Yahoo Layoffs Begin, CEO Sends Employees Apologetic Letter 138
redletterdave writes "As expected, Yahoo began laying off more than 2,000 employees on Wednesday morning — roughly 14 percent of the company's total workforce — in its effort to slim down and pivot its focus in a new direction. The mass layoff marks the sixth time in four years — and under three different CEOs, no less — that Yahoo has dumped employees, but this one will the company's biggest in its 17-year history. Scott Thompson, Yahoo's CEO, sent an apologetic letter to all his employees this morning explaining the changes."
Yahoo is dead (Score:5, Informative)
And Ballmer sighs with relief at not having bought this turkey.
Re:Yahoo is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they mistakenly thought they could buy marketshare by picking up a company on the fast track to irrelevance for the better part for years leading up to the buyout bid.
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Boohoo for Yahoo.
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Yahoo! is quite successful in Asia. They may mostly die in the US, but I would guess that they will follow the same path as 7-Eleven and Mister Donut, both of which are few and far between in the US but literally everywhere in Japan and Taiwan.
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What??? 7-Eleven is few and far between? What part of the US do you live in? I spend a great deal of time both in southern California and southern Florida, and I have a 7-Eleven on every corner.
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Around here they are practically non-existent. There are none in my city, although there are 12 within a 20 mile radius. I'm definitely not going to drive 4 miles just to go to the closest 7-11.
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In the DC metro area they are everywhere. I daresay there are more 7-11s in a 10 mile radius of DC than there are Starbucks.
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They're making comeback (or at least a rapid expansion) under their current (Japanese???) ownership.
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And Thailand and Mainland China.
Re:Yahoo is dead (Score:4, Funny)
Canned "I'm so sorry" letter, probably copied it off of the Internet using Google Search.
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Somewhere I picture Jerry Yang getting drunk and calling up his remaining friends every night to rant about how it totally wasn't a mistake to turn Microsoft down.
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And Ballmer sighs with relief at not having bought this turkey.
You think Yahoo would have kept all of it's employees pre-merger with Yahoo? Look at what happened to Skype. No, it would likely have ended up nicer for the shareholders, but the same for the employees - but 1-2 years earlier.
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Yahoo! is now !Yahoo
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My Kif sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund manager who is also one of Yahoo's largest shareholders, has launched a new campaign to shake up Yahoo's board even further since being spurned by the company. Loeb has been trying to persuade Yahoo to elect him, as well as three other alternative candidates, as possible directors. If a truce isn't met between Loeb and Thompson, the dispute will be put to a shareholder vote at Yahoo's annual meeting.
So, this "hedge fund" guy (we called them corporate raiders back in my day. They wore an onion on their belt because that was the stye back then ... oh, yeah.) is going to can a shit load of people, reducing the expenses and boosting profits in the short term. Said "hedge fund" guy will then make a killing on his stock, options, and any warrant positions he has and flies back in his corporate jet to the bank.
In the meantime, Yahoo! not having people to actually, I don't know innovate and restructure the company to actually offer unique products will be gone. So, in the long term, Yahoo! will just be an email outsourcer for the likes of AT&T - a nice low margin commodity market.
Yep, if I were Yang et. al., I'd be unloading as fast as I can and spend the rest of my life being a philanthropist.
Nothing good of this will come of it. It never has and never will. "Hedge fund" guys know only one thing: slash and burn.
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And what, exactly, is wrong with that? (Aside from no longer being a source of nerd porn.)
Re:My Kif sigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
I dunno, turning a potentially thriving company with an illustrious history into an internet toxic waste dump while spacing 10,000 workers in a poor economy seems kind of FSCKed to me.
The only problem Yahoo has is leadership and vision. You aren't going to out Facebook Facebook or out Google Google. You need to look at the big picture, notice the human trends and come up with a selection of related new services, that others haven't seen yet. There are two dozen startups doing uber-cool things with customer information. If Yahoo had picked a couple of those up, and streamlines its offerings to unique high values services, they'd be cake walking to the bank today. Of course if it that easy, everyone would be doing it. You need to find the right geek with business acumen to carve out some new business spaces.
