Slashdot Mirror
MySpace Lays Off 47% of Employees
tgtanman writes "CNN reports that MySpace has announced that it has laid off 500 employees, 47% of its total staff. From the article: 'MySpace's management kept most of the site's developers but gutted nearly every other job role, according to a staffer who survived the cuts ... "Today's tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability," CEO Mike Jones said in a written statement. "These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product."'"
MySpace still had 500 employees?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
MySpace has developers? What do they do?!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
They're still around?! I thought I recognised "Tom" squeegying my windows at a red light the other day...
one can only hope the next iteration empowers the individual and gives them ownership and true control of their information.
What "new product"? MySpace is MySpace, isn't it? What else do they do? (Can't bear to RTFA and find out.)
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Yeah. Maybe Time-Warner should buy them and make them even more irrelevant.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
...I bet most of those ex-employees will be complaining about it on Facebook this evening.
I'm fairly sure that a rabble of serfs having their every detail picked over and monetized is way better for shareholder value...
From the article: 'MySpace's management kept most of the site's developers but gutted nearly every other job role, according to a staffer who survived the cuts
Translation: They're up for sale, and devs are part of the more valuable "human capital". I wonder who would be buying?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Actually Ah-Oh-heLL bought Time-Warner in one of those amusing quirks of speculators driving share price far beyond anything reasonable. AOL management, in their one and only lucid moment, realized that they had best take the money and buy some actual assets with it or their stock options were going to be utterly worthless after the impending crash (a crash that was obvious to everyone who didn't work on Wall Street).
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
There is a "Connect with Facebook" button on the front page of myspace.com
It blew my mind
NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.
Myspace used to employ more than 10 people! What do these people do all day?
I loved Imeem and then MySpace bought them out. So, maybe somebody else who can afford Imeem should buy them up and allow them to go back to their business they had and possibly make amazing music plug-ins for their walled garden *cough*Facebook*couch*
The world is how you make it
I'm sure that he's got a package labeled 'parachute' neatly stored near his desk, just in(evitably) case.
I guess he still has a glimmer of pride left after all.
I am sure he is laughing at this post... all the way to the bank.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It is a little know fact that MySpace got its name from a typing error.
It was supposed to be called Mice Pace - based on their innovative approach of running millions of mice over millions of keyboards in order to create a sample of "perfect code".
It was a variation of the idea with monkeys and typewriters - mice were cheaper to get and easier to scale up.
The result is the site we all know as MySpace. They could never get the Complete Works of Shakespeare out of the mice either.
But they did get half a Justin Bieber song once. Thousands of mice had to be put to death after that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm not sure you can have 47% of one person...
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
How exactly does MySpace make money?
Does it really have a path to profitabillity?
Which means it had 1064 employees before the layoff. What in the world could they possible need more than a thousand people for? And why are now able to run with only half that many?
If you can't run MySpace with 100 people -- and that's being generous -- there's something seriously wrong. This is another case of "Somebody (in this case Rupert Murdoch) gave us a lot of money, so we can afford to hire a shit load of people regardless of whether or not we actually need them.
That will happen right after the Year of the Linux desktop....
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
I'm guessing most of these people were full-time mods responsible for keeping tidal-waves of porn and spam off of the site.
Too bad they couldn't find a way to automate the blocking of duck-face pictures.
http://antiduckface.com/
If the world isn't beating a path to your door you're doing something wrong.
Probably because you're the kind of person to whom that sort of thing matters.
I thought it was the must idiotic mess of ugly web real estate I had ever seen. Poor execution which never got any better.
Now looking at Facebook, I think it's confusing as hell, too. Something better will come along and knock them off their peg.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Am I alone in thinking that MySpace was Geocities for the new millennium?
Three Squirrels
It seems like there is a lot of hate for Facebook on Slashdot. I wonder whether MySpace gained anything from it.
That depends on the operational costs.
Dilbert RSS feed
The fate of any online service who's sole purpose seems to be to flood their users with spam and marketing gimmicks. Twitter take notice.
I feel sorry for the employees but the worse his investment becomes the happier I am.
Everyone should have seen this coming. Makes me wonder what will happen with FB and Twitter.
People actually still use it?!
It was posted on Facebook...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Wished they hadn't to be honest....
This for example, was on there today(thanks(?) to Sarah Michelle Olmstead)
"Wat am i supose to do wen the best part of me wuz always u nd wat am i supose to say wen im all choked"
I mean for fuck's sake.
that sounds like murdoch's style!
It started to go downhill drastically at about the time Murdoch bought it.
It started to go downhill drastically because Murdoch bought it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well I am glad to know I am not alone in the world.....
A gin in the hand is worth two in the bottle.
because your post was 15 times harder to read to the end
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
What does this do to the stocks, up or down, I am not sure, maybe up cause they see myspace is serious in streamlining and remaining in the game, or down, because everyone sees this as signs of trouble...?
Truer more descriptive words never spoken.
I know my first reaction is MySpace is still hanging around? They had more than 1000 people working for them still? They still have 500 people doing something at MySpace?
In other news MySpace lost half their user base... :)
I mean, Daaaaaaaaaaaaa --*cough, cough!*-- aaaaaaamn!
MySpace is dying.