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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

We’ve had lots of emails from MySpace employees with their response to our most recent post about the crumbling mid level management structure. “If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously,” we said. And they did contact us. But they don’t feel differently. There was also a great discussion in the comments section to that post where a few MySpace employees chimed in both pro and against the company.

But the emails were most telling. One wasn’t anonymous and the writer asked to keep it off record, and we’ll respect that. But he wrote at length about high level execs “chewing out” the lower ranks, in public. And lots of exec level nepotism hires.

This is a theme brought up by another employee, writing anonymously. He or she confirmed that too many mid level managers are leaving the company, and talks about more yelling at employees in public (“Maple” refers to 407 North Maple Drive, the address of MySpace HQ, “Jason” refers to Co-president Jason “Hell Yeah” Hirschhorn):

Dear TechCrunch-

I always enjoy your article on the drama at my company – MySpace but I’ve never felt the urge to write until now. I guess I’m writing you because your article was ABSOLUTELY dead on. Because of that, my morale isn’t really high and I really don’t give much of a shit anymore.

Well, the hole goes deeper than that. Many departments are losing much of the middle layer of actual star performers, but people who can’t get anything done due to the crazy BS in Maple. For example, 2 directors in Jason’s product org are gone recently: (Director of Analytics – Joe Schantz who went to Yahoo), Director of Product Mahesh Angadi. Other senior middle managers like Sr Product Manager Charles Pham, who went to CitySearch and Sr. Online Marketing Manager, Laura Coltrin left and is now at EventBrite. What do these particular people have in common? Besides being huge losses for MySpace, they were all re-orged under his royal heighn-ass, Jason. People don’t want to work for that moron – he’s just consolidating power.

Today, Jeff Webber – Director of Engineering in Seattle – gave notice (no idea where he’s going.)

Oh, and Jason really doesn’t get along with Mike. Jason was witnessed ripping one of his VPs a new one when the VP was trying to explain why he was doing something that Mike requested (in front of 6 other people.) It’s a mess – but it should be fun watching one run the other out of town.

A bunch of other people have their foot out the door – spend some time around Maple, SF or Seattle near the front entrance and watch people disappear for hours at a time or for “long lunches”. Its almost comical. You see a lot of people going into empty conference room and talking on their cell phones or people “going to grab coffee” by themselves and chatting on the phone walking down the street. And yeah, I’m one of those people.

Anyway, this isn’t just due to the fact these idiots are running the company into the ground. The reason why people are leaving now is that MySpace gave out these big secret retention bonuses that had a 2 tier payout. Overall, the ENTIRE bonus was for anywhere from 20% to 100+% of a person’s base. The key is that they pay out in two segments – you had to be working in December so that you get 25% of the bonus amount). If you’re employed here until June, you get the remaining 75% of their bonus. As you can imagine, this is a LOT of money – especially at a place that gave tiny annual raises last year (<5% was the average), where we cancelled profit sharing last fiscal year (not sure you knew about that) and with no stock incentive.

It’s a huge sign of how bad things are that they are leaving 75% of the bonus on the table. However, since we all know that the ship is sinking, taking 25% in December was good enough. I don’t blame them. I’m out of here as soon as I get a new gig. I earned that bonus money but I’m sick of this place.

Oh – and the guy who thought of this bonus plan? Mike. These were given out after the review cycle (August.)

So yeah, you want to write about more defections? Wait until June and then everyone will get paid and bounce. I and others are counting the days. Its kinda funny – it was supposed to be a total secret from everyone in the ranks (yes, some people didn’t get bonuses, but those people kinda suck so who cares right?) but now everyone is joking about it privately.

-Disgruntled

And one last employee says it’s ok to paraphrase and quote parts of his/her email. This one still has some fight left in ‘em. Here are some of the better parts:

Until a recent reorg of the engineering group (did you cover it? I don’t recall seeing it.), the whole company was segmented into horizontal layers so there was an operations group, a database group, an api group, a front-end group, a search group, a datawarehouse group, etc. Anything but the most minor feature required an obnoxious amount of cross-group interaction and took huge effort just to get everyone on board and the work scheduled. Some of that layering is being done away with, at least that is the stated goal.

In addition to the extreme layering there was a group of people who sat in the middle of the process, able to accept or reject any project; people who didn’t have the business sense to be in bizdev or be product managers and didn’t have the technical ability to be developers. When they accepted a project for development they would (randomly?) select some developers to build it. There were no clear lines of responsibility, no reason for anyone to really care about what they were working on, no reward for success and no punishment for failure (except for layoffs which seem to happen more or less randomly so they don’t fall on either the reward or punishment side). This structure was called ‘the matrix’ and thankfully was a casualty of the reorg. Plus in the big layoffs last spring (before my time) the hardest hit groups were front-line employees, the developers and testers who do the actual work; you had these big design committees arguing back and forth for weeks or months about how and what to do and no one to do it at the end of the day.

A lot of the people who are leaving and have left recently were in charge of this dysfunctional process and are unable or unwilling or just plain sick of trying. Yes a lot of good (better anyway) technical people are leaving or have left and yes there is a lot of detailed knowledge about keeping the current code running going with them.

…

There are other problems besides all of that, God I’m getting sick of writing about this. The technology platform (.net) and development methodology (scrum) and general caliber of developer (although there are exceptions) is more reminiscent of a poorly run enterprise development shop than an Internet company, certainly far far far from what you would find at a startup or Facebook or even Microsoft.

