April 21 2001.

Fast lays off "idiot" employees

The Norwegian search engine Fast is the new victim of the dot com blues. The company has decided to let go of some 30 to 40 employees, some of them "complete idiots" according to board leader Thomas Fussell.

"Fast has grown from a staff of four in 1997 to 300 employees with 11 offices in six countries," Fussell is reported to have said to the Norwegian site DN.no. "During this process we have hired some complete idiots that are not good in their jobs. Now we are letting some of them go."

To the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten Fussell says that he cannot remember to have used the word "idiots". "If I the word 'idiot' has passed my lips, I obviously did not mean it," he says.

Fast's Director of Technology, John M. Lervik, replies to Aftenposten that none of the redundant employees are idiots. He argues that Fast need to focus on its main objectives, which means that someone has to go.

Like for most businesses in this field the new development is caused by the recent development in the Internet market. Lervik is an optimist though, arguing that large customers like Lycos and Dell stick with Fast.

The company Opticom owns 40 percent of Fast Search & Transfer. Fast owns and runs one of the largest (and fastest) search engines on the Net, Fast alltheweb, which also powers the American version of the Lycos search site.

In March WEB.DE, Germany's fastest growing portal, selected Fast to power its online search engine.

In December last year the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-motion announced that it would deploy FAST Mobile Search across Europe, benefiting 26 million wireless users. FAST Mobile Search, the world's largest, most comprehensive index of the wireless Internet, now exceeds 10 million pages.

Fast sier opp "idiotene" (DN.no on the "idiots" -- in Norwegian)
Sterke reaksjoner på Fussell-utsagn (on reactions to the "idiot" statement by DN.no -- in Norwegian)
Fast sier opp 30-40 ansatte (Aftenposten -- in Norwegian)
Fast Search and Transfer
Fast alltheweb search engine

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