Definitely not the case for me at the moment, but I won't bore you with the details.

I don't think it would be cruel at all. If a company cuts entire chunks of the business (products, departments, what have you), it's because someone made a management call that they don't want to bear the risk and/or losses associated to that particular segment, or they cannot imagine new strategies. That does not mean that such a segment is completely unviable, it might simply be that it's not as profitable as that someone decided it should be, or requires more effort that that someone is willing to invest (money, time, creativity etc).

It might still be a perfectly viable lifestyle business for the people working there, who only want to make a decent living. Giving them a choice and a fighting chance, imho, is a win-win situation: the business offloads risk, knowledge is not dispersed, relationships are kept positive. At worst, the spin-off fails, the company has executed a cheap round of layoffs with no hard feelings; at best, the spin-off succeeds, they get some service for cheap and/or dividends, everybody is happy.

I'm surprised nobody said "well, the laid-off people can still do it themselves, nobody stops them" and that's absolutely true; but doing it in an organised manner, with support from an established "mother" entity, is much easier.

Say I switch to the cloud and don't really need most of my datacentre anymore. Instead of just chucking it all away, people and machines alike, I set them up as a separate hosting company where i'm a minority shareholder, buy from them a small contract for my little bit of legacy stuff, and let them free to go find new customers or do their thing. If they fail, nothing of value is lost and I still have access to their talent pool because no bridge was burnt; if they succeed, my shares are worth something and I keep getting good service for cheap.

In a way, it's similar to what Amazon did when they first introduced AWS: they had internal overcapacity for some services and just turned it into another business. (sure, it was a new system etc etc; but when you boil it down, it's just that: they had more internal resources than they needed, and rather than scaling them down, they started selling excess.)

I did see it and a win-win, but it takes a lot of resources from the company. I don't see a say 1000 employee company in the middle of some crisis (hence the layoffs) having the capacity to execute such things. Or at least it's easy to see why this would not be a priority.

I agree with allanienhuis, that it can work well for products.

I was myself working on a mobile app (before they were really a thing) at Nokia. The app was for analyzing golf swings. There was a department working on sports related products. Someone decided to streamline the company (around 2002 or so I guess - nothing major back then), and this department was killed.

We were allowed to spin off the app and related IP to our own company, and were able to continue working on it. At the time I think it was a win-win for both sides.

I worked for an employer who did exactly that when one of the new product/business they'd built wasn't growing (enough?) to warrant more investment. So he set up a couple of the developers working on the product with the rights to the product and helped work out new contracts with the existing handful of clients (it was large enterprise software). There was enough revenue (maintenance contracts) to support the two guys, and so the existing customers were taken care of in terms of maintenance. Worked out pretty well for everyone as far as I know.

Specifically, in the case of the article, spinning off the redundant employees leaving them in a new firm with no product and no revenue sounds like a cruelly dystopian option. And if the company was willing to put money into it, I'm pretty sure most employees would prefer that as a severance package instead.

In this case I expect he might have made a spot for those employees working on a different product, but that's not certain - technologies & skills were different & the vertical markets were completely different.

And in this specific case, the two staff thought it was an amazing opportunity for them - I think their short-term salary went up & they got a lot more flexibility plus potential upside if they could grow the business even slowly. Obviously some downsides in terms of benefits, etc. But even if it didn't work out it would have been a pretty good line item on their resume. :)

Possibly, but I think the employee should be given a choice. If even just 1% of laid-off people took the choice and succeeded, the entire economy would clearly benefit.

In the B2B space, the costs of switching vendors/products is often a really big deal. Spinning the product off released him from the obligation (allowing him to focus on more promising products), and avoided (most of?) the pain for his clients.

It's not just troubled books. Many have lay off quotas they need to fill: jack walsh style of management. It's just how modern day capitalism works.

There is however, one upside. All that laying off means they'll have to do a lot of re-hiring to replace all the employees they laid off.