location based blog: cuts

Monday, June 27, 2011

Comment on Skype CEO, not investors, made the key cuts by Skype Insider

To those who say that Skype employees should have sought legal advice - a few comments in response - Skype employees have a stock option agreement and a stock option plan. The stock option plan, in turn, contains a “blink and you missed it” reference to a third document, a Partnership Agreement in the Cayman Islands, the jurisdiction where the stock options are actually held. That means to obtain competent legal advice, a typical employee would need to retain lawyers in both their home state and in the Caymans. Then they would need to retain a lawyer in New York because Skype chose New York state law to apply to many provisions (nb: strangely, Skype has no employees in New York and claims, for regulatory purposes, not to even “do business” there). Q - Do we really expect this kind of massive “lawyering up” from new employees? - These were not negotiated agreements. Employees were induced to join Skype with promises of stock options, and then, after leaving their other jobs behind, were instructed to sign these convoluted agreements - Take it or leave it. - It is very revealing that Skype, unlike every other tech company, chose not to furnish its rank and file employees with a “Q&A;” overview or summary of key provisions of its stock option plan. They knew they were engaged in a deception and decided to keep it dark. - No amount of lawyering should be able to take away the common-sense and "legal" definition of vested. From Black's law dictionary "vested " means "having become a completed, consummated right for present or future enjoyment, not contingent, unconditional, absolute." - Finally Skype/Silver Lake have not successfully cheated anyone out of their vested options yet. This won't be over for a long time....

Comment on Skype CEO, not investors, made the key cuts by Skype Insider

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2011/06/20/skype-ceo-not-investors-made-the-key-cuts/#comment-634029

Monday, November 29, 2010

The PC's Death By A Thousand Cuts: Tablets Today, Thin Clients Tomorrow

old computers

Today's Gartner forecast of PC sales focused primarily on the consumer market, which is already being impacted by media tablets such as the iPad.

But there was more bad news for PC makers buried near the end: businesses are showing increasing interest in hosted virtual desktops (HVDs). That means that instead of of buying new PCs every three to seven years to support the latest OS and applications, companies can use inexpensive terminals or stick with old refurbished PCs.

With virtual desktops, the desktop operating system is actually running in a virtual machine on a back-end server. Cheaper hardware isn't the only benefit for companies: IT departments no longer have to touch thousands of desktops every time they want to deploy an app or patch the OS. But to employees, it looks and feels more or less like using a regular PC.

According to Gartner's predictions, HVDs won't start impacting the PC market until 2012 or later. But when this happens, it's another knife cut to the old PC industry.

Citrix and VMWare are leaders in this space today and stand to gain. Microsoft will probably be OK--a lot of virtual PCs will still use Office, and Microsoft has reluctantly started offering a licensing model that makes it easier for companies to buy Windows this way instead of on new PCs (as 85% of Windows sales are today).

The losers in this switch will be big business PC providers like HP and Dell, whose last quarter was saved by strong business sales. They'll make it up somewhat in sales of new servers and services, but upgrade cycles for servers tend to be longer and the number of units per sale is typically much lower.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also: