Three thoughts for the day... Layoffs, Cloud Computing and California/Arizona budget shortfalls

For a company facing 10% layoffs: Should companies offer employees the option to vote on:

• 10% layoffs
• 10% paycut + no raises for the next two years
• 1 day/week furlough (ie. unpaid day off) staggered so the company is always production ready

There is a certain fairness to letting employees determine their own destiny. It would not work in all cases (for example, the restaurant who does not have customers and therefore there are less tips to share or a factory with 50% less output). It would seem to set up an interesting prisoner's dilemma. The main reason to not do this is probably the politics involved with the actual decision making; that said, it would be interesting to see a company ask employees (maybe it has been done before?).

2/18/09 UPDATE: I guess I'm not the only one thinking about this. NPR did a story on this topic earlier this week.

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The major problem I see with Cloud Computing right now is that there are many clouds in the sky. The dilemma for the consumer is that they do not know which cloud to choose. Using social media as an example, the consumer has to choose between Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Plaxo just to name a few. None are really compatible with each other in terms of data portability. New services are coming out to help the user manage their data and privacy, but its not there yet. Some may not think of social media as cloud computing, but what else is it? It's basically a hosted software as service which allows the user to store data online instead of on their desktop. Another example is online photo sharing. When consumers log on to each, they are now responsible for managing a different set of data (photos) on each. Adding photos to Kodak is a different data set than photos shared on your blog which is different than photos shared on Facebook and on and on.

While, in many ways, cloud computing is already on its way to achieving critical mass, the next step needs to be horizontal integration that opens up data across closed platforms and the ability for the user to manage one set of data.

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In speaking with my father over the weekend, he described the budget deficit that Arizona is facing... $1.6B this year. In California, we are facing a $41B deficit over the next 18 months (so let's say $30B/year). With 5M people in Arizona, the total budget there is $9.9B (which means that they have a 17% budget shortfall). With 31M people in California, we have a $100B budget (and a 30% shortfall). I am not sure of Arizona's plans (besides job cuts at the government), but California is going to borrow $10B, cut spending by $15B and temporarily raise taxes (sales and gas) by $15B over the next 18 months.

So who is in a better situation - Arizona with collections of $8.4B and a budget of $2000 per resident or California with collections of $70B ($80B after the changes) and a budget of $3,000 per resident? Is more money a better starting point? Or is it just wasteful excess?