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They seem to be trying, and not sure who's vision of the future is the right one. Which I suppose is always the challenge.
In their defence, they do kind of have this strategy outside the US, where they bought some services overseas and have made them into something over there. In the US they might have stuck their thumbs up their arses for a while waiting to see if MS could acquire them.
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You aren't going to out Facebook Facebook or out Google Google.
No, but Facebook beat a lot of other competing social networks and Google beat a lot of other search engines. In retrospect it's easy but it was not at all obvious that Facebook would ever become anything more than a glorified student directory. And Google pretty much out-Yahooed Yahoo among others, they hit them dead center with better search algorithms - exactly the thing you claim they can't do. There's no one good answer to this, sometimes you can take them on head on and then you should. Sometimes you
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Social networks aren't really driven by the skill of it's management, simply the herd trending to that location. No matter how much effort a social network put's in when the herd starts trending somewhere else it dies. You don't think Newscorp put hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising in trying to keep myspace popular but found out their PR dogs could not herd the sheep.
Every single social network site once they peaked has lost popularity, every single social network site has proven to be a
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Social networks aren't really driven by the skill of it's management, simply the herd trending to that location.
It takes management skill and drive, and vision (both technical and business) to identify the herd and its trends, and either herd it to where you want them to be (building a market) or build around where they go, providing something they haven't had. Even if the corral is short-lived, if the corral is massive, that on itself is an amazing technical feat, and a testament of business skill, drive and vision.
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Google has done well but they have their own problems. iGoogle, for one. I really didn't want a gob of search results for the category I was looking into, nor did I really want a boat load of amateur widgets mixed in with the ones I'm more likely to want.
Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
Strong companies don't have these problems with "hedge fund" guys. Weak ones do. Like nature, american enterprise and the markets can be very cruel. It seems odd to me that you complain when things work the way they are supposed to work. What did you think was supposed to happen when you don't give customers what they want? (ie: you are not successful in the marketplace - for whatever reason).
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"Like nature", very apropos. The vultures don't fly and circle around healthy animals. They wait until either the object of their desire is dead, or so close to that point that there is no risk other than their peers trying to get their share. Personally, I think a hedge fund manager cage match could possibly be quite entertaining :) I suppose the winner wo
Re:Wrong question (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally you would be right.. but Yahoo isn't a weak company. It just hasn't kept up with Google.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=YHOO+Key+Statistics [yahoo.com]
5 billion in revenue
1 billion in net income
2 billion in cash (1.3 billion in operating cash flow)
no debt
They have a problem with falling revenues, and as a result, falling profits. Their profits declined 5.3% yoy -- so instead of 1.10 billion, they only made 1.05 billion.
Yahoo has the resources to build their company.. they just don't have a vision. And this guy... he doesn't have a vision either.
He is slashing and burning... he is not going to lead Yahoo anywhere.. he's just destroying the company further.
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but he will make quick cash with his loaded dice...
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I believe you made my point better than I could. Weakness is the same as "not keeping up" in a capitalist economy.
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You write a good post. But you aim at the wrong subject. You should ask yourself: Why does Yahoo find themselves in this position in the first place? (hint: it has something to do with not giving customers what they want)
It depends on who your customer is. Yahoo has been pretty good at giving end users what they want. Google has been pretty good at giving people with advertising dollars to spend what they want. Unfortunatly, one of these types of customers pay much better than the other (given that the content is "free").
Strong companies don't have these problems with "hedge fund" guys. Weak ones do. Like nature, american enterprise and the markets can be very cruel. It seems odd to me that you complain when things work the way they are supposed to work. What did you think was supposed to happen when you don't give customers what they want? (ie: you are not successful in the marketplace - for whatever reason).
If you define companies w/ high valuation and/or preferred voting share structure as "strong", I agree with you. However in a company with a more equitable share structure, if a so called "hedge fund" g
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I've been through this sort of BS before. The "hedge fund guy" has no direct power here. He's not going to buy a ton of shares. He's going to present an alternative strategy to shareholders whereby they can make a lot more money (at least in the short term). If they believe him, he'll will and the board will cave - such contests almost never need to be resolved by actual shareholder vote, it will be obvious from calls with the largest shareholders which way the wind is blowing.
