Slashdot Mirror
More Massive Layoffs at AOL
dawnzer writes "It looks like AOL read the comments from Slashdotters saying that 950 employees do not constitute a 'massive' layoff. Several news sites are reporting that AOL is getting ready to cut 5,000 jobs, or roughly 26 percent of their global workforce. Now that's more like it."
AOL is a dinossaur now. Their market doesn't exist anymore and they stuck upon their past until it was too late.
Your ad could be here!
I'll bet you'd be a lot less glib about it (and way more pissed off) if it was your job on the line. Especially if you saw people making comments like that!
Its never cool when any company does layoffs. If Microsoft did a layoff, I know people would be happy because "the tide is finally turning." That is very sad. You should never be happy when someone gets laid off... you don't know who they have to support with that income. It may be their family suffering now that someone got laid off, so be a little more of an adult and don't praise layoffs, from any company.
Nope. This is just the HR side to AOL's decision to only charge for ISP connections... much fewer paying customers, much fewer people needed to handle the support, sales, and retention operations. AOL figures they'll get more cash from ads being shown to many more eyeballs than they're currently getting for subscription revenues.
It's just a shift to smaller companies or self-employment; we just don't hear about it. A company laying off 10,000 people is news. 1,000 different companies hiring those people the next day isn't.
They do serve a unique function: Spam control.
They've been known as the 800 lb. anti-spammers for several years now. Read what you want to in the news about Microsoft's efforts, but fan away the smoke and there's nothing left but the mirror you're standing on. Microsoft has made some money, directed it to their "big three" (Huey, Dewey, and Louie - aka Marketing, PR, and Sales), and Dewey has done a good job of ensuring they make a lot of press by looking terrific. When you hear a consensus of HotMail issues and bCentral.com ratified in the anti world, then perhaps it's safe to venture back online. Microsoft's anti efforts are supposed to be a hammer, looking at 2003-U-CAN-SPAM as a blueprint. Has the volume decreased?
Aside from AOL, how many other Fortune 500 companies are actually doing something about spam generated by their resources, either by providing online services or have zombies?
By-and-large, AOL has had at least one person monitoring SPAM-L beyond the PORN (Post Once, Read Nothing) factor, where others such as Tropica have done. When questions have arisen, AOL has been pretty open about what they're doing and resolving issues. If they were like everyone else, they'd have left the guy who walked with their member list go. They pursued his hairy ass and taped his buns together.
Oh, and Louie could be generating more local (U$) income if the piracy@microsoft.com address actually worked. If you send them too little info, they tell you they need everything. Send everything along with an explanation at the top, and it'll be rejected, telling you it looks too much like spam. Send them text asking which way they want it and silence. Send plaintext message + ROT13 for the headers+payload, silence. Plaintext explaining you are unable to send anything, the response is, "We're working on it." So much for being a good guy. (actually, it started as an experiment and I had to see what happened all of the way around.
It's one of the risks inherent in participating in a capitalist economy. The potential exists to do very well, but there is also the potential that things might slip in the opposite direction. Is it cool? Not really, because it does tend to disrupt peoples' lives. Do I feel sad for them? Not really, because it's all part of the game called "US of A". And let's not forget that there are other parts of the world where just getting a single meal is the biggest worry.
At the risk of sounding like a libertarian (which I'm not), that's how capitalism works. A crappy company goes under, and in the process some people lose their jobs. Then some other company rises and those people get another job.
Note that there's no need to get doom and gloom about it. I know that for the average citizen unemployment and inflation are signs of the apocalypse, and politicians use them as such in campaigns... then proceed to forget that they promised solving both. That's because they're not. Read something about keynesian economics, which is how the economy works nowadays, and especially about the Phillips curve.
In a nutshell, there's a corelation between the two, and if you push one down, the other one goes up. And what governments can do is pick a point on the curve and try to keep the economy around that point.
What does this have to do with this? Well, it's darn simple: for the last 60-70 years (depending on the country) everyone had the unemployment basically where they wanted it. In spite of the constant "waah, another company lays off 5000 workers, our country is doomed" scares, that's never actually been a long term problem. So some other company or several smaller companies will figure out "hey, look at all the workers we could hire in city X" and proceed to do so.
Incidentally that kind of a correlation isn't even just an effect of the last century, but you can see effects as far back as, say, the 1300s and 1400s. The plagues and resulting utter lack of unemployment for, say, peasants, caused a massive inflation and were in the end the cause of the Renaissance.
And you can see the same economics at work on a smaller scale in the limited domain of IT in the dot-com bubble, where lack of enough workforce caused the salaries to spiral up out of hand, and the cost of any resulting program reflected it. There the impact was absorbed by the rest of the society, but imagine the same economy-wide. If for every job there wasn't a pool of unemployed workforce, and companies had to pay a premium even to get receptionist, you'd see the prices rising accordingly.
It may seem calous and lacking empathy to say that someone has to be unemployed for the economy to work, and it partially is, but that's how it works. Rebelling against it is like rebelling against gravity: not very productive. We have to work with what works, not with what would be an idealist utopia. All we can do to make it more palatable is to offer some unemployment benefits and some government demand for work and move on.
And at the risk of going off topic, that's another reality that we have to live with: that governments actually have to do that kind of thing. In spite of bullshit pseudo-economic theories idealizing lean governments and some idealized image of unrestricted 19'th century capitalism, it stopped working that way in the Great Depression. That's when the economy of scarcity ended. The countries that got out of the crisis fast were the ones whose government overspent: be it FDR's New Deal, or Germany's and Italy's spending on armament. The countries which didn't, got to enjoy a jolly good depression until WW2: e.g., Canada.
Funny what things you get to learn when you take your economic theories from real economists, instead of from novelists. (*cough* Ayn Rand *cough*) But that's another discussion for another time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.