Good news, bad news day

The good news is that Jesse Helms, 79 years old and longtime ridiculous caricature of his younger anti-civil rights self, has announced he will retire in 2003. This follows fellow caricature Strom Thurmond’s recent decision to retire from the Senate after next year at age 99. These are two seats the Republicans will have difficulty holding even though Elizabeth Dole looks like a strong early contender to replace Helms as a Republican.

The bad news is AOL Time Warner’s announced plans to layoff 500 people from iPlanet. This represents all, or substantially all, AOL employees working at iPlanet. Lots of friends of mine. People will point to the soft economy as the cause but from my perspective there were lots of executive execution errors early on in iPlanet’s history that are more to blame. For example, the application server team lost at least 12 months trying to figure out what to do with two application servers (Netscape and NetDynamics) and then how to manage the people side of the decision. Lots of pain and now it ends up like this.