“There are ethical ways to cut costs,

July 29, 2002 5:27 PM

“There are ethical ways to cut costs, and then there is executive greed. Your comment at the recent shareholder's meeting will be your legacy, like it or not (‘I have to make that much money, I have an expensive wife.’).” –says a disgruntled EDS employee to his CEO, Dick Brown in an internal company memo. FuckedCompany rides the corporation bashing bandwagon and branches out to give you further insight into some of your favorite companies. Subscribers to the mother site get complete access. Non-subscribers can view the free rotating posts. Described in NYTimes (password).
posted by found missing (9 comments total)

The little "$" next to that item means
The memo you have selected requires a paid subscription
Unlimited access to all memos, for an entire month, for $45
Billed monthly, cancel anytime

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Yet another doomed Internet business model.
posted by swell at 7:39 PM on July 29, 2002

Watching the times delicately refer to fuckedcompany.com is more fun than watching Peter Jennings reporting back when Voyager was approaching Uranus. (his brilliant solution was to switch the stress from the 2nd to the 1st syllable)
posted by BentPenguin at 8:03 PM on July 29, 2002

"Yet another doomed Internet business model."

Fuckedcompany is one of the few .coms that makes money. I expanded do run its own ad service and has very few employees other then pud. Works for me.
posted by madmanz123 at 8:50 PM on July 29, 2002

I think fuckedcompany does ok as a moneymaker as it's a great source for journalists and analyists, who expense the subscription. Kind of a muckrackers LEXIS-NEXIS I think.
posted by Salmonberry at 9:38 PM on July 29, 2002

here's my true story:

March 2002: My company (at the time), Aquila, holds a special board meeting to distribute an extra $30 Million in bonuses (on top of their regular multi-million $$ bonuses) to the top five executives. Five people. $30 Million.

April 2002: My company announces massive layoffs (500+ people from a 1500 person branch of the company). The reason? To save $35 Million in expenses.

July 2002: CEO of Aquila publically defends their extra bonuses. Why? It was for good performance last year. It apparently didn't matter that at the same time these bonuses were being handed out, the company stock was in the middle of a nose-dive that brought $35 shares down to become $5 shares, and that several wall street ratings agencies were threatening downgrades on their stock. Those extra bonuses were more important than 500 people loosing their jobs.
posted by LuxFX at 11:28 PM on July 29, 2002

Um, the snippet that I quoted was from InternalMemos.com, not fuckedcompany. One of them deals in stuff leaked before companies publicly collapse, the other deals with stuff that happened after. FC carries info that may be useful to people before anyone else gets it, InternalMemos charges $45/mo for info that runs in my $0.25 Mercury News.

LuxFX - 11 top PG+E execs were given $30M in bonus pay for driving the company into bankruptcy.
posted by swell at 12:50 AM on July 30, 2002

Those extra bonuses were more important than 500 people loosing their jobs.
luxfx, why do you hate america so much? do you want the terrorists to win?
this response has been u.s. patriot act approved.
posted by quonsar at 5:16 AM on July 30, 2002

quonsar -- hehe...yeah, well, it turns out a second round of layoffs came in June, another 300-400 people, and I was one of them.... this is a sad world we live in. at least I was able to talk the CEO into writing me a personal letter of recommendation
posted by LuxFX at 6:35 AM on July 30, 2002

I think this harks back to the revived AdCritic business model discussion. There are people who will pay $45/month for access to this database, and those people are grouped together into companies who employ other people called journalists, for whom a $45/month subscription will seem a pittance if they can sell many $0.25 copies of newspapers based on a story written via access to the site.

I don't know that it's guaranteed successful but it makes much more sense than monetizing millions of eyeballs, and it's clearly a trend.
posted by dhartung at 7:14 AM on July 30, 2002