Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

AOL Cutting 2000 Additional Jobs

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Oct 15, 2007 04:15 PM
from the never-saw-the-dialup-collapse-coming dept.
Businesses IT
butterwise writes "AOL plans to cut 2,000 jobs, or 20 percent of its worldwide workforce, as the Internet division focuses on advertising sales to make up for subscriber losses. 'The latest cuts will pare AOL's staff to 8,000, down from about 18,000 employees in 2001, when the company bought New-York based Time Warner for $124 billion. The combination led to $100 billion in losses and a more than 60 percent drop in Time Warner's stock as customers dropped dial-up Web access.'"
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: AOL cutting 2000 additional jobs by butterwise (862336)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

AOL Cutting 2000 Additional Jobs 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • "AOL - because online discourse is too intelligent."

    I'm sure that these are mostly support positions, not the chimps who set policy.

  • Obligatory: (Score:5, Funny)

    by oahazmatt (868057) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:23PM (#20987957) Journal
    Boss to Employees: "Goodbye".

    There, now it's out of the way.

    • Re:Obligatory: (Score:5, Funny)

      by eln (21727) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:31PM (#20988085) Homepage
      You've got a pink slip!

      For more information, go to AOL Keyword: Unemployment
    • I had a friend who worked for AOL. He had bad story after bad story. Apparently their biggest problem is that the execs in Virginia are in an AOL only universe and have no idea that Silicon Valley (not Virginia) sets the pace for the internet.

      I'm willing to bet every single person they lay off is a regular employee and not the management responsible for turning a one-time good service (circa 1996) into a cluster f*ck of bad UI design and pop-up ads.

      I recently used a 6 month free trial that came with my co

      • Re:Obligatory: (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cHiphead (17854) on Monday October 15 2007, @07:12PM (#20989607)
        I used to work at AOL. I agree with every part except the last part. Time Warner related execs should've all been f'ing fired for letting AOL "buy" them with a merger of overvalued stock options in the first place. AOL had its chance to turn things completely around but the pointy hairs in charge wouldn't listen one bit to reason or common sense, the p-o-s aol 'client' was too precious to do away with due to its perceived 'value' to the marketing and advertising data mining. Ah the sweet irony of their crash and burn, just took a few years longer than expected.

        Frankly, Silicon Valley can go f*ck itself as far as the rest of us geeks with (somewhat) affordable housing is concerned. ;)

        I wish Google would just buy AOL out already, it'd be a real fire sale in terms of the value of the user correlated data mining.

        Cheers.

    • They're totally screwed... (Score:5, Funny)

      by nick_davison (217681) on Monday October 15 2007, @06:13PM (#20989121)
      AOL's trained its employees too well.

      Boss: You're fired!

      Employee: Sorry, AOL employees only accept termination notices between the hours of 1:13am and 1:16am, Ugandan time. Please call back at this deliberately inconvenient time. Until then, we will continue to bill you for our services.

      Boss [several hours later]: OK, now you're fired!

      Employee: Sorry, please hold.

      Boss [several hours later]: Look, you're freaking fired!

      Employee: OK, I'm going to sign you up for one more month of free employment.

      Boss: I don't want a month's free employment, you're freaking fired, you stupid cretins!

      Employee: I'm sorry, we accidentally disconnected that call. Please begin the process again.

      Management may want to fire them. If the employees have learned anything from their time working there, it'll be next to impossible to make them actually leave. Karma's a bitch.
  • But, I don't feel sorry for AOL.
    So easy to hate them for their horrible business practices.
    May they disappear into dust.
    • >I feel sorry for the canned individuals

      I pity the ones that didn't see this coming.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nwbvt (768631)

      "I feel sorry for the canned individuals"

      Don't. I'm not trying to sound mean, but there is really no reason to feel sorry for them. They get 2 months of severance pay and get to get out before things really get bad (read, bankruptcy). Plus now that they are no longer working for AOL, maybe their neighbors will be willing to befriend them again. They are the lucky ones.

  • I blame this on all of you Slashdotters. For years you just HAD to casually point out how crummy their service is, and how morally repugnant their business practices are, and now look at what has happened!

    Have you no morals? Will you not rest, until every poor person working for an underwhelming ISP has lost their job?

    For shame, Slashdot!

