Destroying American Jobs (ie Mediaguide)

[Undertoad]

(this is not a parody thread)

Last week it came to my attention that the employer who laid me off a few years ago is officially calling it quits.

Mediaguide was a data services company. They could identify audio via a series of digital fingerprints, and put this technology to figuring out what was being played on broadcast radio. They created charts and worked with ASCAP and sold streams of playlists to marketers and stuff.

For a time Mediaguide was run by a Harvard MBA who was highly obnoxious, did not understand his industries, and demanded that the laws of physics be changed to meet his business model. (He would go on to CEO Limewire, another technology company that would fail spectacularly.)

After that Mediaguide was run by a soft-spoken lawyer with intelligence but lacking any serious vision for why his company would succeed or fail.

Engineering was managed by a Vice President who, when the company moved, intentionally chose the office furthest from his people.

HR was run by a gossipy shrew whose degree was in Accounting. Any problem taken to HR immediately made the problem much, much worse and often in spectacular ways.

Mediaguide briefly enjoyed a monopoly in knowing exactly what was played on the radio in major markets around the country. When it was founded, this was a nice thing to have. Radio was big, and important.

But then terrestrial radio began its slow decline. A death by a thousand cuts. The iPod was the biggest cut, but radio also suffered from easy channel-flipping, corporate homogenization, more options for getting news/sports/traffic/weather... like everything, old radio was disrupted by the Internet.

Nobody high up in Mediaguide ever seemed to pick up on that, until during the last five years of the company, traditional radio revenues started to plummet. The company's arrogance led it to not invest in monitoring any other media besides AM/FM. A decent team of developers... no new products. Fresh ideas actually crushed, by departments working against each other to maintain their various empires.

This is what tw talks about; all these problems happened because the CEOs didn't enable the company to work like it could have. To have a 35 person company become political like that is to lead to certain failure.

So today the staff starts signing their termination notices. It was no Kodak in size, but the company suffered from the same problems as Kodak, and today faces the same end.

And me, I sit here with a little sense of schadenfreude. They had no idea who I was, did not care to use my breadth of knowledge and understanding. I knew they were doomed; I knew all of the above. Didn't matter, the company's lack of vision from top-down meant that they were only ever interested in the 10% of me that did Linux system engineering and thus could be fenced off in Operations.

And so they let me go. And so they must die.