arms race, as well as its pressure on other countries to increase their military might, is not just to make sure that less money goes into infrastructure that would make those countries a better place. But thats a whole other ball of wax.

      --

      I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.

    2. Re:America Online - Moving to India.. no F'n way by BluedemonX · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You know, there's part of me that just shakes his head and chuckles at the whole thing. They no longer BUILD anything, and now they want to get out of the business of DESIGNING things, they just want to employ about four rich fat cats to MARKET and CEO the damn things.

      Yet, at the same time, they're sending their militaries all over the place to stomp people and assert American testosterological might.

      However, I see a parallel to all this. Any of you seen Gone With the Wind? The part where the Southern gentlemen just come to learn that the Yankees want to take their mint-juleps-on-the-porch-while-the-slaves-work lifestyle away from em and vow to fight? And Rhett "Common Sense" Butler says, simply, "dudes, you have no armouries, no cannon-making forges, no mining, no resources except for cotton and slaves. You import everything like that from the North. And they'll stop selling it to you the moment war is declared. This is a fool's game." And the Southerners refuse to listen and get slaughtered.

      Well, fast forward thirty years. The North is China. The South is the CEO class. The slaves are the poor hillbilly remnants of the once prosperous middle class. And when China makes a move that the USA CEO class finally is uncomfortable with, they'll find out too late that the modern equivalent of cotton and slaves, marketing and entertainment, can't be used to eat, build, heal or fight with.

      --

      --- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
  8. Re:Winamp 3 shelved by SuperMo0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My problem with Winamp3 was that for the longest time, it would pop up 6 or 7 error boxes that I'd haev to click OK on to get it to work. That and it was a total memory whore.

  9. Re:Winamp 3 shelved by lennart78 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the past I've seen some pretty neat things that could be done within winamp(2) visualisation. Somebody even managed to program a 3d-rendered asteroids game in it. It's not really usefull, but it warms my geek-heart to see a product with such versatility.

    However: the bottom line is: I've always regarded winamp as a software mp3-player. And when I double-click an mp3, I want to hear it instantly, and not wait around for something like 10 seconds on a PC with recent hard and software for the music to start.

    It's cool if it's got lot's of features, but it should at least do that for which it was designed/intended. Winamp3 failed it, so I switched to an alternative, and many more with me for as far as I know. Complies with the qoute above it seems...
    Too bad for winamp. Really liked it so far...

  10. Justin has been gone for a while by John+Harrison · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Didn't Justin leave several months ago? Slashdot says he did!

    --
    Lasers Controlled Games!
  11. Ah, sensative HR departments by MadAnthony02 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The idiots in HR sent me a big fat glossy book, personalized with my own numbers, about what great benefits the company has for it's employees. The only thing they missed in the personalization was the fact that I was fired. How sofisticated, the company really loves me.

    That sounds sadly typical of the people who work in HR departments. A few years ago, my mom was laid off from an insurance company after they decided to close the office she worked at. Several days later, they called her at home to do an exit interview, and one of the questions they asked was "why did you leave this position?" - which made her start crying.

    Come to think of it, this was just after Christmas - I was home at the time on Christmas break from college. The timing may have been more a fiscal calender that conincided with the calender year, but it still seemed kind of harsh.

    --
    I have blog like everyone else
  12. What the people who fired you did. by twitter · · Score: 2, Interesting
    This just in - the power lunch is back. A close example from that article:

    Over at the Four Seasons, events of some significance are on the menu along with the white truffle risotto ($130 for an appetizer portion) and grilled dorade. On Nov. 20, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Roger Ames spent a good long while chatting amiably with heads bent toward each other while other captains of industry, including Ronald O. Perelman, Steven Rattner and Ronald S. Lauder, casually took in the significance of the pairing. A few days later, Warner Music, of which Mr. Ames is chairman, was sold to a group headed by Mr. Bronfman for $2.6 billion, which sort of puts the price of risotto in perspective.

