Some companies are like trees. They seed the world with executives that run the next crop of startups. So it is with SuccessFactors. Before SAP bought SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion last year, the company made millionaires out of a lot of employees by going public in 2007. SuccessFactors alums are now working at some 13 up-and-coming companies including Lithium, ServiceMax, Pandora, Coupa, Okta, Saba, Responsys, Keas, Crowdfactory, Marketo, Castlight, Bizo and Workday. Check out the SuccessFactors startup tree in a super cool infographic published by AllThiingsD. And maybe that's the perfect spot for these folks. One alum, Rob Bernshteyn, predicts that SuccessFactors will have a hard time thriving under SAP's control. Are you a current or former SuccessFactors employee with insight to share? We want ... Continue reading →

We were the first to tell you about HP's massive layoff. Now that HP has come clean with some details, we'll be the first to tell you why it's not going to fix HP. HP says that by getting rid of 27,000 jobs (9,000 of them by October), it will save about $3 billion a year. This will supposedly fund "innovation." But HP could do a lot of damage with this layoff, too, by getting rid of some of its best employees. We're hearing ... 1. HP is laying off the wrong people, employees who still work at the company tell us. Management is targeting people purely based on salary, not skills or performance or the profits employees generate for the company.Plus, HP is full ... Continue reading →

HP shared this scary picture of the company's revenue declines over the past few years last night. This was actually meant to be hopeful. Revenue isn't growing yet as the chart shows, -- last quarter revenue it shrunk about 3% -- but at least it's not declining as much as it was before! HP Continue reading →

Here's a little tidbit that HP's CFO Cathie Lesjak slipped in during the company's analyst conference call: 9,000 jobs will be cut in HP's fiscal year 2012. That ends on October 30, or about five months from now. HP said yesterday that it will be cutting 8% of its workforce or 27,000 jobs through October, 2014, mostly though layoffs and early retirement. As we've previously reported, HP's Enterprise Services is going to be particularly targeted, Whitman confirmed yesterday. HP ES handles consulting and outsourcing. "We will have a smaller, more profitable services business in the next two to five years which will have fewer people in it tomorrow than it does today," Whitman said. But she wouldn't say what other units would be effected. When ... Continue reading →

Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch is out at HP. His job will be taken over by Bill Veghte, who was leading the software business AND named chief strategy officer in January. Autonomy hasn't been the killer software product that HP pumped it up to be. "Autonomy saw a significant decline in license revenue," HP revealed in its last quarter earnings press release and Meg Whitman called the product's results "disappointing." She also said in a company conference call to analysts that the problem was not with the product, or with demand or because it was losing out to a competitor. She said it was "a classic entrepreneurial scaling challenge." However she also acknowledged what employees have told us, that Autonomy hasn't been integrated with other ... Continue reading →

Over the last few years, Microsoft has gained a reputation as a rough place to work. Ex-employees have publicly complained that the company is political and bureaucratic. Now a tell-all book published earlier this year depicts Microsoft as downright soul-crushing. Stack Rank This! Memoirs of a Microsoft Couple was written by two married, ex-employees who left the company around 2008 and felt compelled to warn others about the Microsoft culture. They identify themselves only as Jason and Melissa. While it's true that their stories are just the thoughts of two ex-employees, many of their complaints are still lobbed at Microsoft via employee reviews on Glassdoor and in our research when talking to former employees. We've read the book and skimmed out the most outrageous stories. Continue reading →

We were browsing a fine website when we saw this: Business Insider This is so typical of the current discussion on the "tech bubble" that we had to memorialize it. "Everything's crashing, so it's clearly a bubble!" When there was a tech bubble, companies with no profits went public and their stocks shot to the moon. Today, a company with a billion dollars in profits and 40% y/y growth goes public and its stock tanks immediately. Clearly the same thing. (Facebook's stock is probably overvalued, but a stock being overvalued is not the same thing as a bubble. Stocks get overvalued all the time. A bubble is when everyone goes crazy and only buys buys buys.) In case you're still not convinced this is just ... Continue reading →

Micheal Dell has joined the gloomy predictions on Windows 8. "DELL Says Corporations are Still Adopting Windows 7, Unlikely that Windows 8 Will Have Large Adoption at Launch," tweets news site Benzinga.com while covering Dell's earnings today. Dell's comments make a mockery out of Steve Ballmer's predictions that Windows 8 will have half a billion users in its first year. Although they're well in line with Microsoft's earlier statements that "the path to Windows 8 is through Windows 7" when it comes to enterprises. Dell isn't alone with middling predictions about Windows 8 adoption early on. Last week, BMO analyst Keith Bachman issued a research note where he pronounced: “Windows 8 will prove to be a disappointment, at least out of the gate,” reports ZDNet. ... Continue reading →

SAP has made another massive acquisition. This time it snapped up cloud-based ecommerce company Ariba. SAP paid $45 a share in a deal valued at $4.3 billion Ariba is headquartered in Sunnyvale, and has approximately 2,600 employees. SAP is dead serious about turning itself from an old-school enterprise software company into a cloud company. It has struggled to come up with a successful cloud strategy for years. This acquisition follows its $3.4 billion buy of cloud company SuccessFactors. Ariba is a network that helps companies make purchases and collaborate with their suppliers. With $444 million in total revenue, Ariba experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011, SAP says. Continue reading →

AP Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has got some crazy rose colored glasses on when he looks at Windows 8. He thinks 500 million people will be using it next year. At least that's what he was blustering about in a speech at the Seoul Digital Forum on Tuesday, reports AFP. Just to give you some context, Windows 7 was one of Microsoft's most successful operating systems in the past decade. It took nearly two years for Microsoft to sell the first 450 million Windows 7 licenses. And that was pretty darn good. By the end of 2011, Microsoft said it was firing up some 633 Windows 7 licenses PER DAY (compared to 335 licenses per day for Vista over the same period). Companies are still ... Continue reading →