According to Palm Infocenter ,The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), and a confirmed article by CNET, Palm is laying off more of its employees. This comes just after Palm announced that they expect their numbers to fall short in Quarter 2 of Financial year 2008.
Palm had last layed off employees back in June. Palm Infocenter reports that a tipster who initially alerted them to the layoffs claims as many as 500 employees worldwide could be let go. Palm had 1,247 employees as of May 31, according to its annual report.
Palm has issued the following statement to PalmInfocenter:
Palm is working to sharpen its focus and better align resources behind core initiatives that will make the greatest impact to our business. To this end, and to ensure that our expenses are in line with projected revenues, we have made some reassignments and reductions in staff. This will better enable us to compete most effectively and ensure our long-term success.
The WSJ article talks about Jon Rubinstein shaking up things at Palm when he arrived and informing the Centro development team in July as the project was almost finished that it wasn't good enough. According to the WSJ, Rubinstein ordered several Palm executives to get on a plane to Asia to work more closely with the company's contract manufacturers.
I feel for the employees who are being layed off, especially this close to the holidays. I guess Palm is getting things in order to better their financial situation and to strengthen efforts in accomplishing their development goals. We know they are working on the Palm OS on top of the Linux kernel operating system. Let's hope that their financial strategy will speed things up a bit.
