I've been trying to find more info online, but apart from a few UK magazines and one Fortune article, these Oracle layoffs seem to have flown under the radar. No media attention means very little blowback, something we desperately need right now if we don't want this to become the new norm. Is our economy so bad that even layoffs this large are more of the usual, not worthy of a news article?
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Want more media? Talk to more journos. I take what I read here seriously, but don't write until I have verification from other sources. I don't believe that posts here are fake news spread by rivals. Oracle has long form just not communicating its roadmaps very well.
That's why I think covering this stuff benefits users as much as for employees, because Oracle's communication to customers is appears not to offer much more than is posted here.
ssharwood at sitpub dotcom if you want to share docs. Confidentiality assured. See stories like https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/plutus_payroll_fallout/ for the way I handle sources
MH played this well - by the time it hit the news it was Friday afternoon, and nobody does any serious reporting on weekend. Nothing was published on Mon as it was a US holday. Now you have it. Fortune and The Mercury covered it today, but it was too late - they were reporting about what happened on Friday and nobody wants to hear this.
Also, keep this in mind: the Corp Communication group is consistent in "no comment on layoffs" which makes it hard for all outlets to publish as they have to rely on what employees tell the. Historically, nobody would report anything as there were no employees speaking up and contacting journalists directly. Layoff.com changed this as all journalists (El Reg first) were able to see what was going on, what kind of mess they did with FedEx and how deliberate they were in hiding the act from the media. At that point, all what El Reg had to do is to validate what we wrote on Layoff.com (to an extent) and the story went public. Also, there was a ton of us ex-Sun folks tweeting about this throughout - Bryan Cantrill (ex-Solaris Performance) was the most vocal and critical of Oracle... This and 20K or so followers he had on Twitter gave this story some legs...
http://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solaris/
http://windowsitpro.com/software-development/new-oracle-layoffs-probably-signal-end-line-solaris
http://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-set-oracle-closes-down-last-sun-product-lines/
http://www.osnews.com/story/29994/Oracle_kills_Solaris
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/business/227749-oracle-lays-off-staff-across-solaris-and-sparc-teams.html
I doubt they're fooling many customers, investors, or regulators. So what's the point of the wild contortions to try to keep it secret?
Out of 1000 MicroElectronics employees, about 30 are left to keep on the lights for the M8 launch. That's all.
@P77cNO2-qsc: Thanks for pointing to the updated roadmap where M9 silently disappeared. If that's not a clear official message SPARC is completely dead, I don't know what is.
expecting media support ? are u insane, all most all media companies are subsidiaries of big business
amazon purchased washington post.
Poor boy wake up.....
it is impossible to wipe out whole sparc team in one shot
Are you on drugs? THE ENTIRE SPARC CORE TEAM HAS BEEN LET GO AS OF FRIDAY. Its gone. No more SPARC. You can't have a SPARC w/o a team to develop the core. Fake news my a--. I got out months ago, seeing the writing on the wall. Glad I did!
Oracle has filed the WARN notice, officially 964 only in SCA ... this has been a carnage
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/05/oracle-slashes-more-than-900-santa-clara-jobs-more-worldwide/
Oracle timed this layoff well to reduce attention. It happened on a Friday before a 3-day weekend. Even wth WARN, it probably won't be reported by a government agency until September 8th.
It's also been a busy news period. You have Harvey, North Korean missile tests, and DACA grabbing national headlines. Locally, the heatwave and the La Tuna fire have been tops.
Oracle also is not seen as a big player anymore in the local business news. Go to the San Jose Mercuery News website and the focus is all on Google, Facebook, Apple and Tesla. With the staffing cut at many of these newspapers, there are few real reporters to cover these sorts of layoffs and those who remain do nothing but parrot corporate press releases.
At the high-end estimate of 2,500, that's only 1.8% of our workforce. Compare that to the Lego corporation which just cut 1,400 that account for 8% of their workforce. They made the news but they also did not try to fly under the radar.
I lost a lot of friends in this layoff. I'm in hardware but not part of the groups that were affected. It irritates me that our director has chosen not to speak about it during our staff call this morning. It reinforces our impression that senior management is being purposefully complicit in trying to bury this news.
In the break room, we're all talking about the folks who are gone.
Nice try, you have done your sh--ty HR work.
But you are ridicolous, and for sure not aligned with what your own corp is OFFICIALLY saying.
This is the OFFICIAL Oracle roadmap:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf
can you see M9? can you see ANY SPARC development after M8? can you see the delayed S11.4?
You are not even ridicolous, you are annoying.
You are a moron.
@P77cNO2-qee Enough. It's one thing to troll in advance, quite another (extremely offensive) thing to disrespect all of us let go. It happened, it's real, and the impact was tremendous, especially to the families involved. Stand down, please.
Good lord you're a moron @P77cNO2-qee. The entire silicon design team was RIFed on Friday. This isn't a secret. Its on Twitter, linkedIn, Facebook, etc by people who worked at the company.
Every article out there related to these rumors are feeding off the same fake news written on this anonymous site. There are no names here, no proof of identity. All we know is that a competitor, or even one disgruntled employee could be spending all his time screaming it’s the end of the world. Not one article is basing its claims on real factual data, no public announcements, no statements from officials and this is all being blown out of proportion. Yes, theres probably layoffs, but there is no factual evidence that it’s the end of Solaris or SPARC and for that matter Oracle HW as clearly this would need to be made public by Oracle. There are still over a thousand people still showing up between Microelectronics and Solaris groups today and from what I understand, millions of SPARC cores in production under Oracle support. Clearly not a business to abandon.
Get in touch with mainstream media and let them know - point to what's already been published and offer to clue them it iff the record
She covered it already
http://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solaris/
Try to reach out to Barb Darrow - she is with Fortune and her stuff is getting syndicated a lot.
https://www.google.com/search?q=barb+darrow
@P77cNO2-tto Please let it be this: https://www.music-bazaar.com/album-images/vol2/158/158521/949125-big/Blowback-Bonus-Disc-Blowkcab-2-picture.jpg
Just curious...what does this "blowback" you have in mind look like? What were you expecting?
Get some Customers on board to push for answers through the Media - they won't get answers from ORCL any time soon...