    - Scott

  • AOL and TW Merged (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RajivSLK (398494) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:27PM (#20988007)
    AOL didn't buy Time Warner, they merged in what was widely consider one of the blunders of the "dot com era". A blunder for TW that is. It is also considered one the smartest things AOL CEO Steve Case ever did. Many people believe that he pulled the wool of Time Warner's eyes.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:AOL and TW Merged (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2007, @04:32PM (#20988103)
      If you read the link you gave, you will come across the following:

      "In 2000, a new company called AOL Time Warner was created when AOL purchased Time Warner for US$164bn."
    • According to the Wiki you linked they were bought, but it was done in a merger fashion.

      "In 2000, a new company called AOL Time Warner was created when AOL purchased Time Warner for US$164bn.[3] The deal, announced on 10 January 2000[4] and officially filed on 11 February 2000,[5] employed a merger structure in which each original company merged into a newly created entity."
      • Well, WHO was the top partner?

        (I'm thinking of the merger picture from I think an Economist or National Geographic or other mag, from about 1994, when two companies "merged"... There was a hand-written caption "Who is the top partner"... It was posted in the Shipping/Receiving/Mail Room area of Bay Networks where I temped back then.)

        (And, to go to the way-back machine, to pull some words from Hall & Oates' "Did It in a Minute"... "If TWO become ONE, who is the ONE TWO beCOMES?"...)
        • Overinflated stock value. Remember, this was in early 2000, when the bubble was still very much inflated. It didn't start to really burst until later that year.
    • Man they bought Atari and then got hit with the video game market crash then they bought AOL just in time for the Dot Bomb...
      The trick is to watch what TW buys. If it currently hot then it is a sure sign the bubble is going to burst.
      On a good not they sold off their holdings in Google in 2004.
    • Sorry, you are wrong. AOL did, in fact, acquire (read: purchase) Time Warner.
    • "Many people believe that he pulled the wool of Time Warner's eyes."

      OUCH! That must have hurt, spinning a new Case (of) yarn like that...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by StikyPad (445176)
      I actually had AOL for two reasons. 1) Chat rooms and mail forwarding was faster and easier than usenet, finding FTP dumps, inane IRC rooms, and other "1337" activities. There were no really good news readers (and really still aren't, but fortunately there are decent web interfaces), FTPs would max out and/or go down faster than a Catholic schoolgirl at homecoming, and nobody wanted to DCC to a dialup connection. 2) Back when games required a healthy suspension of disbelief and a metric sh.. well.. a lot

      • Re:AOL and TW Merged (Score:5, Funny)

        by StikyPad (445176) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:45PM (#20988289) Homepage
        He said "pull the wool of their eyes." It's like the strings of their heart, only softer and with a higher risk of retinal damage.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by eln (21727)
        Case took his overinflated stock and bought a huge media company with it, and got himself a very nice golden parachute right before the bottom fell out of the tech sector. I don't expect to see him washing windshields on a street corner any time soon.

        AOL was a dialup company struggling to find its way in a world that was rapidly moving to broadband. The company's future was not nearly as bright as its past, and its stock would have plummeted even worse had it not managed to pick up a giant old media prope

  • TW are Idiots and they Killed AOL. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erris (531066) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:28PM (#20988025) Homepage Journal

    The death of dial up did not have to be the death of AOL. TW had all sorts of content it could have sold as a subscription to it's user base before they lost it all. Now they are scrambling and suing their fans to keep their media empire alive. More savvy competitors are cutting into their sales via the internet with no base at all. They expect the treats to draw customers.

    • Subscriptions for content never made sense, mostly because you can't stream much of anything over dialup. Once everybody got broadband, AOL got left behind.

      Besides which, how much pull do you think the AOL folks had in TW after the .com bust? (hint: not much.). I understand that TW killing AOL didn't make TONS of sense, given TW's broadband lead, which could easily have been co-marketed, at least. Remember, though, AOL also had a crappy reputation for quality of service (horrific login times once the "

  • Actually slightly surprised (Score:3, Interesting)

    by damn_registrars (1103043) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:29PM (#20988039) Journal

    more than 60 percent drop in Time Warner's stock as customers dropped dial-up Web access.


    Am I the only person surprised to see this? Considering AOL used to be the top ISP in the country (IIRC), and now the cable companies are instead (like Time Warner), I would have expected that AOL-TimeWarner would have broken even on the deal. Or maybe even come out ahead, considering how much more they can charge for high speed cable modem access, with presumably an easier network to maintain than the phone network that is otherwise beyond their control.