And he may well have a poi
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You write a good post. But you aim at the wrong subject. You should ask yourself: Why does Yahoo find themselves in this position in the first place? (hint: it has something to do with not giving customers what they want)
In addition to that, there were more fundamental problems with yahoo:
http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html [paulgraham.com]
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
It's an interesting read, from the inside, and not from some pundit looking from the sidelines.
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Re:My Kif sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
At least they are getting a severance. When I got laid off from Nortel, they went into Chapter 11 just so Pavi Binning didn't have to give out no stinkin' severance.
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I'm not a fan of the raid1ers; but did it occur to anybody that there's not that much need to innovate at Yahoo?
As a long-timer user of the service, it reached that point a while ago. Many of the changes they've made have not been for the better. It's all the trendy "let's add AJAX to this page" crap that just slows it down in the older browsers which is... hello!!! A large part of their customer base. Geezers like me.
These companies need to learn how not to break what don't need fixin'. I'm thinking of
Re:My Kif sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was living and working in the Bay Area back in 1991. Yahoo! was primarily a massive indexing operation then, the largest employer of library sciences majors outside of the CIA, and employed several friends of mine. Historically, they have always laid off large groups of staff, and then hired new staff to replace them under different titles, thereby skirting state employment law. I've pretty much been able to time their layoffs, because their recruiters have my number, and they start doing interviews in advance of the firings, like clockwork. Well, up until I told them in several rude ways to stop calling me.
Nobody who wants a long term job works for Yahoo. I'd say the current round of layoffs is just that, the current round. Continuously firing their performing (ie, highest wage earning) staff would also explain why they have done nothing notable since, oh, the early 90s. Everything they have done was simply to keep up with the Joneses. Web space didn't happen until geocities and angelfire became popular, and after their own failed attempts Yahoo then just bought Geo. Mail wasn't added until HotMail took off. Automating directory services didn't happen until Google. I could go on- but they have always been an overhyped dog of a stock, slow to adapt, and their lugubrious descent into failure hasn't surprised me in the least.
The clincher for me was when they were considered the "gold standard", and their shares were over at over $450 per. This was when they were still doing indexing with librarians. Once I saw that, I quickly changed my skillset to survive the coming dot-bomb and socked away my cash.
Re:My Kif sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't exist for several years after 1991.
And add a few more years here. Are you thinking around 1998?
No. When Yahoo! was on the way up, no one left, willingly or unwillingly. Their first layoff was in 2001. Since I was working there, I remember :-)
Now you're just making stuff up. Yahoo's not a good company, but they never "historically [..] always" did this. If they do this now, it's a new practice within the last half a decade (since I left).
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It was '98. I'm getting old, and thinking in internet years. ;)
Re:My Kif sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing good of this will come of it. It never has and never will. "Hedge fund" guys know only one thing: slash and burn.
And that may be the right thing to do at this point. The marker is moving -- very quickly. The pace at which it is increasing its speed is also increasing.
A company the size of Yahoo can't spend the money it needs to in order to really innovate years out, and not months out, once it gets behind the curve. They've got 17 years of legacy crap they need to continue supporting if they want to remain "Yahoo". Seventeen years worth of cruft, acquired services and the ilk. If they can't break even on those, they need to do MASSIVE restructuring to eliminate legacy support debt to even have a prayer of coming up with something new and delivering it before the market leaves that behind, too.
Microsoft can keep innovating because they've got massively profitable products and services around the majority of the support debt. Apple got where it was because it had basically failed when Jobs started to turn it around. (It'll be interesting to see if they can continue to innovate as they end up with a half billion people they need to keep happy... I own a lot of Apple stock, and I have to say that Cook's tenure so far has me pretty nervous from that standpoint!)
Yahoo, though? The scenario you described may be in the best short and long term interest of both the employees and the stockholders. The 2000 people laid off are 2000 people getting severance while there is money to be had, and have the opportunity to get into a company that has a better chance. And if they trim it enough, shed enough services, get the company lean enough that it can invest in real future-looking research, maybe some of the employees left will be able to weather that storm.
