Earlier today, AOL [TWX] has announced laying off another 700 employees from its workforce. In this era of massive job losses, it does not seem as massive as in years past, but nevertheless, with only about 7,000 workers remaining since the last wave of AOL layoffs, the number is still a very large one.
In the past, I’ve mentioned that online advertising is a tricky business, where it is easy for one company (like Google [GOOG]) to completely and utterly dominate the market to the point of a monopoly because of its access to consumers via search. It’s one of those drug dealer mentalities that works so well in various media (from actually selling illicit drugs, to viral marketing, to search…), that anybody who wants to play in the advertising game has to pay the leader in many different ways. It is unfortunate that AOL has gotten caught in the advertising hype and now has to struggle harder with its remaining properties and resources to eke out some form of survival.
Obviously, this hurts the employees as well. I still get E-mails and IM’s from people who are unaware that I had retired from AOL more than a year ago, asking for architectural and technical assistance on the various systems and business programs I’d created/launched/developed or participated in. With the ever-dwindling pool of knowledge, it will become even more difficult for the surviving employees to conduct their daily business without spending more time researching issues and technology on their own instead of simply contacting the authority; and since a lot of the technology at AOL has actually been cutting edge and developed in-house, and in some cases actually leading in the open source movements, that information access was rarified and exclusive to begin with. Now it may just be absent…
Good luck, AOL’ers.
More Reading
- Exclusive: AOL to Lay Off 10 Percent of Staff, Cutting 700, Due to Ad Meltdown and a Refocusing on New Structure (All Things Digital, Kara Swisher)
- AOL CEO Randy Falco’s Entire Memo to the Troops on Layoffs (All Things Digital, Kara Swisher)
