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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.
...I bet most of those ex-employees will be complaining about it on Facebook this evening.
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
NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.
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
Translation: They're up for sale, and devs are part of the more valuable "human capital". I wonder who would be buying?
That doesn't make sense. If you're trying to sell, you don't fire the employees first yourself -- what would be the point? Once you're out, you don't care how many employees the company has. Instead, you invite possible buyers to the office and make sure every single body is at a desk, working away like a busy little beaver on countless amazing things, making the company look like an incredible value and pushing the bidding price up. Then the investor walks away thinking, "Wow, they sure do great stuff there -- but they seem to have too many employees. If we buy the company, we can fire half of them and we'll end up with a real bargain!"
Breakfast served all day!
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.
Am I alone in thinking that MySpace was Geocities for the new millennium?
Three Squirrels
That doesn't make sense. If you're trying to sell, you don't fire the employees first yourself -- what would be the point?
Because it fudges the profit numbers. Firing people doesn't hurt the revenue stream until a few quarters or even years down the road. But it significantly reduces costs which can provide a temporary bump in profitability. Buyout candidates have been doing this for longer than I've been alive and for some reason it still seems to fool potential buyers.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.