Technology

More Cuts At AOL

by

You can get the skinny here.  It’s 100 employees being laid off.

What’s most interesting are the cuts to super-popular AIM, which an insider says is basically support staff.  Surely that will be fixed, but my guess is AOL sees AIM as a cash cow and doesn’t plan to do anything new with it.

A good deal of AOL’s activities seems to be seeking to maximize the numbers in profit, so I don’t see any actual plan so much as calculations.  Not sure where this is going to end up.

TAKEAWAYS:

  • AOL is probably going to go for some radical rebranding soon.  OK further radical rebranding – they really aren’t “anything.”
  • AIM will probably survive, but it’ll be just a service that doesn’t really grow.
  • I wouldn’t send a resume to AOL.
  • Bonnie and I?  WAY wrong on AOL in the past.  Just apologizing.

– Steven Savage

Really. Yahoo is suing Facebook

by

No, I’m not kidding.  I’d heard rumors of this coming, but there you go.

It seems incredibly obvious with the timing (and past history) that this is an attempt to get a settlement out of Facebook to give them some cash.  However reactions I’ve seen across the net are mostly “what a load.”

For Facebook, well, they’ll weather this (they have other problems).  For Yahoo this looks incredibly pathetic (and a repeat of their suit against Google), and breaks a kind of unwritten rule among web companies of “don’t sue over this.”  They’re going to loose a lot of sympathy over this.

Also, frankly, the patents don’t seem to be very defendable because they’re rather general (though the linked analysis seems a bit off) and look like the kind of things Yahoo could sue enormous amounts of companies over.  Some good lawyers could probably take this thing apart fast.

This is humiliating for Yahoo, and smells of desperation to me – they’re resorting to patent trolling.  Sure they might win – or they might get smashed while everyone else looks on and applauds.  But they’re making a lot of people angry.

If they’re resorting to this level of action to raise money, I’m going to say take Yahoo OFF your to-work for list.  I think they may be in worse trouble than we thought.

– Steven Savage

– Steven Savage

Netflix In Talk With Cable Companies

by

So says Reuters, who aren’t exactly prone to fly off the handle.

The idea seems to be Netflix becomes an option for the cable viewer, bundled into their bill.  Simple, effective, and efficient.  In fact, I’ll be exploring some of that on Monday . . .

Anyway, on to this possibility – frankly, it makes perfect sense.  Netflix gets a cash cow, viewers probably get some kind of discount or at least easier billing, and cable companies get a new reason to be around.  This also opens the opportunity to all sorts of crazy additional technologies and collaborations, as well as questions (is it going to be your-cable-box-only?)

None of this is surprising, of course, except that it’s happening a little faster than I’d have expected and doesn’t seem to be part of any larger initiatives – that we know of.

If this goes through?  Well, I’d start sending resumes to Netflix now, just in case . . .

– Steven Savage