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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.'"
There's no real need to go buy books anymore since everything is so dumbed down and stupifyingly simple. These days you can write your "programs" with nothing more than a mouse and a spiffy GUI. That doesn't really lend itself to sitting down and studying or using books as a reference.
Bollocks. A few years ago programming was just tapping away on a clicky keyboard with a spiffy green-screen terminal. Or, in other words, it hasn't changed at all; maybe you only write dumbed-down trivial apps, but the rest of us are still writing the good stuff.
No doubt things are going to get worse, with loads more layoffs. As it is, companies have been quietly laying off. For example, verizon, comcast, and qwest have for months doing layoff. But the good news is that lots of new companies will come out of this just due to necessity. We will see lots of new innovations all over the world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There are a few big publishing houses that print a tremendous percentage of our books. Fewer than there were a few years ago, due to consolidation.
But at least one of the six major houses has stopped purchasing new books from authors, either completely stopped or near-completely stopped. Times are tough for everyone but bankruptcy lawyers. (And their times are tougher when ours are better.)
--- Thousands are enslaved every day.
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.
The ones that have a job anyway.
Cutting costs (ie, sometimes employees) is exactly how companies weather a downturn.
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to employ people? Obviously big companies have a lot more "extraneous" costs that can be cut, but many smaller and midsize companies don't run with a lot of fluff to begin with, and for many companies, employees are the single biggest expenditure.
I work in publishing, in a small company (~20 people) ... we don't have elaborate travel costs, don't throw parties, or buy crazy advertising, the boss isn't some fatcat CEO, etc. Our biggest costs--printing books, shipping books, labor. Not a thing we can do about printing and shipping costs--they are out of our hands. Labor is about it. Apparently the employee insurance plan (which not everybody is on--some have their spouses, so maybe 10-15 people insured?) is running close to 100k a year. (that's one thing I would like Obama to fix!)
Should also add that we've had no "redundancies" and doesnt seem like we will (heh, that's what everybody says, right?)
Sure, this is really bad for people who bought within the last decade. But a Million-dollar mortgage has always been the equivalent of selling yourself into lifetime indenture. Maybe the slaves should have revolted before.
Bruce Perens.
Uh-huh. It is especially true for folks like me who really just stuck their name on the front of the book for series recognition and didn't do the work. Authors don't need that any longer, if they even did then.
Do you think you might try to do it on your own? Selling online, demand printing, etc? I'd do it that way today if I felt the need to write.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It's an interesting point Bruce. The Internet continues to be the big thing shaking up business, worldwide.
Leo Laporte's keynote at MacWorld was along a similar vein for broadcasters, just a short few days ago. Broadcasting will be similarly dead eventually. People want a customized continuous stream of only the information they want. They don't want "mass media" anymore.
I look at my little sister's generation -- she hardly ever watches "the news". She's still well informed about general news from the overwhelming flood of information about the same topics over and over spewing from the broadcasters -- it works it's way to her somehow, but she's better informed and dare I say, "more competitive than her older peers" on the topics that interest HER.
This is happening to books, broadcast, anything that can't change rapidly.
Sure, there are things that are good on paper -- things that don't change. Stuff like "How to learn to fly a plane", and "Physics 101".
But trying to put down anything on paper like software languages or computing techniques, is a short-lived proposition -- unless you're talking core technologies like IP basics (and not how to program the latest router du-jour to do what you want with IP), etc.
I think the point I'm getting to here in this rambling fashion (hey, I'm tired.. hah...), is that static information -- is good in print. Stuff that changes, even slowly, has to be priced higher in print than anyone's willing to pay... to make it worthwhile to publish it in the first place.
Broadcast companies on the other hand have a small leg up, if they morph and morph quickly... having a 50,000W AM station at 850 KHz shouldn't be about putting out AM modulation of voice and news anymore -- it's a wide-area low-speed data transmitter... that can then be sliced up into packets.
I don't think the FCC nor the broadcasters quite "get it" yet, though.
He who dies with the most erlangs wins! -- Is our local joke in our little techie group. (We're telco-heads, and telco gets it... everything's rapidly sliding over to VoIP, and the struggles against QoS and actual voice quality have already begun long ago.
Not only that, we're just going straight to video and so-called "HD" video, and that 1960's world's fair dream of the videophone is here... easy to do on any laptop... *With enough bandwidth* to the laptop.
And print "media" like newspapers? The businesspeople already KNOW that model is dead. It's just being propped up. (I will miss my daily paper copy of the Wall Street Journal someday, but I can print it if I want to waste the toner... eventually.)
It's interesting times, but the Internet and packet-switched networks are still shaking things up... it's not done yet.
The movement to these new things is why I'm still upbeat about this so-called "bad" economy. There are still jobs (perhaps boring ones, but IT was always the "plumbing" of the business anyway -- the booming 90's just made us all feel more important than we are -- we're overhead, unless we make or save the company real MONEY), converting these old technologies to new ones.
