Monday, January 12, 2009
Seagate Defrags Workforce, Executive Team
“Terrible.” That was Seagate CEO Bill Watkins’s (at right, doing his Dr. Octopus impression) one-word description of the disk drive maker’s December sales last week–and apparently one of his final public comments as Chief Executive as well. This morning Seagate said that Watkins is handing the CEO reins over to Chairman Stephen Luczo and that the two will confer over the next week to “determine what role, if any, Mr. Watkins will have at the company going forward.”
Earlier this year Motorola said it would sack 1,500 employees during the fourth quarter of 2008. Apparently, that was a mistake. What it meant to say was that it planned to sack 1,900 employees during the fourth quarter of 2008, as evidenced today by the company’s announcement that it will lay off 400 more employees than originally expected this year.
The wheels of justice grinding away at Apple’s option-backdating scandal for the past few years have worn another career down to gritty dust. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday settled the last civil case against a former Apple executive accused of stock-option fraud.
Get this: Yahoo’s merger talks with Microsoft collapsed because the software giant wasn’t fully committed to them. This, presumably according to the same folks at Yahoo who would have us believe the company didn’t learn of Microsoft’s offer of $33 per share until Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s kiss-off letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.
As predictable as the call and response between two chattering squirrel monkeys, the recent dialogue between Yahoo and Carl Icahn. And about as elevated.
Shareholders suing Yahoo’s board of directors for its alleged mishandling of the Microsoft buyout offer may find their efforts to pull the company’s controversial severance plan something of a fool’s errand. Because according to a new company filing, their chances of forcing Yahoo to scrap the plan are about as good as their chances of forcing CEO Jerry Yang to use capital letters in his all-hands memos just like a big boy.
The only difference between Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s latest all-hands memo and the last one he broadcast is that “Carl Icahn” has been substituted for “Microsoft.” Other than that, it’s another tired restatement of the capitalization-free “try not to get too preoccupied with the ongoing assault on our company” missives that Yang has issued at least twice before.
