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.
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.
Good thing Wall Street wasn’t expecting much from Microsoft. Because it didn’t get it.
After market close Thursday, the Redmond, Wash-based tech giant reported that fiscal fourth-quarter net income fell to $3.05 billion, or 34 cents a share, from $4.3 billion, or 46 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue for the period ended in June fell 17 percent to $13.1 billion.
Microsoft missed Wall Street revenue estimates by $1 billion. Gruesome.
2009 has proven a lucrative year for departing Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen. Sure, he’s leaving Yahoo, but he’s doing so with a $1.8 million lump-sum severance payment, according to a company SEC filing. This in addition to the $250,000 bonus he was awarded earlier this year.
Well, that didn’t take long at all. Microsoft has thought better of its decision to ask some of the 1,400 people sacked last month to return part of their severance packages. Days after distributing a letter to an unknown number of former employees requesting repayment of accidental severance overpayments, the company has reversed course.
Yahoo’s financials for the fourth quarter–co-founder Jerry Yang’s last as CEO–were about what you’d expect: mediocre. The fourth was Yahoo’s first money-losing quarter since 2002, and the first time its revenue declined since the fourth quarter of 2001.
Yahoo caught a lucky break yesterday when a Delaware Chancery Court judge denied a request by company shareholders to expedite a trial on whether to invalidate Yahoo’s controversial employee severance plans.
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.
Have you heard? Carl Icahn is unhappy with Yahoo’s current leadership and the manner in which it handled Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition offer. In a stink-bomb of a letter to Roy Bostock, the chairman of Yahoo’s board of directors, Icahn accused Yahoo of acting against its shareholders’ best interests by making it practically impossible for Microsoft to stay at the bargaining table.
Turns out Jerry Yang isn’t the only Yahoo CEO to reject a buyout offer from Microsoft. His predecessor Terry Semel did as well. According to a complaint unsealed as part of a proposed class-action suit against Yahoo’s directors today, Microsoft offered $40 a share for Yahoo in January 2007.
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. Read more »
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.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
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.
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