Originally, this was published at http://www.longmontfyi.com/tcBusiness/business-story.asp?ID=8918 but it has since been taken down. A web search doesn't yield anything, so I'm going to republish the story here. "Publish Date: 7/23/2006 Web site helps ex-Maxtor colleagues keep in touch By Tony Kindelspire The Daily Times-Call When Mike Beaty launched his Web site, ExMaxtor.com, it wasn't because he had an ax to grind or because he wanted to get back at the company - now part of Seagate Technology Corp. - that laid him off last week. In fact, it was quite the opposite. "I started the Web site a couple days after I heard there was going to be a merger (in December)," said Beaty, who had been director of supplier engineering until being let go after 6 1/2 years with the hard-drive maker. "There's so many great people that work at Maxtor, so many high-caliber, quality people, that it's always good to keep in touch with people like that." ...." Beaty is one of about 640 people who either have lost or will be losing their jobs with Maxtor-Longmont when its assimilation into Seagate is completed in the next few months. He said he got the idea for a Web site after noting the success of a similar site connected to one of his other ex-employers, Digital Equipment Corp. of Colorado Springs. "My interest was mostly social," Beaty said. "For instance, the folks at Digital, they have 500 people and they actually have gatherings, social gatherings." In fact, he said, there are quite a few Digital alum like himself in this area, and the group had a get-together this past Friday night at Longmont's Old Chicago restaurant. Beaty said his only expense in setting up the site, aside from his time, was securing the domain name. He's put links on there so that employees from six different Maxtor locations can have their own user-group, including here, Milpitas, Calif. -- the company's headquarters, where 2,300 jobs were cut -- Shrewsbury, Mass., and even Singapore. So far, the Colorado group has about 55 members, and Beaty hopes it grows. Made aware that Daily Times-Call was researching this article, one user replied to a post by updating what he has been doing post-Maxtor. Jovan King is now working at a small debt collections and receivables management company based in San Diego with an office in Highlands Ranch. He's in charge locally of all IT and development for the company. "Making the transition to a smaller company has been a challenge since some of the functions that have just been happening automatically for the past six years are now my job ... and I don't always have the resources to get the job done," King wrote in an e-mail. For his part, Beaty is "actively looking" for a job. "I was fortunate in that I was able to get to do some management stuff at Maxtor, but before that I had been a design engineer and a quality engineer in industries like medical devices, consumer products, military electronics and test instrument design," he said, adding with a chuckle, "and of course, disk drives." As a manager of a six-member team, he was responsible for letting his team know they were losing their jobs in June. Of his five colleagues, Beaty said one has already found another job, two have offers pending, one has decided to go back to school and the other is still looking. "And that was just six weeks ago," said Beaty. "So that's encouraging to me, I'll tell you that." Tony Kindelspire can be reached at 303-684-5291, or by e-mail at tkindelspire@times-call.com ---------- This was a sidebar to the main story found at http://www.longmontfyi.com/tcBusiness/business-story.asp?ID=8917 "Publish Date: 7/23/2006 New beginnings Ex-employees finding life after Maxtor By Tony Kindelspire The Daily Times-Call LONGMONT - It's a brand-new company with a collective 65 years of experience. Piranha Design Resources is a four-person printed circuit board design company that launched in early June, and already it has landed a half-dozen clients, mostly because customers know the employees' names and reputations from their former employer - Maxtor. "I always said I'd be with Maxtor until the end, and I was true to my word," said JoAnn Vigil, Piranha's founder and co-owner. "I was there to the end. And now we have new beginnings." ...."