Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they’ve contributed to Yahoo!.Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson • In a statement regarding the thousands of layoffs it plans to enact. The company’s press release says that it will “radically simplify” how it build products.
» Not in good shape these days: With declining traffic on certain sites and a $20 billion valuation largely due to the company’s minority stakes in Asian internet companies, the company is in bit of a rough patch, partly reflected in Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy the company in 2008, the shifting executive branch, and the company’s spurning of parts of its product line, such as Delicious. Recently, the company has been in the news for a patent lawsuit with Facebook, which we covered last night. Are you guys worried about the future of Yahoo? Can they right the ship?
» Word is that a major restructuring is happening: New CEO Scott Thompson (no relation) reportedly plans to cut back heavily at the company, which analysts see as a key example of tech company excess, in an attempt to focus on the things the company does well. While the company has had some recent success (their Open Graph collaboration with Facebook has been a boon, for example), the company has not undeservedly built a reputation of acquiring other companies (for example, Delicious) and letting them languish under the corporate structure. It used to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, but now it’s more likely to be mentioned in the same breath as AOL. Would cuts bring Yahoo back to life?
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