Consumers today are more confused than ever. It was much easier to assume everything is going badly. But these days, there seems to be hope, or is there?
"We may be seeing the end of the beginning of this recession, but it is not the beginning of the end of the downturn," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
It's just that easy... Right?
Well the Yen dropped today, the New Zealand dollar is up and IBM and Google just announced job cuts. This economy is whimsical to say the least.
After a little digging it seems both IBM and Google are reducing salaries but not the overall effort or head count. It is almost as if they are robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The Washington Post reported that it IBM has been moving toward an outsourced model for quite some time.
"My understanding is that it isn't targeting the people who have skills leaning toward federal or local governments," said Ben Pring, who follows the company for market research firm Gartner. "Outsourcing those jobs doesn't fly in the government context."
Most of the jobs being eliminated come from the global services division, which ranges from software developers to data center managers, according to the sources who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak about the layoffs.
Pring said IBM has been gradually moving jobs out of the United States to trim costs for nearly a decade. IBM reported in January that fourth-quarter revenue from its global services business fell 4 percent from the year-ago period. The layoffs come just two months after IBM cut about 4,000 jobs related to sales.
According to an article in The Business Journal “When companies grow that quickly it’s almost impossible to get everything right—and we certainly didn’t,” said Omid Kordestani, Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) senior VP for global sales and business development in a blog posting on Thursday. “In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process.”
The online search engine company also said it overinvested in some areas “in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.”
The posting said “just under 200” sales and marketing positions would be eliminated globally.
Workers will be given a chance to find other jobs within the company, Google said.
Both of these companies are doing exactly what every company in the world should be doing. Taking an honest look at the business and cutting everything they can live without. They are also asking themselves can another person do this job for less money?
The mixed messages are really not too mixed, if it makes business sense the message is clear.
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