From HardOCP, an email they got sent;

Hi Kyle,

I'll let you quote this message IF you keep my name out of it. I'm an ex-employee of the company and I don't know if you got the entire story of what's been happening there. I noticed that you've gotten a quote from Kelly Ramsay, the Director of Marketing for the North America group. It sort of pissed me off the way he gave a marketing blurb to answer your question. If you can't put this up without keeping my name in there, then don't post this, & you'll at least have this information for yourself.

You've probably gotten the email from Tali Fischer, the PR specialist last week as she sent one to all of her journalists. That day, April 30th, 2002, there were 10 people laid off from the North America group. This is the second wave of layoff in the company in the past 6 months as there was a shocking wave in November. I believe about 20% of the staff was cut at that time. The April layoffs included the entire Tech Support team, the RMA department, the Graphic designers and the Web Department. One top of these departments being completely gone, there has been someone from Human Resources, the two Head Testers at the warehouse (test the RMAs), some sales reps that are in California, PR (Tali) & someone from the Marketing team. The reasons are pure economics. The Decision to completely get rid of the tech support team was a surprising one, but on the very same day, they actually realized their mistake & tried to rehire part of the technicians back. Some accepted, some have not. This is happening right on the eve of E3, so I think that if you're going, it might be interesting to go to their booth & check it out. Xxxxx is still there, but I doubt he'd give you an unofficial statement.

As for www.hercules.com going down, it is unrelated to this. It was actually a glitch on Verisign's side of things, the DNS got lost somehow. Just a bad coincidence. As far as I know, the other subsidiaries around the world are doing fine but the North American market is so cut-throat that a couple of bad decisions that kill you. On top of the fact that the market does not seem to care about quality as much as price anymore, which is a shame because the market will be flooded with a ton of cards with cheaper components.

Anyways, I'm not doing this out of spite towards the company, I've enjoyed many good years there & the people have been great, but I wanted you to have a better understanding of the story. BTW, if you're interested, do a quick search on www.monster.ca for the keyword guillemot and look at the job postings. These were put up right after the layoffs. We found it pretty funny.