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Yahoo Closes Lab, Among Other Things (venturebeat.com)
mikejuk writes: In its recent earnings call, Yahoo revealed plans to cut its workforce by 15% -- around 1,600 employees by the end of the year. Yahoo Labs is another victim of the cuts as revealed in a Tumblr post by Yoelle Maarek who reports that both Yahoo's Chief Scientist, Ron Brachman, and VP of Research Ricardo Baeza-Yates, will be leaving the company and that going forward: "Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas. We will also have an independent research team that will work autonomously or in partnership with product partners. The integrated and independent teams, as a whole, will be known as Yahoo Research." Maarek, formerly VP of Research now becomes leader of Yahoo Research. To anyone who has followed the story of research at Yahoo there will be a sense of deja vu. Back in 2012 Yahoo laid off many of its research team, many of whom found a new home with Microsoft. It was Marissa Meyer who in the following year recruited a substantial number of PhDs to Yahoo Labs which initiated some interesting projects.
Meyer clearly thought research would save Yahoo, but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo can't save its research lab.
Meyer clearly thought research would save Yahoo, but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo can't save its research lab.
That is because things never come out of R&D int the tech world.
Well yes, other than than fax machines, synchronous-sound motion pictures, statistical process control, television, radio astronomy, stereo signals, speech synthesizer, electron diffraction, photovoltiac cell, the transistor, Hamming codes, the calculator, Karnaugh maps, transatlantic telephone cable, electronic music player, C, awk, telephone switching, 32-bit microprocessors, TTL, TDMA/CDMA, 56k modem, and electron lithography.
What have R&D companies ever done for the world?
Yeah, Yahoo! Finance is still the best free financial data provider. They still have better charts than Google, and they had those charts before Google even had a finance page.
Also, Yahoo Messenger is used by people who don't use facebook to stay in touch with people they added to their IM in the late 90s...
I'm still using ICQ for that, though.