    I don't think there was any great exodus of AOL customers switching to satellite for internet service or anything...

  • You've Gone Pale! (Score:5, Funny)

    by stabbycabby (1102591) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:36PM (#20988157)
    AOL Keyword: Inevitable

  • AOL - a Web 2.0 company! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:38PM (#20988189) Homepage

    AOL just needs to promote itself as a "Web 2.0" company. They are, after all. Social networking? Definitely, they were there at the beginning. User-contributed content? Yes, they have that. Interactive client? Yes, AOL has that too. Mashups on the home page? Yes! Mobile phone capable? Of course. They even had virtual worlds with avatars, back in their Q-Link days.

    • AOL is now run by the same ppl that run TW. That is, they do not understand the net. All they see is ads and are still desperate to figure out how to make money with no work.
    • AOL just needs to promote itself as a "Web 2.0" company.

      AOL Executive #1: Hey, we came out with AOL 2.0 in 1995, wayyyy before Web 2.0. Didn't you receive the CD? If not, do you want one? Or do you want another one? I'll slip a couple in the mail just in case you need one.

      AOL Executive #2: Me too.

      ---

      In all seriousness, AOL announced their Web 2.0 initiative in late 2006: http://dev.aol.com/node/86 [aol.com] . Although, their blog is almost a year out of date, despite the fact that he says "soon!"

      I'll be writing anoth

  • AOL should have called it a day already (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GnarlyDoug (1109205) on Monday October 15 2007, @05:09PM (#20988553)
    There is a problem with organizations. They seek to perpetuate themselves long after their purpose has been met. In AOL's case they made a metric a**-ton of money in the early days of the internet. Now, instead of distributing all that money and selling off divisions when the business model no longer was very viable and sending everybody home rich, they blew it all on trying to buy a new lease on life with Time-Warner.

    This idea that once an organization or business has been created that it should try to exist for the rest of eternity is stupid. Folding before you have uselessly expended all of your capital when you no longer have a viable business model and you are not structured in a manner that allows you to change business models (very hard to do), is not only smart, but it is a fudiciary duty. Throwing all that money away on a long-shot gamble to simply continue existing is silly.

  • The bubble burst 7 years ago... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bigdaddy25fb (1166129) on Monday October 15 2007, @05:41PM (#20988859)

    And we are still feeling repercussions from the burst...

  • ...were as hard as quitting your account with AOL.

    Employees would get another three months of employment rather than terminated immediately.

    • Re:People still use AOL? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by moore.dustin (942289) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:25PM (#20987987)
      They do not know any better, it is as simple as that really. They either do now know other options exist, think the service is the same, or for many they are to lazy to break their ties with AOL thinking they will lose their email, aim, and other things AOL gives them.

      I have asked numerous people why they still have AOL over the years and almost all of them said that they have had it for so long that they are uncomfortable changing for whatever reason. AOL does a great job locking its customers into its systems and making it seem counter-intuitive to switch.

      • Re:People still use AOL? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by vux984 (928602) on Monday October 15 2007, @04:41PM (#20988227)

        I have asked numerous people why they still have AOL over the years and almost all of them said that they have had it for so long that they are uncomfortable changing for whatever reason. AOL does a great job locking its customers into its systems and making it seem counter-intuitive to switch.

        don't blame AOL for customers being 'comfortable'.

        That's the same reason most people give for using Eudora or Pegasus mail clients. Its not that these companies/products have 'locked customers in' or made it counter intuitive to switch, its simply that people have gotten comfortable, and they don't perceive enough value in changing.

        (Not that there is anything wrong with Eudora or Pegasus. But most people using it aren't "choosing to use it", its simply the case that they've used it for so long its just what they use, it works, and they don't want any hassles.)
        • Actually, trying to migrate from Eudora to ANYTHING is a pain in the ass. Users are essentially locked-in because the file format they use for storing messages is so botched that nothing can properly import it.

          We have a guy at the office who really wants to switch to Outlook, but we just can't transfer over his messages from Eudora.