Its short sighed to assume that you can wish a company into success, and sometimes the safer bet is to be honest about where you are and where you can get from there.
sad (Score:2, Insightful)
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The way I remember it, Yahoo was "the king" in maybe ... 1998?
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dammit ! my firstname@yahoo account which I created in 1996 just became un-cool :P
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I got a call this morning from a head hunter representing them. I asked about this layoff. He denied it. I turned down the offer.
FYI: Head hunters don't offer jobs, they merely refer you to a company that may or may not give you a job offer (which undoubtely has to get approved by HR).
Just because a head hunter claims that their is a job for you doesn't mean that: 1. There is a job, or 2. The company will offer you the job if there is one.
No doubt there is one of several things going on here:
1. The head hunter saw a stale job listing at Yahoo and cold called you up about it hoping to score some commission.
2. You are making this whol
They can't do that! (Score:5, Funny)
They can't do that, it's supposed to be *my* Yahoo! and I didn't give permission...
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*Somebody* needs to take a closer look at his ToS.
Re:My (Score:2)
You might have been whooshed.
There was this craze a while back (not sure who it started with) to label everything "My ___". My Documents in Windows, MySpace, My____
So of course Yahoo followed suit with a My Yahoo section. http://my.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
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But it's mine! Mine! ALL MINE! That huge advertising campaign about it being "Your Yahoo!" was aimed specifically at *me*! Just me!
translation (Score:1)
Over the last 60 days, we've fundamentally re-thought every part of our business and we will continue to actively consider all options that allow Yahoo! to put maximum effort where we can succeed.
"The guys from McKinsey swarmed through here and gave me three options. Had I picked one of the other two, you'd have liked that even less."
Last! One! Out! Please! Turn! Off! The! Lights! (Score:3, Funny)
Last! One! Out! Please! Turn! Off! The! Lights!
CEOs (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, they got paid for doing a job of course. And even if they do a bad job of it, they (arguably) deserve a paycheck. But bonuses, severance pay, and perks are hard to justify when letting people go because the business if failing.
Stock options are actually a pretty good idea. If they drive the company into the ground, those aren't worth much.
With the rising costs [google.com] of "quality" CEO material, were these guys worth the investment?
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If Jerry Yang walked away with more than $1 it was too much.
YaWho? YaWhere? (Score:3)
YaLost, YaDown, YaGone. coasting too long is fatal to a dotcom.
Y'know .... (Score:2)
Imagine a drafting company that has 50 drafting employees. The CEO decides they want to be an IT company. They can either
a) Lay off the 50 drafting employees and hire 50 IT people, or
b) Not do that, and keep going as a drafting co
We need new laws governing layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
We need a new law governing layoffs.
If layoffs are about restructuring a company so it can better respond to the market and so it can be profitable, we need some new conditions to ensure that not only are layoffs necessary, but that they're structured to effect long term growth and stability.
In the event of a layoff:
1) executive pay increases are frozen and executive pay is limited to no more than three times the median company salary (excluding executive pay).
2) stock grants to executives are suspended for a period of one year following the layoff.
3) stock vesting is suspended for two years following the layoff.
4) executive bonuses are suspended for a period of two years following the layoff.
5) any new layoff resets the clock.
This way executive compensation is disconnected from any short-term gains or profits realized from a slash and burn strategy. If they want to reap big rewards they have to manage the long term growth of the company.
but I know that's just a pipe dream. no law will ever be passed and you know they're not going to vote this on themselves.
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So you want better corporate governance, but you want the people in charge of corporate governance (BTW, you need to include the board in there, not just the execs) to get paid less? Your objectives don't seem to match your plan.
Also, the first thing any such plan would result in is the closest few homeless people being named "corporate executives", while the people with the big paychecks getting retitled as "junior assistant janitoral staff" or somesuch. So it would help the homeless, I'll give you that.
Re:We need new laws governing layoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
other factors external to the business that result in minor profits for the next three years and the stock returns to its previous low levels
When Rome is burning, it's externalities. When it's growing, it's entirely due to the CEO's guidance. If, after two years, the stock has returned to it's previous state, then the CEO's amazing work wasn't all that amazing.
