Like I said this is going to end badly, I have never heard of a merger that has gone of smoothly without customers loosing out in the end. No matter what the "economic" necessities of cutting overlapping jobs people are gonna get fired and this is going to affect the morale of both companies. And this is only a minor effect. Who decides who goes and who stays?

Like someone already said Im pretty sure Blizzard will probably retain all of its employees but they will be assigned aditional workloads (Activision Customer Support, etc. etc.) this cant work out well. Mergers serve to make money for the top brass, and sure they will make a heap, but in the long term Blizzard customers will lose out, the quality of titles will drop and in the end all that will be left is the brand.

HP was a financially stronger brand before the merger. Compaq hurt them big-time. That's why I cited Compaq/HP first because the way I see this merger Blizzard is HP and Activision is Compaq.

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kxmode:
I'd say compaq suffered too, they killed the compaq brand name off. I actually liked compaq laptops, and I've disliked the HP laptops I've tried.

Really Theo? IMHO TBC made it more fun. Very much looking forward to Wrath.

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lol, wow was ok before TBC.

TBC turned it to shit tho.

I don't want any Activision devs touching anything to do with WoW at all. I don't care what they bring to the table, WoW is perfect as it is, I don't want to take the risk of someone new fucking it up.

History is replete with examples of companies that have suffered because of a merger.

Compaq -> HP (HP suffered)
Pixar -> Disney (Pixar suffered)
PeopleSoft -> Oracle (PeopleSoft suffered)
Origin -> EA (Origin died)
Bullfrog -> EA (Bullfrog died)
YouTube -> Google (law suits ensued)
Macromedia -> Adobe (Macromedia died)

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This comment was edited on Jul 17, 17:09.

Noticed what? You taking the piss out of me??

am I the only one turned off by seeing both of these words used in the same sentence ?!

Yep. Nobody else here seems to have noticed it.

Redundancy can mean different things to different people.

Obviously executives making the descisions don't consider themselves redundant...

Things like QA...

"Hmm Bizzard does well on support, so we can just use their team and spread them out to cover all our projects, we'll get more out of the same people for the same ammount of money!" "Lets fire a bunch of guy's making $12.00 an hour, for every ten of them we fire, we can have another stock option poker party!"

"Hey Maybe we can mix Diablo and World of Warcraft together, then we could get rid of some of the artists!"
"Great idea Skip, honest to god, some of those artists seem to just stare at their computers and doodle for days."

etc, etc.

am I the only one turned off by seeing both of these words used in the same sentence ?!

Two marketing teams is one thing, I'm all for cutting some marketing positions.

But 2 teams of devs is NESSASARY in a merger like this.

Blizzard devs are all busy on WoW, D3, SC2. I seriously doubt they have much redundancy going on there.

Why would we want them to be taken off thier work on those titles to work on activision crap?

The activision devs are all going to be still busy on the activision crap, and it would be stupid to have them screw with the blizzard success formula.

So yeah, removing redundant sales/marketing positions is all well and good, but when it comes to dev teams, I dont think they should screw with anything there. And if they do, then they are killing the golden goose known as blizzard.

As a last ray of hope, recall that we are also talking Vivendi (who owns blizzard and didn't kill them when they joined together). So if all the cuts come from the vivendi parts that are not blizzard, it would still be ok.

But wtf is up with calling this "exterminate" ? Yeah THAT is real smart and treating people with respect.

Smell that? Smells like EA's sweatshop ghost has found a new home.

So referring to them being "exterminated" (like bugs) is treating them respectfully?

Or indicating that the guys being fired are the ones who can't cut it compared to the "all-star" guys keeping their jobs.

This comment was edited on Jul 17, 14:28.

Plus using the word "exterminate" implies that the employees are unwanted cockroaches. . . but they'll be stepped on with the utmost respect.

But in the short term we will exterminate some of our overlap through redundancy – but we will treat people respectfully.

Um...I think you already failed at that, you jackass. Treating people with respect means not referring to them as "redundant overlap", Mr. Tippl.

Michael Bolton: Tom, every week you say you're going to lose your job and you're still here.
Tom Smykowski: Not this time. I'll bet I'm the first one laid off! Just the thought of having to go to the state unemployment office and stand in line with those SCUMBAGS...

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When companies merge they have to eliminate redundancy in order to ensure profitability

As if both of them lacked any kind of profit to begin with. The best that can come of this is to put L80ETC in GH3 and they keep separate logos. I don't want to boot up D3 / SC2 and see something other than Blizzard; otherwise, I'll know hell froze over.


This comment was edited on Jul 17, 13:03.

BOB SLYDELL
Here's a peculiar one. Milton Waddams.

DOM
Who's he?

BOB
You know, squirrely looking guy, mumbles a lot.

DOM
Oh.

BOB SLYDELL
We can't find a record of him being a current employee here.

BOB PORTER
I looked into it more deeply and I found what happened was he got layed off about five years ago and no one ever told him about it. But through a glitch in Payroll, he still gets a paycheck. I went ahead and fixed the glitch.

BILL
Great.

DOM
So, um, Milton has been let go.

BOB SLYDELL
Just a second there, Professor. We, uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore. So it'll just work itself out naturally.

Best. Quote. EVER.

We care, that's why we *exterminated* you like a bug.

Will their pink slips have variations of this text?

"You're a bug. We're the exterminators. You're dead."
"Because we respect you, we exterminated you."
"Activision Blizzard: Exterminator bugs dead!"
"1-800-Blzzard: Exterminating pesky employees today!"
I'd hate to put "Exterminated" on my resume as reason for leaving.
:o,
Ray

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