Bob Moffat, the high-ranking, kilt-wearing IBM executive arrested in the Galleon insider-trading case, has traded his temporary leave of absence for a permanent one. According to a brief message posted to IBM’s internal Web site, Moffat, head of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, has left the company in the wake of the Galleon affair.
Twitter has already had repercussions in the courtroom. Now it has had them at Microsoft’s annual company meeting as well. Employee tweets from the gathering Thursday revealed that we may see a major update to the company’s Bing search engine as early as next week.
Add another name to the list of Yahoo employees defecting to Microsoft. Dayne Sampson, Yahoo’s VP of Operations for Search and Advertising, has fled the company for its former suitor, Microsoft confirmed to Digital Daily.
If Yahoo employee defections to Microsoft continue apace, there may come a day when Redmond will no longer need to buy the struggling company’s search business. It will already have acquired it. This week yet another Yahoo alum joined Microsoft: Jan Pedersen, a former chief scientist and VP in the company’s Search and Advertising Technology Group.
Apparently, fear of a deepening recession alone isn’t enough to maintain tech worker loyalty these days–mounting job losses be damned. This week, Google repriced millions of employee stock options that had gone underwater as the company’s share price declined. Now eBay hopes to do the same. The reason: employee retention.
If no mention of layoffs was made during IBM’s reporting of its fourth-quarter results it’s not because the company hadn’t been planning them. IBM sent layoff notices to a number of employees last week–just one day after reporting a 12 percent gain in fourth-quarter earnings and issuing an encouraging financial outlook for 2009. And according to reports, the company is eliminating about 2,800 jobs in North America–mostly in its sales and software units.
Weakening economic conditions have forced Dell to add a new benefit to its already tenuous employee salary packages: a week of unpaid leave. In an effort to “better position the company for long-term competitiveness,” the company is asking workers to consider taking five days off without pay–the theory being that five days off without pay is better than six months off on unemployment in a lousy economy.
The hammer has fallen at eBay. This morning the online auctioneer sacked about 1,000 permanent employees and a few hundred temps, about 10 percent of its workforce. That’s a bit less than the 1,500 workers for whom the company was rumored to be writing up pink slips, but it’s substantial just the same.
Astonishing. The average prole spends more than 25 percent of his or her time online at work on personal activities. That’s the word from IT consultancy Voco, apparently having just discovered that the Internet, which essentially puts a concert hall, movie theater, TV, brokerage firm, shopping mall, garage sale and family/friend gathering on every employee desktop, can be–gasp–a distraction in the workplace.
The word “Nintendo” literally translates as “leave luck to heaven,” but another translation might be “leave luck to your employees.” Because Nintendo’s are among the most productive in tech. In fact, the average Nintendo worker earns more for the video game maker than average Google or Goldman Sachs workers earn for their respective employers.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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