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Tech Publisher O'Reilly Slashes Jobs
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, geeky tech publisher O'Reilly Media has slashed 14% of its workforce, or 31 people. Founder and tech pundit Tim O'Reilly comments on the layoffs by exhorting people to 'get more with less.' According to the article, 'Just this week... both tech giant Google and book retailer Barnes & Noble announced their first layoffs ever. Other publishing houses, including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Random House, and Simon & Schuster have frozen salaries or cut jobs, or both.'"
Most independent book stores are gone. B&N went though a bankruptcy and Borders is for sale. But books have good margins if you control inventory. I remember a decade ago, the large bookstores had huge sections devoted to tech books, but it has deteriorated (because of poor sales and rapid obsolescence) to a couple of book cases. In many ways it is just like the science and engineering section. Limited and focused demand of a small base for quality books and a shrinking base of noobs needing books. While O'Reilly is the gold standard, the market isn't there in depth anymore and the book market is being disrupted by online purchases (long tail, smaller runs, marketing issues), electronic delivery (cheaper but the cost savings are not passed on), and alternative sources of information (many technical solutions are a search away and seldom require the depth of a book).
Actually layoffs are pretty much all that do make the news, regardless of what else is being tried first. What you see are "Company X lays of Y workers". You never see "Company X keeps Y workers a little longer than they otherwise might have", nor do you later see headlines like "1 worker gets a job elsewhere" repeated Y times.
Profit Margins in publishing are usually razor-thin. (The mega-blockbusters are the exception.)
Barnes and Noble shows a 2% Margin, for example, with a 36% drop in stock price this year.
It's hard to make a profit in books, even good books.
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
Tim says at TFA: "The layoffs, which were spread across the company, were part of an overall reorganization to create more focus on some new opportunities, as well as a response to today's very tough economic climate."
Cut the crap, Tim. Why can't CEO's just say it:
"We laid of 30 people to save money so we don't lose the whole company. Sales are down, profits are impacted. If we don't lay off, we will die."
Be real. It'd garner a lot more respect from the people you NEED supporting you.
+++OK ATH
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
Go do what you're going to do: The economy will take care of itself, if you're working toward useful endeavors.
+++OK ATH
Heh... I remember getting calls after I was hit in a post-dot-bomb layoff, asking "Have you seen what people are posting about the company at FC?"
Not knowing what FC was, I enjoyed reading the rants. But then again, I always thought they were stupid, in the end.
Stupid of the people (then looking for work) to post things like that in public, and stupid of the people still working there to even care what was being said.
Most of them were about the company's culture, which was based on the personalities of the owners, their professional backgrounds, and stuff like that...
Those guys sold the company a few years later for 3.5 million, and are on to working on their next company. The people who complained? Who knows -- but I bet they've haven't been as successful.
Why post to places like that? Get a life, get on to the next job, and move on. And I say that after being jobless for a year after that place. I was depressed, angry, all the classic stages of loss... and then I got on with life.
People will get on with life after this "global slowdown" too.
I say, the sooner the better. Kickstart it... move on, and don't wallow in it. Go do something useful today.
+++OK ATH
http://mediacow.tv/node/166
From October 2007
In short, the deregulation of credit derivatives and lowered lending standards created a real estate bubble. The depression will ease once homes return to their pre-bubble prices, which is still a ways off.
The only way to soften the impact of the trillions of dollars of equity disappearing in a few short months is to create jobs through government spending. If you give the money to anyone else, they will just hoard it in today's economic climate, so you have to keep the low and middle class working and spending, and at least direct money towards infrastructure improvements. We could easily afford it by halting foreign wars and slashing military spending, but that seems unlikely at this point.
As far as China is concerned, they will emerge from this crisis as a new economic superpower within five or ten years. They have huge growth potential internally, and they are essentially the manufacturing engine for the world. America will continue to slip behind unless we reinvest in education and the manufacture of high tech products, and drop our costly engagements in South America and the Middle East.
I don't know that I can give specific details, but at 10% of wholesale, I don't make enough money in royalties to work as a full-time author of technical books. I believe there's still a market for the printed word, but I have my doubts that a big publisher creates as much value as it captures, at least from the author's point of view.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Now, tutorial books can still sell.
That's an area most easily covered by the web and also an area that tends to go out of date quickly. I don't know they sell that much more highly than a good reference.
Do you really use reference books any longer?
All the time, but then I'm an O'Reilly Safari subscriber. Otherwise I probably would use the web resources instead. Either way, paper technical books are pretty much dead to me - but the content of the books if properly refreshed, I usually find more valuable than most web resources.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, since you are asking, I'll give you my side of the story.
We are a consulting, IT services and software development company. Not a big name, and we are very small. I'm the founder of the company. We have 30 something people. The economic problems affect us too. Projects in the pipeline dried up, as customers cancel or postpone indefinitely. Quite a bit of receivables suddenly become bad debts.
We could have slashed half of the workforce, but I'm putting in my life savings, and borrow money to pay for the monthly expenses and salary, trying to ride the storm. We don't even cut any benefits, we even gave everyone a small bonus at the end of year (yeah, in cash, not a Gphone like Google did), and also paid for the annual health checkup (as we have done every year), when every other company has cut all these.
Now, can I get the good publicity now? Can we be called a good corporate? Can we get more clients (eventually) because we are good to our employees? In fact, I'm not even sure that, once the economic slump is over, our employees would even be grateful and stay a bit longer with us.
When the economy is good, we see employees jump ship for a 100$ raise all the time, and being so cynical at the same time. During a bad economy, when a company is trying to be nice, no one notice. As a matter of fact, a lot of people called us stupid too, because employees are ungrateful by nature. Sometimes, I just think being nice does not pay. But I'm just trying to do what I think is the right thing, and hopefully, more people or more employees recognize that, and have the solidarity that would allow us to get past this time. But telling the truth, I don't have high expectation for this, as I think it would be same old, same old, as the last recesssion in the early decade. We did the same thing at that time too, but that didn't prevent employees to be so cynical. Go figure. Some day, I'll have to learn to be "evil" too.
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
It's not just emotional: people really have less cash to burn. The housing bubble ended the happy days when homeowners could get huge loans, or when flipping houses was a major business activity (not that it produced any real value, of course.) Today you can borrow money only if you can prove that you do not need it.
Salaries also took a hit. Many are unemployed already; more will be; and often those who are still allowed to go to work every day are told that their salaries are reduced. What can they do? Business wise, sales of stuff (of all kinds) are dropping. People have less money to spend, so the industry has to reduce the manufacturing, so previously employed workers become unemployed. They don't need the media to tell them anything about the economy - if they have no job they already know themselves.
Add to that the news that many states are approaching bankruptcy and trying to increase taxes to cover the deficit. Or they can send state workers packing, that will save money but unions won't allow that. So everyone may need to pay higher [property] taxes using their reduced income. That leaves no money for toys and non-essentials.
Finally, people who had their money invested into the stock market lost big - as much as 40%. If they were investing into specific stocks, they can be wiped out completely. Look at how much value of banks' stock was destroyed - and banks were thought to be safe, long term investments. People holding bonds are not immune - now and then a bond issuer defaults, and then you have nothing. So one way or another, people have less money today, even though yesterday a lot of their money was of imaginary, speculative nature.
Guess there just weren't enough H-1b visas issued, huh?
Seastead this.
How Capitalism Works:
When the company is doing well, it's because the CEO is a genius.
When the company is doing poorly, it's because the workers are too expensive, too lazy or too numerous.
Read my blog.