AltaVista To
Lay Off Employees
08:49 PM ET 09/16/00
PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) _ AltaVista is
laying off a quarter of its workforce and giving up its
fight to be a top Internet media site to refocus on its
search engine.
The layoffs, among the largest in the
Internet industry this year, will be the second round
for the Palo Alto-based company. It laid off 40
employees in May. The new layoffs, announced Friday,
will affect primarily employees who oversee news and
message boards.
AltaVista had tried to transform
itself over the past two years from a search engine into
an Internet portal, spending hundreds of millions of
dollars to add chat rooms, shopping and a finance site.
But industry analysts say that wasn't enough.
``They failed to respond with the
necessary attack instinct when it became clear in 1997
that search would not be enough to drive portal
traffic,'' said Whit Andrews, an Internet industry
analyst for Gartner Group Inc., a market research
company in Stamford, Conn.
AltaVista Chief Executive Officer Rod
Schrock said the Internet portal model is difficult to
achieve.
``The wisdom was that search engines
would evolve into media companies, and Yahoo has been
the only one to successfully do that,'' he said.
The company has beefed up its search
engine for MP3 music, photographs and video and has
added RagingSearch, which downloads more quickly. The
increased focus on its search engine is expected to put
the company in greater competition with Google, based in
Menlo Park, and Inktomi, in Foster City.
AltaVista, which delayed its initial
public offering five months ago because of a volatile
stock market, plans to become profitable by Jan. 31,
Schrock said. He said AltaVista's focus on its search
engine will help the company reach that goal.
Related Links:
AltaVista: www.altavista.com
Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
Google: www.google.com
Inktomi: www.inktomi.com
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