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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?"
That has to be a good .03% of their workforce.
Slow day already?
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...
Q: What do you call 450 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
"What we're doing is actually moving some of our projects into teams in other facilities."
Sounds to me like winamp will have a distinct bangladesh feel to it next version
675 - 450 = 300?
what about other aol services that non aol people use? aka aol instant messenger, icq, etc etc?
...especially since the new Winamp is supposed to come out sometime really soon.
Two Nullsoft employees (Brennan and Aus) were yesterday. Winamp will continue though.
AOL started out in the dial up industry which from what I can tell has gone right down the shitter for them, however they still managed to merger with Time-Warner before they figured out. Now what have they got? Certainly dial up won't get them anywhere, and the broadband service they offer is just a piece of seemingly annoying proprietary software. Where can they go from here ?
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
So does this mean I can expect a reduction of AOL cds in my mail?
Looks like he still works at Nullsoft to me, though it doesn't look like he knew that this was coming, or he didn't care: http://www.webdog.org/plans/314/
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?"
Hello!
You got laid off!
Goodbye.
%$##@!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
So do I. I remember people talking about them being "the next Microsoft", and not in a flattering sense. I remember the incompatible tags they introduced. I remember the appalling mess of Netscape 4 and CSS.
And then there was the <blink> tag...
I can remember distinctly when I switched to IE, and at the time it was because IE was better, not because Microsoft forced me to. I can also remember switching back to Mozilla (and then Firebird), again because the browser was better.
I would argue that the glory days of Netscape stopped at Netscpe 3, took a break and restarted in the present time due to Mozilla. I'm not certain now what percentage of Mozilla developers are ex-Netscape, but I imagine it's still high enough to be called Netscape-in-another-form.
Cheers,
Ian
AOL acquired Nullsoft a long time ago. Well before their version 3 release... which coincidently is said to be their worst release ever. Hmmm. Maybe you have a point.
You've got a pink slip!
Goo goo g'joob.
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
No actually it's an increase that's coming in the future. They've actually laid off a brewing anti-"cd shipping" group within the company that was distributing propaganda to eliminate the cd's that we enjoy getting in the mail. Thank God they shut these guys down. Now I can finish building my house of CDs...egg-cellent.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
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
Oh well, it can be worse. You could get ranked and yanked, like I did. When that happens, they paper your file, rake you over the coals for a few months and fire you individually. It looks great. In my case, my supervisor made sure he nailed me on my birthday. Another great and integral part of rank and yank is bonus incentives for those not fired. The company was talking about bonuses as high as 15%, knowing they could split the salaries of the people they planned to fire. It's strange how no one but supervisors were excited about that.
Look forward to getting the usual communist propaganda from the company by mail for a while. 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.
My company was big, but Time/Warner is much bigger. I wonder if the Netscape people are going to have it that much worse than I did. Nah, it's hard to get worse than fired, no matter how the jack-asses dress it up.
Welcome to the great suck that is the "recovery". I've been out of real work for more than a year. I'm not really happy to have lots of company.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I for one was expecting this. Considering that earlier in the year AOL Time Warner decided to change its name back to just Time Warner. It is common knowledge that they have been losing thier clients to other ISP services like MSN and Comcast. When your user base shrinks the company must as well to keep from losing to much money on having to large of a workforce for thier userbase.
-Certified TechnoWeinie
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.
So do I. Though only as an event in history. Netscape Communicator is gone. Dead. Arising from its ashes, however, is a top class browser that leaves netscape communicator and internet explorer coughing in its dust. Let go of netscape. AOL had no problem doing so.
ibhear
It's: Winamp, it is really whipping the elephant's ass!
Somebody tell me that little icon fscker running man was included in those layoffs, and also will some of their users be laid off ...
source http://www.antioffline.com/aolstory.html
Confident with the US government's standing on its purchases, AOL announced today they will purchase themselves in a hostile takeover move in an effort to ensure they don't compete with themselves.
Time Warner an AOL subsidiary backed AOL's decision with the company's spokesperson stating "We as a company are please to announce that customers will have the ability to choose between AOL and the new line of products titled XAOL which simply translates to eXtended AOL which will feature more robust happy face icons with a slightly higher 102 megabyte overhead of icons and sounds.
"In addition we are now ceasing the abilities of hackers by bundling XAOL with the latest in our very own firewall which features will include packet filtering, AOHell punters for our chatters, and SpamGod v.1 for our users who send bulk mail."
As for the takeover plans include an overhaul of the technical support group which will now have mandatory classes at Romper Room and a new set of AOL for Dummies, Internet for Idiots in 21 days for Dummies, and The Internet Who'd of Thunk it, books in order to facilitate their skills.
"Customers will also have new screen names to keep up to date with the changes of the net, so a user named billybob will have all aliases associated with that name to keep AOL as hip as ever. BiLLyBoB, xXxBiLLyBoBxXx, b1llyb0b, are some of the combinations available at this time." states Justin Case CTO Operations.
Along with these added new functionalities in AOL, monopolies will be built around Time Warner's existing empire and the entire cast of the WB's popular will fill chat rooms from 6-9pm and the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will also join popular chatroom channels such as DesperateAndDumbHousewives.
Investors are delighted to this deal and are pouring millions of dollars into this new venture in hopes of someday being able to interpret anything related to technology. "As long as its on the Internet it must be profitable, so we filled out portfolios and dumped our life savings into this wonderful idea."
Phil McGroin analyst Meryll Lurch
MoFscker
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.
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?
'You've got dole!'
'You've got a P45.'
'You've got food stamps!'