…

Will Mike & Jason succeed at creating something functional out of this godawful mess? Too soon to tell, I think. The first all-hands meeting a couple of days after they took over felt like an old fashioned tent revival or something, I almost expected Zig Ziggler to show up. But I will say that there has been more communication from them in a few weeks than from Owen in several months and they are reaching out to meet with developers working on interesting or important new projects, in short they seem engaged in a way that Owen never did. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Long ago Google unofficially abandoned the Don’t Be Evil mantra and replaced it with, no kidding, an “evil scale.” Sometimes you have to chose between the lesser of two weevils, as Patrick O’Brian would say. And frankly, just staying this side of decent is enough for most companies.

So when Twitter CEO Evan Williams said earlier today that one of Twitter’s operating principles was to “be a force for good” I cringed a little.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in business, and am still learning, is to never trust anyone who says “you can trust me.” That’s a big red flag that they’re planning something really messed up in the near future. And likewise, a company shouldn’t be out there saying “don’t be evil” or “be a force for good.”

First because it’s basically impossible to balance a profit motive with a goodness motive. And in fact the nice thing about capitalism is that everyone acting in their own self interest tends to be good for everyone else, too, if appropriate government forces are put in place to stop monopolies, pollution, etc. Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society.

And second because when people, or governments, or companies start talking about being a force for good, there’s a good chance that a serious amount of self righteousness is brewing behind the scenes. Everyone who fights a war thinks they have God on their side. And some of the most atrocious moments in history were done in the name of good.

What I’d like best is if Twitter just focuses on keeping the lights on, and adds competitive features that keep Google, Facebook and others on their toes. Let others use Twitter to do good things. Twitter should stay goodness-neutral and self righteous free.

Or alternatively try to be a force for good. But just do it, don’t talk about it.

We have written repeatedly that Windows itself is one of the main reasons why touchscreen computers have never caught the general public’s attention. The interface just wasn’t designed for finger input

More here:
Notice the lack of Windows in HP’s slate device

Short Version: Tax season is upon us, friends, and wouldn’t those 1099s and W2s floating hither and yon would be much more accessible if they were nestled deep inside a searchable PDF? Sure.

See the rest here:
Review: ScanSnap S1300 portable scanner

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.

The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.

Examples of questions asked include:

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the Application submission process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the application review process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with the length of time it takes to get updates available on the App Store.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Sometime around the first of the year, Apple made some changes to the App Store approval process that drastically sped things up for many developers. In fact, a number of developers noted that approval process wait time went from two weeks (or worse) to just a couple of days in some situations. There have also been reports of improved communication from the app review team.

It seems likely that Apple staffed up its app review team and also provided them with better training and instructions over the past few months. Still, if the App Store continues to grow at its blistering pace, it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get bogged down again. So during this time of relative peace, it’s smart for Apple to survey its developers to fine tune the system.

MySpace is obviously a social network, but in terms of being talked about these days on the social web it has lost a lot of steam in recent years. To help with that, they’re bringing in Sean Percival to be the service’s new Director of Content Socialization.

Percival, who was apparently one of the first 3,000 people to ever sign up for MySpace, had previously been consulting for the company and has written a book about what he’ll now be preaching: MySpace Marketing: Creating a Social Network to Boom Your Business. He’ll report to Angela Courtin, the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Entertainment & Content for MySpace, and will work with the editorial and content teams to try to help kickstart talk about the service on the web.

Percival, who lives in LA, is also known for starting the Southern California tech/gossip blog Lalawag. Previously, he’s worked at Mahalo, Docstoc, and Tsavo, under Mike Jones who is now the COO of MySpace. Jones was MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta’s first hire when he took over that role last year.

As he notes on his blog, this is a good week for Percival, he also just announced that his wife is pregnant. Read more about Percival’s new gig on the MySpace Blog.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:

Nicira - Virtual Data Center Control Software
TopTenREVIEWS - Product Research and Reviews
Tangerine Solar - Community Solar Power Project
Powered - Social Media and Marketing

Do not expect UFC to look the other when it comes to online piracy of its various pay-per-view events. Dana White, the company’s president, recently told the Vancouver Sun that he and the UFC will do whatever it takes to eliminate piracy. “It’s gonna cost us a lot of money, but guess what, it’s gonna cost [the pirates] a lot of money. It’s gonna get to the point where it’s like, f*ck it, maybe we shouldn’t pirate MMA anymore.” This is not a very forward-thinking way of looking at the problem, no.

It was only a few weeks ago that I first made mention of UFC’s efforts against piracy. The gist of the argument was, just let it happen and concentrate on maintaining the company’s momentum. The UFC doesn’t want to end up like the music industry, having sued its fans into indifference, if not antagonism, toward its product.

One of the key features of the Nexus One has nothing to do with its hardware. The latest and greatest Android phone also is the first device to come with the new Android 2.1 OS. And while other phones, like the Droid, are going to get it too (likely later this month), for now, if you want to play around with it, you’ll need a Nexus One. Or, starting today, you can also download the Android 2.1 SDK.

As noted on the Android Developers Blog, the team is releasing it before most devices have it so that developers can play around with and build for the new features introduced in 2.1. Though Google calls 2.1 a “minor platform release” over Android 2.0, there are a number of new elements such as voice recognition, live wallpapers, a new launcher, more home screens, and some WebKit changes. Those who have ported it over to the Droid note that the new OS is also faster.

Google also notes that there is a new USB manager available through the SDK Manager that supports the Nexus One. This may or may not be related to the new services that it seems like Google wants to include with the device, such as a new docking station for backing up your data.

You can find the new SDK here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.