Zoom and gloom: Vid-chat biz sheds 15 percent of staff – by email Video chat outfit Zoom has "made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15 percent and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues" – and communicated it in an email. The quote comes from the email CEO Eric Yuan on Tuesday sent to "Zoomies" – the firm's term for its staff. The …
We actually WANTED to make it the official video conference tool in the company, but its stupid pricing model left us stuck with only a handful of rooms, which wasn't really usable. Now we are transitioning to Teams, which is an inferior product in every way, except one: it is basically free, since we have an O365 subscription anyway. It's a damn shame.
I can see another anti-trust case on the Horizon for MS about that - although from articles I've seen it looks like Teams isn't going to be free for long anyway - once enough companies have adopted it for the reasons you identify you'll probably see that it only becomes "included" in a higher tier of 365.
Hmm...
"Zoonie is a character from the series Fireball XL5 ... he is a very lazy creature and thus possesses little motivation to do anything. Given the opportunity however, he is known to fiddle with machinery he does not understand, which predictably leads to misfortune for those around him."
Fireball XL5 - thats going back a bit :) I was actually young then and TV here was monochrome :(
(Recently seeing an episode from the later UFO series I could see how much the lack of colour affected the story such as it was. The wigs are straight out of our Sydney gay mardi gras parade or eurovision :)
I am guessing when enterprises start looking at individual productivity versus the use of social media like business communication tools they may start ditching both the tools and the individuals. Before zoom and its ilk meetings could be and were enormous wasters of time - the pandemic and zoom just put the whole charade on steroids. It was like an episode of "Roger Ramjet" (q.v.:) - Roger and his american eagles zooming here, zooming there causing mayhem. When I first saw one of these new electric monocycles I immediately thought of that series' "Solarbots." For me a unicycle pretty much implies the rider is a clown.
Yeah.
On the one hand, I don't believe for a second that the C-suite didn't know this was coming from the moment they started hiring all those additional staff. Everyone – everyone – who was paying any sort of attention and capable of critical thought knew the pandemic hiring surge was unsustainable. Many people said so at the time. I do not for a moment believe company officers are at all surprised by this turn of events. I expect they've been discussing all along what layoffs would have to be made, and when.
On the other, I do appreciate seeing the exec team taking a significant hit in compensation themselves as penance.
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