If they complain about it not being fair, the response is the same as the one they gave during the bust years.
"Well there are externalities"
This wasn't the best example for you to pick, please try again.
only in the software industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
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... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
Excess workforce can lead to:
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those look like "bad management" to me rather than intrinsic issues with excess workforce...
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... laying off people allows you to "get stuff done" and "be nimble". To me a company with excess workforce is a lot more likely to be nimble (easy to create ad-hoc teams to pursue new products/things) than a company at capacity where everybody is already fully tasked (where if you have a new project you HAVE to abandon some older project whether or not it makes sense to do so).
The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
That may be the view if you've spent most of your time in software and are looking at the rest of the markets with rose colored glasses, but corporate bloat, political fiefdoms and massive human resource structure are not an invention of software companies. There's hundreds of years of business experience behind the decisions people make like that. You shouldn't assume they're morons or don't understand business just because you don't or you believe you can intuit your way to a greater understanding.
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The nimbleness of a company is more of a function of how it's managed than of its size, but of course it's a lot easier to spin layoffs by pretending that a smaller company is somehow better performing than a larger one (if that was the case why would companies ever hire? it'd be much simpler to just remain "nimble" by staying small).
Small companies are generally more nimble.
Small companies are usually new companies - or ones that have experienced only minimal growth since their founding. As a company gets bigger, the ratio of manager:workers increases. New companies and start-ups have a very low manager:worker ratio. They're "lean" and "nimble". As they expand, the manager:worker ratio goes up, and they become less nimble, because although the total workforce has increased, the actual hands-to-the-plow segment of that force hasn't. In
Poor choice of word? (Score:1)
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/yahoo [thefreedictionary.com]
coincidence? (Score:1)
April 4th: Yahoo lays off 2,000 people.
Wait a second... (Score:2)
A New Direction (Score:2)
What they mean is; instead of swirling around the bowl at an agonizingly slow pace, they are wanting to pack as much cash into their pockets as they can and shoot straight for the drain.
Need work, Yahoo is hiring! (Score:2)
Why is it that Yahoo has job listings on Craigslist? Surely some of those 2,000 had the skills to fill those positions?!
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Jack (Score:1)
Jack be nimble
Jack be quick
Jack got laid off by a hedgefund manager dick.
Flickr? (Score:2)
Thats nice (Score:2)
That letter will really comfort the ex-employees as you drive home to your mansion you got for doing jack shit to actually help the company
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Right on. And most of the time it is the worker bees that get canned while the actual bloat - the clueless middle management, and the incompetent first-line management are saved because they are buddies with the higher-ups. The old boys club and all... And they reward themselves with retention bonuses after throwing the hard-working folks on road.
I thought AOL bought them a ways back. :) (Score:1)
Their web property is just the worst, mail riddled with spam, the whole thing riddled with adds, a hairball of a UI that can't manage to prioritise the three things I did there over the 90 things they are are trying to rape my eye-sockets with.
just a friggin mess...
Re:Typical large corporations (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a capitalist, but not a 1 percenter, and I say that you can't cut your way to profitability.
How does that affect your prediction?
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Sorry, but sooner or later you have to start making a product or providing a service that people actually want to buy.
That's 80s Wallstreet bullshit. There are no such things as products, services or money. It's all about grabbing the most of what you fancy (which in most cases is money). No selling or buying involved. Think consultants.
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I'm a capitalist, but not a 1 percenter, and I say that you can't cut your way to profitability.
How does that affect your prediction?
Free market fantasies. You're a capitalist, eh? Too bad it doesn't really exist....anywhere. I hope you don't think anything that's gone on in banking, the oil industry, agriculture, uh...do i need to go on, has anything to do with a capitalist 'free market'. Has a lot more to do with fleecing the tax payer and handing the cash over to companies, who then pretend to be engaging in some kind of free market. What a bunch of bull.
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There's the free market (Somalia) and the fair market (e.g. USA before Glass-Steagel was cut and anti-trust laws were still enforced), but you can't have both.