. Any more? I suspect said ex-employees will be finding out if you can build a house out of AOL cds.
that's what being anonymous on the net is all about.
IHATEAOL69 and AOLSUCKSCOCK3 could join the xmms team, and so long as they stayed that way, i don't think anyone would care, as long as the software worked.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It comes from the same place as those 1500 free hours that you have to use within 60 days.
SharkJumper
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.
Didn't Justin leave several months ago? Slashdot says he did!
Lasers Controlled Games!
I hope that their layoff comes with a nice deal, like maybe getting an AOL CD in the mail.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Oh grow up. You're putting words into my mouth that are utterly without basis from what I posted. I think any job loss is bad news, and 450 is really distressing. I've been in situations where I've put my shirt on the line for a company I believed in and, in some cases, just wriggled through, and, in other cases, paid the price with my job. And, hey, guess what? In one of those cases I was the sole programmer at a company that ended up struggling and decided to cut me loose first.
If you read my direct quotation of the 2% figure as being somehow trivializing, then you're deliberately trying to spin it. 2% of a company's workforce is, to me, fairly substantial. Getting rid of innovative people such as the undisputedly talented programmers under discussion here is a very real and serious action.
Looking at your other post on this topic, it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder, but it's certainly justifiable. Unlike you, I'm not going to wish you ill or gloat, because I've been there and know how much it sucks, and it's just not worth it to spread the bitterness. I really do hope you find a job soon.
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."
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
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.
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--
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.
Unfortunately, AOL has gone down the pan and perhaps this distinction now works against them. Perhaps management doesn't feel the same guilt from slashing jobs when they're not technically AOL jobs.
For example, what do you do if you're using a proprietary, obsolete, closed source, single platform browser made by your main competitor but your Netscape division has developed an open source, standards compliant browser, capable of embedding in any app on any platform? Answer - sack all the Netscape developers of course! Why? Who knows, but I bet it boiled down to "not invented here" syndrome - IE is comfortable straitjacket, which Gecko is some scary 'open source' thing. AOL has become institutionalized.
I bet some management / marketing idiots fretted over the minor flux of replacing IE with the slightly scary Gecko and scuppered it. Apparantly AOL thinks letting your main competitor control your content delivery mechanism is good business, not sheer stupidity.
Nullsoft is another example of AOL stupidity. What do you do when you own one of the most popular media players on the market? Why, licence all your streaming content and players from Real of course! And for good measure, sign deals with Apple to sell your own music from their store when you've had the chance to sell direct using WinAmp via its minibrowser for three years.
In summary, there are some very dim bulbs in AOL.
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*
You've touched on a big beef of mine. Bay area housing at $250-$400/SF and up is not substantially different than Roanoke, Virginia housing at $100/SF, except you get more land under the building.
I bought 8 acres of hillside with a view that even God would be envious of for about 50k. Sure, it's ten miles outside of Blackburg (Virginia Tech), but that's not too far to drive. I even have DSL and CableTV (though I get my video via DirecTV).
I started a company that relies on the building industry, so I have to be somewhat close to civilization, and I'll be generating real income in under a year...starting from scratch.
Why is it that high tech firms believe that they must locate in big, expensive cities? How many of your programmers have to make face-to-face visits with clients on a weekly basis? You could just as easily move to Newport, Pembroke, or Pearisburg, VA and set up shop for nickles on the dollar. Would people have to relocate? Probably. Can you live on $45k? Comfortably. And you'll know your neighbors, and everybody will wave to you when they see you. Go to www.gilescounty.org, call up Chris McKlarney and he'll set you up. He's got space for new businesses that's just now coming online.
Me? I rent space in an historic building downtown for under $5/SF. 768kADSL to my business runs $44/mo. Electricity is $0.05/kWh. VaTech is right down the road - good for interns and p/t workers, plus the research library and all the attractions of a big state campus.
Locating a non-geographically sensitive business in a big city is about as smart as equiping an accounting firm with Aeron chairs, solid mahogony furniture, G5s with 23" 16:9 LCDs, and a couple of DS3s. Sure it looks nice, but it's ego-fluff that will likely kill the business financially before it ever has a chance.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
inefficient == less than full capacity. Central planning wastes resources that people would otherwise exploit as they pleased. The net result is a lower standard of living and under-employment. It's generally for the benefit of those in power under both systems too.
Music is a good example of market consolidation resemeling a socialist state. The FCC decides who can broadcast and collects lots of money. The big music companies decide who they will promote and collect lots of money. People who could promote alternate acts are locked out and musicians end up doing anything else for a living because music does not pay, even for best selling artists. So the whole structure of restrictions is really supporting the FCC and RIAA. It can be argued that musicians would be better off, ie employed, in a system that was free.
Don't worry, I was fired.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
doing lines off a supermodel's chest. rich/lucky bastard. :-P
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.
Healtheon is gone.
Turned into WebMD
SGI is dying.
Microsoft bought much of their relevant IP so they could ship the XBox, royalty-free. Nintendo, NVidia and ATI got their Engineers. Tera got Cray.
We need much longer holding periods for insiders
Clark is famous for, among other things, writing some of the most favorable deals with VCs ever. He keeps a large share of the company and holds it for a long time. This reduces marke liquidity and makes it more difficult for outsiders to participate in his companies. If anything, Clark's problem was holding his shares for too long, creating fragile, monolithic companies.
Presently, the economy is recovering from the Enron and Worldcom accounting scandals. It is difficult to turn a good idea into $$$ when there is little consensus as to how the new accounting rules should be interpreted to successfully create new wealth.
Until then, expect to see some growth in international companies listing ADS/ADR on US exchanges. It will be a few more years before we see rapid American tech growth.