some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc.

You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.

it's not immoral to fire people.

it's immoral to lie to people.

very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."

at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.

The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .

And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.

Obviously sometimes a business is unsustainable, and it's unavoidable, but it's pretty sociopathic to not consider that people are harmed by being laid off.

"excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"

There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.

Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! :-)

Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?

Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".

A reasonable person, when told "Company A is buying and will operate Company B," would interpret that as "all of Company B" including its assets, liabilities, cash, property, patents, AND employees. They would not think "Well, ackshually, they're just buying the corporate entity itself, which doesn't technically involve keeping the employees..."

Try to be innovative without staff though...

Imagine what would happen if we tried these actions like we do for real murder trials.

"CEO John Doe is found Guilty of maiming Company B to the point of bleeding it dry of its funds, resulting in bankruptsy. Due to person-hood laws, we sentence you to life in prison. Thank you for your attention on this matter."

It sucks that people get laid off, but there are a whole lot of finished low growth products like this that have bloated teams.

I don’t really see any lying going on. Which statement was a lie?