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back to article Adobe slips good-bye note to 10% of stafff

Adobe Systems, reckoned to be one of the best US employers to work for by business suck-up mag Fortune, is cutting 10 per cent of its staff. The company said Tuesday that it's eliminating 680 of its just-over 7,000-strong workforce as part of a restructuring, which will cost between $65.0 and $71.0 million. Employee severance …

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  1. Aunty Dan

    Cost of severance seem very high

    Picking the average of $50,000,000 from the quoted estimate of the cost of the layoffs that works out as an average of $73,530 per terminated head-count item.

    Seems to me a high figure, I wonder what the average annual salary of the down-sizees was?

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  2. Blain Hamon
    Coffee/keyboard

    Given the HQ's in San Jose...

    Expect engineering salaries to start at 40-50K, plus stock options. Throw in some managers and some higher ups, and all the vacation time they've accrued, and it all adds up quickly.

    Also, "terminated head-count item"? I feel dirty even just quoting the phrase. George Carlin was right about euphemisms...

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  3. Paul Coen

    Length of service and benefits

    That doesn't seem high. First off, decent IT people or developers with experience (say, 10+ years) aren't cheap. Also, in addition to the salary savings, Adobe will be savings on the employer's share of the health benefits, social security and other payroll taxes, as well as any 401K or other retirement fund match.

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  4. Gannon (J.) Dick
    Boffin

    @AuntyDan

    Apparently an unexpected strength in Soylent Green Futures has forced a re-evaluation of Item's offspring component of deferred compensation.It's just for tax purposes.

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  5. J 3
    FAIL

    Really...

    So, gouging people for their software is not giving that great results, it seems. I mean, my girlfriend is a design student, and they have little choice but using Adobe software. It is good stuff apparently, but charging some $500 (student rate), if I remember right, for the upgrade to CS4 is ridiculous. But people have no choice, so they pay. When they can't pay any more due to having to eat and things like that, then...

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    2 execs

    probably 2 execs got $49,000,000 and the rest was divided between the rest.

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  7. asdf
    FAIL

    Oh great Adobe security fails harder

    As if Flash and Reader weren't enough of a security nightmare I am sure cutting staff will make them even more secure going forward. Flash is such a fail technology. Refuse any technology that does not have at least one viable open source implementation. It tends to prevent debacles such as your box getting owned no matter which platform it is running.

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  8. Grumpytom

    Never quite got it

    This company never quite the concept of software that wasn't bloatware, never got the concept of volume should reduce price and traded on past glories and inertia in the market. And I guess the management style and company ethos was also full of this "milk 'em" self aggrandising largesse. So I'll continue to use similar products offerings from other sources giving similar results at a fraction of the cost.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Big companies suck

    So they can spare 1.8billion for the crap that is omniture, but need to save a few million by firing staff? Maybe if they stopped overcharging for their products people would buy them more and oh look! suddenly revenue is back up.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    @Aunty Dan

    Not high - Dell were offering 4 weeks pay for every year of service - however, I think the cap was 2 years. If the cap is 2 years, it's not hard to get $73k. Of course, if you work for a small company, these levels of redundancy payment are hard to be believed.

    Problem is, with these staff reductions and the resulting turmoil, they will never finish a 64 bit version of Flash let alone 64 bit versions of Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements - not only are they 32 bit but Adobe don't even support them running on 64 bit Vista.

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Maybe adobe should be including support for platforms people want to use

    Hey Adobe!

    How about including support in your line-up for FrameMaker under MacOSX???

    Maybe you could increase your revenues instead of laying people off!!!

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @J 3

    A student upgrade of CS4 costs you $500? From what version? I bought a CS4 upgrade (legal) from CS2 from Adobe for the equivalent of $250 last year (after CS4 was released).

    Sounds like you're being gouged.

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  13. Herring
    WTF?

    @AC

    Support, what support? Maybe it's still stuck in a cyclone on it's way from Ottawa, Canada to India!

    Or did you mean actual support like a help file with your software? :(

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  14. Hugh McIntyre

    Re: cost of severance

    According to the local newspaper, part of the cost (probably most) is for severance but it also includes "expenses from consolidating leased facilities". So it's not all for employees.

    A shame for the people since, while there's some anger in some of the comments above about Acrobat and cost, many of their products particularly Photoshop Lightroom are good.

    I suspect though that they may have gotten larger than normal upgrade revenue to CS3 (x86 Mac support, several key new features in Photoshop at least) and then CS4 has less of a compelling set of features for people who just upgraded.

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  15. Bilbo
    Grenade

    I love Adobe!

    What is there not to love? I think Adobe is one of the greatest companies of our era, offering some of the most powerful, easy to use and affordable products of their type on the market.

    Of course, all of these statements are untrue.

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