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dotcom life preserver
Thursday, June 28 2001
The big news at work today was that the company is not going softly into the dotcom darkness but is instead being bought for about twelve million dollars by Yahoo.com. This is about half the price paid by StudentAdvantage.com for my last employer, CollegeClub.com after they went bankrupt. In the course of crossing this dotcom desolation one has to accept whatever rides come down the road. The irony, of course, is that the handful of millions paid by Yahoo for my present employer will probably do a lot more for Yahoo's music content that the billions (yes billions) Yahoo paid for Broadcast.com back in the heady days of the dotcom boom.
In keeping with my campaign of invisibility, I didn't talk to anyone in the company about the acquisition news, but I could sense that the overwhelming feeling in the office was one of relief. For the first time in months there is no pervasive dread of impending layoffs. The dirty work of laying people off will have to be a Yahoo thing, but it will be months before the Lords and Ladies of Yahoo get up to speed and figure out who goes and what stays. In the meantime, it's business as usual, but without the performance anxiety. It doesn't matter if we succeed or fail; from now on it's all Yahoo's problem. It's as if we just crawled on our knees across the desert and, despite losses along the way, most of us survived. Indeed, though today the live database seemed to be bogging down and even requiring reboots under the weight of the media attention, there was none of the usual sense of life or death urgency. We'd made it; the race is over.
Of course, I don't know if any of this has any bearing on my future; as it stands now I'm moving to New York and it's doubtful my company will want me working in their New York office.
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