Yahoo! VP Calls For a Shakeup

prostoalex writes, "Yahoo!'s Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse sent out a company-wide memo calling for layoffs of 15-20% of Yahoo! staff and reversal of priorities to concentrate on major issues facing the company. (The Wall Street Journal posted a copy of the memo.) MarketWatch quotes Garlinghouse: 'I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.'"

Comments

They've already been cutting staff

[linuxci]

I know someone who works in the Yahoo London office and there they've already been cutting back on some major departments. Fortunately he managed to find another job in his notice period, but it looks like a large portion of people there were getting the push.

These things unfortunately happen in any big company eventually if they have got involved in too many different areas.

Re:Google could be accused of the same thing

[nelsonal]

Yahoo finance seems to be the only product they have that is best in class (in my experience). It's probably the best ad supported place to go for info out there.

Re:Same old same old ... Bye Bye Yahoo.

[NineNine]

(if you're lucky enough to avoid contractor-dom)

Little do you realize, but being a contractor instead of a "permanent" person in the IT industry has many, many benefits, such as much higher pay (Even without benefits), either not working mind-boggling hours, or at least being compensated for it, an ability to ignore beauracracy, an ability to go from project to project with no "job-hopper" penalty, the ability to take long vacations whenever we felt like it (between jobs), etc., etc.
 
    Those of us who were professional contractors during the dot-com era always laughed the poor suckers working "perm".

The funny thing is that they thought they had it better! Morons.

Obviously wants HIMSELF to be on top

[polyex]

This guy is a typical MBA cut throat loudmouth who thinks he should run yahoo.com:

http://www.ptc.org/events/ptc06/program/speakers/g arlinghouse.html

He became president of dialpad.com from working at the venture capital company that funded dialpad, when dialpad was bought by yahoo.com they inherited this master of the obvious.

Notice he has virtually ZERO technology education, he is a diametrically opposite of Google.com management, yahoo's competitor (actually yahoo is google's bitch). Yet they continue to promote and stack the management with these same types. Shareholders should revolt.

Re:Google could be accused of the same thing

[whoever57]

Yahoo finance seems to be the only product they have that is best in class

Yes, but with Y!'s recent redesign, they are doing their best to wreck it. I hardly ever use it now, and I don't believe I am alone in using it far less.

In fact, I use Y! far less since its redesign. Whereas it used to be my default for many things except for search and email, now I only go there for specific information.

Re:There are some sites that already do this!

[DerekLyons]

Unbelievably to me, some sites can already ascertain your character using little real info. For example, "www.LikeBetter.com guesses your physical and personality characteristics just by which pictures you like. Every 10 or so pictures you can click on the brain at the bottom and it tells you what it knows about you. I couldn't believe how accurate it was ... After about 10 rounds, it had given me 20 characteristics, only 1 was incorrect.

I started from scratch 20 times - not once was what it "knew" (the first time) correct. (And I made no attempt to mislead it.) A further 30 rounds of testing (10 each of clicking all left, all right, or by the roll of a dice) actually was correct 5 times!
 
This suggests that this is a very crude program that makes it's guesses based on nothing more complex than 'x number of people have picked picture y over picture z - thus you must be _____'. It's not learning or knowing anything - it's merely guessing. (And badly at that.)