After noticing this was written by Arrington, I think this was clearly tongue in cheek, and partially meant as a display of "Look, here's some proof that TechCrunch is not really changing and is not going to censor stories due to various financial interests. We're still going to complain about things that are dumb, and I think meetings are dumb."
Offtopic: When I read this post the first time I thought "Gee, ya think?", but then I was reminded of how obvious something can be in your mind, yet so insanely difficult to formulate.
The gist of Arrington's article might be very clear in my mind, but I doubt I could have formulated it as precisely as Zach did without trouble.
Ok, I’m off to go review HR policies, or something. On the upside, there’s a guy here named Brian from corp dev and I think with enough pressure he’s going to tell me all the other acquisition deals AOL is working on.
Yeah. It's completely unsurprising. It also looks like a chunk of the meeting is getting them situated with HR. It's mind numbing but better than getting situated with HR via phone tag.
I don't think Warren Buffet or other Berkshire people do a lot of meetings after a buyout. Sure, they bring him over to show to an average worker, but they're not there to manage. If they don't believe in firm or management they won't invest in the first place.
Most of their buyouts are private because the founder wants to retire or the heirs don't want the hassle of running the company. In either case the people in Arrington's role don't stick around because they already have professional management in place.
Arrington seems to be unreasonably excited about the gifts. What will he do when the dump truck pulls up with all of the 'recycled' AOL CDs as gifts. :-)
They'll do what everyone does: use them as coasters, play dangerous frisbee games, and test their quality by breaking the CDs in half with their bare hands.
Theoretically they could connect to the Internet by accidentally sticking it in a CD tray, but I suspect TechCrunch already has Internet access.
I still think that at some level Michael Arrington approved this deal because it meant one more story he could break. He's clearly crossed from dedication to addiction.
We have a big meeting coming up soon where I work. I can very much relate. I was recently thinking "That something like 1500 man hours wasted on all this togetherness when we could be accomplishing something."
Lest anyone forget the absolute utter dirt bags running the show at AOL, let me regale thee with all time hit #1 "Cancel the account" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpDSBAh6RY
Good luck Mr. Arrington, and better luck getting out.
This seems to be Michael asserting his place in the pecking order, in his own mischievous way :-)