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by codedivine 5128 days ago
As a sidenote, all the cheering and celebration that goes on in the techpress when a company dies is somewhat disgusting. I don't understand why a large section of tech industry wants RIM or Nokia etc to fail. I would rather them see them succeed, see them build something cool and have more and fun things to play with.

edit: I think we can safely conclude that hackers are about as human and as fallible as any other group. We have our own fashions and our own tabloids.

4 comments

Probably because this proves them right and the companies wrong, at the time when they refused to believe that iPhone or Android are threats to them. RIM has been very defiant about beliving that especially, but also Nokia for as long as they had their former CEO (about 4 years). "Finally failing" means that the companies were wrong, and the tech press was right all along about them, but the companies were too arrogant to admit it at the time, and now they suffer for it.
Except these layoffs are not what killed the company.

The company has been dead for a while, reality is just slow to adjust.

Do not think of it as a company dieing but rather thousands of brilliant souls being released from enslavement.

Having worked for a large "dead, but didn't know it yet" company in the past: Yup. In the later layoffs, when they had run out of dead wood and were cutting into great, productive workers, it was entirely unclear who the lucky people were. I heard of people getting axed on a thursday who were working at a new place the next week, with higher pay.
Сompanies have their reign and they die; it's inevitable. (But CocaCola didn't yet die). The problem seems to be that people's fate are too much tied to the fate of their company. Each company can be seen as trial of a business model or product idea; they monetize the idea to the full limit and then they go down.

And each death seems to be a birth for another company; look at Apple's profits and Samsungs growth.

It's also a good thing to have a company finally fail rather than just not quite die perpetually. It frees up their engineers and other talented people to go pursue a company with maybe a bigger or more contemporary vision for adding value to the world

Ie, let's take these resources away from those bad managers.

Sucks for the employees short term, but no doubt they'll be happier in the long run