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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?"
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...
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
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).
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...
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
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.
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.
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*
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"
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.