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Father of DVD Gets Bitter Reward
Ant writes "MSNBC has a
Newsweek article on Warren Lieberfarb, the father of DVD, transformed the movie business. And yet his reward was he was fired."
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Hey, the church wanted to oust Galileo for his views on the soliocentric universe. Being smart sucks.
Trent Polack
www.polycat.net
they moved his job to India.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Do you suppose he's that "cubicledrone" guy who was tearing up the career-related articles here yesterday with endless tales of being fired from job after job for his blatant superiority?
he got $10 million in severance pay.... if only I had such a rotten deal
If I discover a billion barrel oil field the super-major I work for gives me a 20% bonus. If I go for a powergrab they'll fire my ass. In most cases people like this do a lot of work, but there are a lot of other people and factors involved in popularizig dvds. I still like my job though...
I hear he's joining the Apple board of directors, right next to the father of the internet Al Gore. Steve jobs is afterall the father of computers. Wasn't it just fathers day too?
Jokes aside, there are lots of reasons to fire someone. Maybe he's just a prima donna and management was sick of him walking up to chicks in the office saying "I'm the father of the DVD don't ya know". Maybe he just smells bad or jerks off in his cubicle to often. It's not like management said "This guy made us a billion dollars, fire him quick!".
I think that story has a moral hiddden in it-No matter how much you have achieved,you should always have humility
I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
John Ruskin
Why does yahoo do this
Lieberfarb added billions of dollars to the company's value, says David Boise, his star lawyer, adding, "The question of how a company treats someone who has created that kind of value is interesting."
Not really. They didnt treat him any differently than they treat anyone else: with utter contempt.
Not because he's wealthy, but because he seems like just one of the many high energy, ego-driven assholes who inhabit the business world. He seems to have treated his peers just as poorly as they've treated him.
...he was ejected.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
While he worked his butt off and managed to get people to come together on the standard, he was compensated rather nicely. To the tune of several million dollars -- over $100M at one point.
I do not understand why anyone thinks they are "owed" when the lose their shirt gambling on the stock market. The only way he's got a claim is if he was prevented from selling the stock when he wanted to. Otherwise he's just another formerly rich dot-bomb victim, the same as a few million other people.
The only difference is he had direct control over $100M+ of stock, not a few thousand dollars in a "retirement plan" like most dot-bomb victims.
It seems he was raising hell throughout the company over his losses, blaming the company for the damage the stock value took after the merger. Again, if he had the option of selling his shares before the merger, he has no cause for complaint.
Regardless of whether he has a legitimite claim (because he wasn't allowed to sell his stocks), you just don't get issues resolved by ranting and raving throughout the company and making an overly public stink about it. You pick the key individuals who can provide resolution and badger them, not badmouth everyone who doesn't help you immediately.
If you make it as messy as he appears to have been doing, you get fired. Period. Any company, any nation, and industry. Nobody wants to keep an employee who spends their time bitterly complaining about how they're being abused, threatening to sue, or otherwise making it abundantly clear they don't want to work there.
I sympathize and think he deserved more at the end of the day, but did not handle the issue correctly. At worst, he should have initiated a quiet lawsuit for his damages instead of ranting.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
He accepted stock, believing it to be worth more than it ended up being. A lot of people lost money in the merger. It wasn't anything personally directed to him.
I don't really understand why someone would think they deserve more from their employer than their salary, unless its spelled out that they will get bonuses or whatever for great ideas.
It is kind of a "chilling effect" not to pay bonuses to your idea folks, but that's the risk companies take... Those folks could just go on and form another company with their new idea, instead.
Most people behind technical innovations that make billions for their employers don't get even 100K bonus. I think the inventor of the LED made a few hundred. In this case the fellow brokered the adoption of a single format across all players in both the media and computer industry, which is a big deal for a manager, although he did not invent the technology.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Actually, he accepted stock options, which became nearly worthless when the stock plummetted. The downside to options is they expire, and most bonus packages that are issued as options have an exercise clause that forces the former employee to exercise them or lose them (I don't know if his did or not).
What I don't understand is, he took a gamble that the options were going to be worth a whole lot more later. If the AOL-TW merger was a smashing success and his options were worth $1.6 billion, would he return the excess to the company? He took a risk in his bonus and lost. He could have just as easily (according to the article), accepted $25 million in cash.
Karma: Excellent (Mainly due to Bill & Ted's Karma Adventure)