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Not that surprising, I must say. Either it's true that he was kicked upstairs and they're now forcing him to the door, or else he's found the Getty culture intolerable. Or maybe a bit of both.

Yes. It's rather poignant. If you look at his Facebook page, you'll see he posted on December 11 saying that his son wouldn't be joining him in New York for another month. He obviously wasn't expecting to leave a week after that.

He could not handle the New York culture! 

Maybe he will start his own stock company, buy one or partner with one. The question is, who will follow him?

I don't think so. This is the common way to say he was fired.

True, but I wonder how much of that was due to the strings being pulled up above at Getty. We know it wasn't his decision to cut royalties, even though he had to fall on his sword and tell us that the decision came from within istock HQ. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any respect for a person who goes along with stuff like that and acts like a puppet, which is why I still have much respect for Bruce and Rob for leaving (allegedly) when things got distasteful. Kelly should have left a long time ago. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that it just took him longer to get to that point, and although he'll forever be remembered at istock as the guy leading the charge to screw contributors, I'm inclined to believe that many of his actions were forced.

Again, that doesn't make what he did ok. Just saying that he might have been only half a con artist, being pushed by bigger cons higher up.

Uh-huh. Sort of like being only half pregnant? 

my thoughts exactly.

The big picture really sucks. Whenever a Canadian company is remotely successful foreign investors gobble it up and most often destroy it.  I personally know so many people who have been moved to New York or Los Angeles.  Virtually all of them layed off within a year.  I used to be so happy (and jealous) of them, but the same thing happened every time!

Bruce built a business and sold it for a riddiculous amount of money.  I would definitely do the same!  It's funny, but money does make me happy.  Well, maybe it does, I've never had too much of it to know if it's a bad thing or not.

These days SS is offering company benefits similar to IS, who knows maybe they already made a deal. The SS benefits below are for a lower level job, just think what they would offer someone higher up. Frankly I was not too enthused to see that SS is hiring former IS employees, we certainly do not need to spread IS's company culture and business practices to other sites.  Yet with all the SS bugs maybe they did hire their programmers to permanently bury new images.

"Among other great benefits, Shutterstock offers competitive salaries, health and dental plans, 401k, company equity, daily breakfasts, weekly massages, discounted gym memberships"

You did! Maybe Klein read your post and thought "Great idea Cas, I'll fire him tomorrow".