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There's the free market (Somalia) and the fair market (e.g. USA before Glass-Steagel was cut and anti-trust laws were still enforced), but you can't have both.
I don't want either. I want something else and to stop pretending this shit works/exists. Anarcho-syndicalism maybe?
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Anarcho-synicalist *collective* ThankYouVeryMuch.
What works is moderate non-extremism and sensible, reality-based pragmatism. Some rules and regulations. Not too many. Some taxes, but not too much. Legal principles as guidelines, not as sacred writ (e.g. the constitution), ongoing, reasonable cost-benefit analyses for every government program or law.
Non-inflammatory, detail-intensive, labor-intensive, kind of boring stuff that makes government work like it does in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and so on.
In other
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OH MY GAWD!!! Your going to sit there with a straight face and suggest sanity!!! What about Religious Zealots! What about Left leaning wingnuts and the others on the Right? What about the folks who demand services but howl when it comes time to pay taxes (both rich and poor.) Sanity, huh? Don't get me wrong, I've been preaching sanity for long time. Its just a real bitch to sell in a political climate whose middle ground seems to have been reduced to handful of white collar workers in Chicago ;-)
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WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous
collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship.
A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--
ARTHUR:
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That's phone sanitizer to you Sir!
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Monopoly capitalism is still capitalism. Competition and free markets are part of the ideological face that it presents to the public, but no capitalist worth his/her salt wants to be out there competing to sell commodity goods for any longer than they have to.
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No Monopoly Capitalism is Capitalism in collapse. When you need widgets to stay alive, and the only widgets you get are my widgets, there is no competition, there are no market pressures. I can sell them for any prices I want up to the point where I start killing off a significant percentage of my client base (I'd have to do a profit and loss analysis to find the optimal price.) Even Adam Smith warned about the concentration of wealth and power and the pitfalls of monopoly in a functioning capitalistic envi
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No true capitalist has reasonable, non-exploitive beliefs, huh?
I believe the means of production should be controled by people who have proven themselves good at producing stuff that people want, at a profit. That's pretty much the definition of capitalism. You sem to have redefined "capitalist" as "evil pig", as if you were a stereotype of a USSR-era communist.
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No true capitalist has reasonable, non-exploitive beliefs, huh?
I believe the means of production should be controled by people who have proven themselves good at producing stuff that people want, at a profit. That's pretty much the definition of capitalism. You sem to have redefined "capitalist" as "evil pig", as if you were a stereotype of a USSR-era communist.
You believe that the means of production should be controlled by the people who have proven themselves "good at producing stuff that people want, at a profit", so where exactly does the worker fit in there? You know...the one who actually produces stuff... Sounds to me like you've perverted the idea of worker control by adding the "at a profit" bit,,,insinuating that it takes some kind of esoteric business knowledge to produce anything somebody wants. Why not allow the people actually producing "stuff tha
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The first have of what you wrote is right on. The goal of the economy is *not* to provide jobs. The goal of the economy is to provide desired goods and services for all, ideally with the least possible cost (jobs and energy) involved. If we could make everything we needed with solar-powered robots, so that no one had to work, shouldn't we?
Profit is simply objective proof that what's being made is in fact desired by whoever is using it - that its consumer sees more value in it that the work it takes to ma
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I'm sure your bombastic speeches impress everyone lacking the ability to differentiate between capitalism, cronyism, oligarchism, and corporate fascism.
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Depends what you're spending money on.
There are two main places you can cut and have that move you to profitability. First, is business areas that just aren't making you money, and don't appear to be likely to make you any money any time soon. For a long time Microsofts Xbox division was an example of this. They were playing a long game, hoping it would eventually start making them money. That's fine when you have positive cashflow from somewhere else to invest, but not a good plan when you are running o
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The company can't cut your way to profitability, but the CEO can often profit handsomely [wikipedia.org], even if he leaves a trail of ruin behind him.
It reminds me of one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: "Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them."
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Ah, I see. Thousands of econonomists over time have said you can't cut your way to profits, but if it gets repeated in one article you read, we're all just parrots. Specious logic, much?
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patent troll