Wendy Laments for the Lost Boys

Written by Alora

This week has been a bit of a melancholy week: my former team at Massive (acquired by Microsoft in 2006) has found themselves almost all the victims of radically changing economic conditions. As part of Microsoft’s plan to reduce several thousand jobs in 2009, their Massive division has been almost entirely cannibalized.

Aside from the personal sadness I feel for my friends (which is significant), even stronger is the sadness at what almost amounts to the demise of the entire enterprise. While in-game video game ads won’t go away (after all, Microsoft didn’t formally close the division, they just let go of 75% of the staff), the market value of the solution never managed to gain the wide-spread adoption the business (and their investors, advertisers, publishers, etc.) was counting on.

This actually reminds me of something my former CIO at JetBlue once said: after having been the CIO at the now defunct Independence Air, he swore he would never go to another airline again — with the exception of JetBlue — because the airline industry was too volatile and he didn’t have the appetite to have to dismantle everything he’d help build yet again. He considered having to do that at Independence Air to be one of the most painful experiences of his professional life, and he was highly adverse to putting himself in a position where there was a real likelihood of having to relive it.

It’s actually very ironic, because most of the time, when people think about the pain of startups, we talk about the long hours, the chaos, the paycuts, the inability to make payroll, etc. Normally the acquisition by a major player in the space is considered the Holy Grail (after IPO, of course). And while there is always a danger of your new owner letting everyone go, those of us who work directly in the development of the technology often find ourselves with (at least a temporary) stay of execution, since what the new owner is usually buying is the technology that we are building.

The fact is, though, this is a pretty common story in many ways. Most high priced acquisitions are big gambles with long odds of paying off. And in the end, the new owner is commonly faced with the prospect of throwing good money after bad or just cutting their losses. Factor in a volatile economy with radical impacts on a business’ most critical industries (in this case advertising), and it almost spells certain death.

Of course, those retention bonuses and original stock packages still aren’t valueless; and in combination with what I’m sure are respectable severance packages, it’s not the end of the world for my former team of talented and creative developers.

But for those of us who were trying to do something entirely new, this is always a sad turn of events. And while this “Wendy” has plenty of faith in her “Lost Boys” and their ability to bounce back (though, as someone who hasn’t had a paycheck in 8 months, I’m less cocky on that front than I used to be), it’s still a double-edged sword to know that most of them are now unemployed and that the work we all put so much effort into will probably never reach the potential we all originally saw in it.

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