    Oh yeah, that's real good perspective. People who think a $1,000 lunch is a reasonable business expesnse think shit - canning programmers is a good idea. The article goes on to predict good economic times. Ugh.

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  13. This is a good thing... by KaiserZoze_860 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know your gut reaction (and that of those directly effected by the cuts) is that this is a travesty of justice and that AOL should burn in hell (and it should along with that ridiculous yellow d00d).

    There is a sunny side to this. Think of all the talent that has been freed into the California landscape... All of those coders, with nothing but time on their hands (in between job searches)...

    I think we can expect to see some interesting and potentially ground breaking start-ups to appear come June/July when they've all given up trying to join a big company. Isn't that how we got from 16mHz machines only good for word processing to the current state of internet, gaming rigs, media servers and TiVo's in the first place?

    To those who are unfortunately out of the job, please keep your talents current. By all means, discuss the idea you had in the shower this morning for that great new piece of software/hardware with your best friend over a beer. Put a desk in your garage and start typing. Give the tech power so horribly mismanaged by corporate America (online) back where it belongs: with the geeks.

    --KS--

  14. AOL is not in bed with Microsoft... by The+Lynxpro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If anything, AOL Time Warner sued Microsoft. Sure, AOL shouldn't have settled their antitrust case, but large institutional shareholders have been pressuring the board to start cutting costs and reducing debt (kinda funny how AOL Time Warner has $25 billion in debt and shareholders are complaining yet Comcast has a debt of $30 + billion and its JUST a cable company) and they didn't have the stomach to continue fighting Microsoft which probably would've lasted in court another 5 years. So instead of winning a $10 billion case, having the damages trippled to $30 billion and then having to fight Microsoft on appeals for several more years, AOL Time Warner took the $750 million settlement and "promised" to look at Microsoft's Windows Media technology.

    Since then, AOL has been aligning itself with Apple. Instead of using WMA files, AOL has been shifting to support the iTunes Music Store. Big loss for MSN. Sure, AOL has been cutting out Mozilla development, but they haven't snuggled up to Microsoft either. I would be willing to bet that AOL Time Warner was embarassed to fund Mozilla once Apple brought Safari to market (I'd bet money AOL would offer a Windows-based "Safari" if Apple made an official port). Check out that AOL PC. AOL is rebundling Star Office as "AOL Office." That's not exactly endearing themselves to Microsoft. AOL also gave lipservice in the settlement to AIM/MSN interoperability, but nothing has happened on that account (I'd expect to see AIM/Yahoo Messenger interoperability before that). AIM is now available on all the major mobile phone services in the U.S. (Cingular just signed on).

    So where exactly is the so-called Microsoft-love? AOL is still fighting Microsoft, although it is more special ops style than overt displays. And if AOL cuts Nullsoft, it isn't because of Microsoft, its because of Apple's iTunes... After all, Steve Jobs pretty much praised AOL in that interview with Rolling Stone, plus anyone with a Mac with Safari as their browser knows that the Netscape/Apple webpage is the default homepage for nothing...

    ps. Oh, I completely forgot about AOL and Apple's cozy relationship with iChat...hmmm...

    --
    "Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
  15. Incredible by kortex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In my snail mail. AOL 9.0 in a tin box. I wonder how much they spent on these tin boxes. I also wonder if it was worth the jobs of 450 people. The idiocy of some corporations new cease to amaze me.

    --
    -- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
  16. The Mountain View campus is already empty by EvilStein · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's where I used to work. 475 Ellis St. Now I work at NASA, literally down the street from the Netscape/AOL campus.

    AOL took the "Netscape" logo OFF of the signs facing the street. The Netscape flag is gone. The parking lots are almost always empty and there are several "FOR LEASE" signs dotting the campus.

    Meanwhile, the *old* Netscape building houses Verisign and the old Netscape fountain has the %$#@! Verisign logo on it.

    It's really sad and depressing.