The business world isn't dead... it's just leaning back on its heels and thinking. The first companies to lean forward and grab on to the fast-moving rope of time, and maybe getting some burns in the process, are going to do just fine.
+++OK ATH
The cash they were burning was never theirs, for one thing. (Burning other people's cash is a great way to end up a wage-slave for the rest of your life. If you like the work they give you to do at the end, fine... but if it's not exactly your life's ambition of a job -- you're headed for revolution at some point. Not everyone can be an Astronaut when they grow up.)
Salaries took a hit? Most IT workers haven't had a raise that was more than inflation in a decade. Now mix that knowledge with, "Honey, let's take out a big loan against the place we need to LIVE IN!" Pretty stupid, eh? Not here!
States and Unions and all of that... yeah, lovely stuff our voted politicians did with their surpluses, eh? How few people were voting for fiscally conservative politicians during the good years in the normal 7-10 year business cycle? Do those who voted for non-conservatives take any blame for their local government being out of cash? Are they willing to pay up NOW to cover who they voted for?
Unions: They'll eventually be busted, one way or another. It's not like sending billions to Detroit is going to suddenly teach GM how to make a car that lasts as long as a Honda. Guess what people are going to buy when times are tight? You buying a GM product, or a Honda/Toyota/Acura? I know which one I want if my car budget is tight.
Stock Market: If those people were truly INVESTING (by definition investing is using money you DO NOT NEED TO LIVE ON FOR SOME TIME YET), they aren't in trouble. They knew if they needed to live on it in the next five years, they were already out of stocks and into less risky assets. The real issue with the stock market right now is there are people dorking around in it pretending they know what they're doing, and who are being ripped off by mutual fund managers and the whole market is being gamed by hedge funds, etc. The reality is, the market's rigged to make big money, big money. The little guy has to be very intensely engaged to follow big money's moves and continually make money. The fallacy of the mutual fund is that it removes the RISK. It doesn't. It means we all go up and down together. The market is packed to the gills with Baby Boomer 401(K) money that should have already started to have been diversified out of the stock market. Oh well, it's out now... poof. Bye-bye. 40% losses on a true INVESTMENT sucks, but it's not supposed to change your LIFESTYLE, if you did it right.
So yeah... people were imagining they were creating wealth, and it bit them in the ass. Now the key to recovery is to GET TO WORK and really create some wealth. Do we have any companies that can make things of a quality level seen back in the 1950-1969 era? Can we do it?
I think we can.
Oh, and in most cases... sorry Slashdotters... SOFTWARE is not the answer. INTEGRATION and really thinking HARD about the big picture of what a company is accomplishing long-term with their products... is the answer.
+++OK ATH
Do you really use reference books any longer? I just use the web.
Bruce, I know *many* people who still prefer books. For me, I do much of my tech reading in bed and on the toilet. I still enjoy the *paper* in the morning (in bed and on the toilet). I buy a lot of books in e-book form, but I almost always end up printing the, out one-sided on 8.5 by 11, I keep 'em in big ring binders. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, psychologically, I *enjoy* books on paper, I feel they lend themselves to easier study, I can search and cross reference content MUCH faster than diddling around with some PDF or whatever on a laptop. Also, I like to have my references *open* beside me while I'm coding on my large but single monitor.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I can search and cross reference content MUCH faster than diddling around with some PDF or whatever on a laptop.
For me, KPDF's smooth scrolling incremental search is -hands down- the best search of any PDF reader.
If the KDE team would a add HTML named anchor-esque bookmarking feature, and freeform persistent annotations and highlighting, then they'd have a *really* killer PDF reader.
Heck, while I'm asking for ponies... it'd be *REALLY* super if it could make reasonably functional hyperlinks out of the TOC from a poorly-constructed ebook.
A couple of years ago I was part of a project that saw what was going to happen and tried to take publishing to a new level. Although initially interested, O'Reilly snubbed it, among other potential investors. That's his perfectly valid right (this is not a complaint or about that project). He's also the self-proclaimed god of web 2.0. Also, there is a huge, growing demand for education and knowledge in Asia (but they won't buy books for $80).
Now this is my point: O'Reilly has had several years between the last crash and this to transform his business. A donkey could have projected the fate of technical dead-wood books. There are huge chances (playing field will change with new winners, Asia). I've seen play O'Reilly play with some online publishing concepts, but not anything remotely convincing, still playing the cards on the paper books.
O'Reilly shouldn't complain. He had his chance and blew it. His employees have a reason to complain. Many lost their jobs because of the lack of innovation and insight of their boss, who rather looked cool on web 2.0 gatherings, talking about the latest Crapmaster 3000 webapp.
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.
Only if they forget that they don't have any damned money. Wages have been stagnant for decades, and the economy is propped up on credit. The problem isn't a mindset, it's that the middle class is broke.