          • Re:People still use AOL? (Score:5, Informative)

            by Amouth (879122) on Monday October 15 2007, @06:17PM (#20989165)
            hummmm Eudora supports Imap.. he could jsut use that to connect to exchange and then move his messges into the imap storage via Eudora and then open up outlook.. not that hard.. (i assume you have exchange sence he is wanting to move to outlook)

          • We have a guy at the office who really wants to switch to Outlook, but we just can't transfer over his messages from Eudora.

            When I have problems like this, I use an IMAP account. This type of account stores messages on the server, rather than locally. Copy all the old messages to the IMAP account, kiss Eudora goodbye, set up Outlook and set up your two accounts (your normal e-mail account and the IMAP), and transfer your beloved messages back from the IMAP to Outlook. When I have to do this, I use a local IMAP server (running on the same computer as the e-mail clients), but that might be a bit too much for a lot of people. Perh

          • We have a guy at the office who really wants to switch to Outlook
            And is that supposed to be an improvement?

        • Re:People still use AOL? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by westlake (615356) on Monday October 15 2007, @07:09PM (#20989583)
          don't blame AOL for customers being 'comfortable'.

          AOL was among the first to profit from the discovery that the future of online services didn't lie with the Geek - and with a half-dozen or more arcane clients for the BBS, FTP, TELNET, USENET, IRC chat, etc.

          AOL pioneered flat monthly rates, automatic updates. There were perfectly intelligible reasons why users became comfortable with dial-up AOL and why they remain comfortable with portals like Yahoo now.

      • Yep, people still use AOL for the same reasons that people still use Windows, they'd terrified of change, for these poor souls their entire experience of the Internet is just what AOL and it's massively bloated software suite has presented them with. Hopefully these users will feel suitably alienated and outraged by change in upcoming versions of the AOL software that they'll consider a move to something less proprietary and start to experience the internet the same way everyone else does.

        Oddly enough, even when it's quite blatantly obvious, AOL users are often hesitant to blame the AOL browser and crapware for dreadful system performance and are happy to pay through the nose for bandwidth upgrades that they never see any benefit from...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Rycross (836649)
          Their software wasn't just bloated, it was terribly buggy as well. Around 2001, I had a job at a help desk at a university. Sometimes we had people come in who had installed AOL's software on their Windows PC (usually 98 se), and then tried to connect to the university dial-up. The AOL software somehow managed to screw up something with Window's networking. Sometimes we had to do a reinstall of the networking components just to get things to work correctly again, even if they had already uninstalled all

      • Re:People still use AOL? (Score:5, Funny)

        by peragrin (659227) on Monday October 15 2007, @05:02PM (#20988495)
        My boss does. $20 bucks a month we get charged just so she can use the "internet" as she likes too.

        When she got a new computer running windows XP, I made sure to "install AOL". In reality I set AOL.com as her IE 7 home page, changed the shortcut icon and name, and locked down bits and pieces of the browser the best I could. Installing the abomination that is AIM completes the illusion. she has had a hard time adapting to the "new"AOL but accepts it as is.

        We do still pay $20 bucks a month for AOL though. I can't seem to break that one out. At least the book keeper is helping me.

    • Re:People still use AOL? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2007, @05:57PM (#20988991)
      Because you can't take your aol email account with you. We need email address portability! Gah thinking about that as an idea makes my head wanna plode.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ravenspear (756059)
      The AIM network is run by AOL, although it is separate from their dialup subscriber network. Even if they go under it's unlikely this would be shut down though, too many users and ad revenue. It would most likely be restructured or sold to another party. Even if it did shut down, everyone would just switch to msn or yahoo.
    • If you work for a large corporation, probably the best way to get the latest breaking news (especially news of this type) about your company is from external news sources. Experience has shown that large corporations, for whatever reason, are extremely bad about keeping employees in the loop. Go figure.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ScrewMaster (602015)
      Back in 1985 or so, I worked for a software house (video games and educational software, as it happened) and due to a number of factors which can be conveniently lumped under "bad management", they had to institute massive layoffs. "Black Monday" we called it. No warning, no hint of anything to come ... just "there'll be a meeting at 9:00." As we were heading towards the meeting room, our manager pulled me and another programmer aside and said, "Not you two. See me after the meeting." So we went back to our

    • AOHell should never have existed.

      That's not true at all. At one time, they provided a crucial service to the PC users in this great nation: a boundless supply of free floppy disks, conveniently delivered almost daily right to our homes and offices. It was only with the demise of the floppy drive that AOL's reason for existence went away.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.