There is no doubt that the Christmas time of the year is without any doubt, one of most stressful times of the year, especially if the future of your company is not safe. Western Digital Corporation announced that the company fired 2500 of its employees on last Friday. During the weekend and today, I learned a great deal about the situation in the company from the people that were let go, but also from the people that stayed.
Overall, there is feeling of dismay and misbelieve in all the errors that management did. I spoke with some engineers and they’re quite literally, have zero confidence in current management, because “the company missed the boat to become first of the big three (Samsung, Seagate/Maxtor and WD) to implement mainstream SSD and hybrid drives. Several sources attacked the management over the case o continuous delays of WD SSD/HDD hybrid drive, that would feature 32GB of ultra-fast MLC cells and combine it with 320GB in 2.5″ form for notebooks and 1TB in case of 3.5” drives.
WDC fired most of its people in company’s headquarters, but everyone agrees that the timing was way off – “firing us for Christmas ruined my family. If I got fired on the (December) 26th, it would hurt half as much. They are bunch of idiots without vision and they will get run over by Seagate and Samsung. My former company is toast.”
This may sound like lot of bitterness coming from a former employee, but WDC cannot hide that they’ve caused this situation. Massive amount of memory vendors attacked conventional hard drive manufacturers and now when we talk about storage, we talk about OCZ, G.Skill, Intel’s SSDs, and SanDisk and so on. Seagate and WD are now in the “also-ran” category, and this is very dangerous for the future of conventional HDD manufacturers. Between mindshare and market share… there is only one little step.
WDC failed miserably here… timing was due to the last working day before X-mas holidays, but still, there is a feeling of dismay in WDC today. We wish best of luck to the fired folk, and to people currently employed by Western Digital Corporation.
