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sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.
by hackernewds 3y ago
sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.
- rob74 3y agoOr stock market greed... of course, if you subscribe to the "greed is good" school of thought, you may also see that as positive.
- School-Cotton 3y agoNot sure if I’d go so far as saying “greed is good”, but if it weren’t for the expectation by investors that companies would attempt to be as profitable as possible, companies like Spotify wouldn’t exist.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoSpotify stock has lost 10% per year relative to SP500 (riskless). It is crazy to call not wanting to lose 10% per year “greedy”.
- styren 3y agoWell, if they determine that firing 17% of staff will lead to greater profits then it seems pretty mandatory based on his fiduciary duty to the board.
- acdha 3y agoThat’s mythology: executives have no such obligation to either shareholders or the board because business decisions are very rarely unambiguous wins or losses, and a great deal of discretion is given to their judgement over any non-trivial timeframe. Consider, for example, the number of people who thought turn of the century Apple should become a Windows reseller or, later, sell the iPod brand to a business which understood how to be successful in the phone market like Nokia. There were certainly times where that could have generated a great deal of short-term gain, and it was easy to find some analyst prattling on about why they had to do it. In the case of Spotify, the only situation where 17% of their company is an unambiguous waste of money with no benefit to the future business should be accompanied by the CEO’s resignation because that would be an enormous managerial failure in the hiring process. Since it seems unlikely that even 1% of their workforce is that bad, it’s far more likely that this has nothing to do with long-term success and everything to do with pleasing the activist investors and consulting firms who’ve been pushing the idea of layoffs as a way to remind workers not to ask for more.
- google234123 3y agoReally their ceo should resign for making the same mistake as almost every tech company
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWhat would your plan be to stop Spotify from losing tens and hundreds of millions of Euros per year?
- rchaud 3y agoRaise prices to a point where the company can be a going concern without needing to find new financing to buy every podcast under the sun. Spotify is one of the few companies that raises prices every year but somehow get further away from making a profit.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoTheir competition, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon, sets the price above which Spotify becomes unattractive to many. Streaming audio is a pretty low barrier to entry and fungible business. And Apple can bundle it with iCloud, Alphabet can bundle it with YouTube, and Amazon can bundle it with prime.