Earlier today, Kara Swisher reported in BoomTown that RealNetworks would sack four percent of its workforce–70 employees out of its 1,700-person staff. After the jump, the official internal memo from RealNetworks Founder, Chairman and CEO Rob Glaser, breaking the bad news.
“We are mostly but not all done” with layoffs. So said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in May at the start of a second round of cuts that claimed the livelihoods of some 3,000 employees. Now, six months later, the company is finishing the job. Sources tell TechFlash that Microsoft will make additional job reductions this week–beginning as early as today.
They’re swinging the ax over at Nokia Siemens again. The mobile network equipment maker said today that it plans to reduce its 64,000-strong workforce by up to nine percent in a bid to “improve financial performance and return to growth”–something the joint venture has had a hard time doing since it launched in February 2007.
Ugly news. The end of Sun Microsystems as an independent company after 27 years is to be prefaced with a bloodletting. And a big one too. The company is sacking some 3,000 employees as it awaits the closing of Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion takeover.
So much for Dell’s personal computer manufacturing operations in the United States. On Wednesday, the PC maker said it would close its plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., as part of a long-term restructuring that will see it cut costs by $4 billion by the end of fiscal 2011. Over 900 employees will lose their jobs as a result.
Apple appears to have a particular affinity for the unwritten no-poaching agreements said to be so popular among the nation’s biggest tech companies. Earlier this summer, the New York Times reported that Apple may have quietly negotiated an agreement with Google not to hire away each other’s top talent. Now, Bloomberg claims that the company attempted to win a similar commitment from Palm, but was rebuffed.
The ax is swinging at Rhapsody America. The subscription music service, a joint venture between RealNetworks and Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks, is sacking nine percent of its employees, mostly in editorial.
IBM had a very good second quarter, all things considered. The company reported earnings that trounced analysts’ estimates and raised its full-year earnings forecast. Earnings were $2.32 per share, up from $1.97 per share in the same period last year, and well above the $2.02 per share the Street was looking for.
The 1,500 to 2,000 job cuts announced during Cisco’s second-quarter earnings call are apparently well under way. Sources say the company is sacking upward of 600 employees at its Silicon Valley headquarters today.
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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