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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.
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
This sentence makes me throw up inside.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Silicon Valley lives in such an SJW bullshit dreamworld now that she would have to kill the Pope for anyone to criticize a female CEO.
She would have to get in line behind Donald Trump annd the Republicans who are upset that Pope Francis has a liberal bent that conflicts with their Old Testament view of religion with an angry God who strikes down sinners, gays, liberals and minorities on a regular basis.
Can anyone state a reason why Yahoo still exists? Do they do anything at all that isn't done better by someone else?
They should have gone bust back around 2003. They're certainly on the road to bankruptcy; it's just taking a painfully long time.
If Meyer's idea of trying to move Yahoo! forward is the hiring of PhDs, that explains much about the horrid redesign of their web site.
Only someone devoid of reality or common sense could think that crappy look and layout would make people want to stay.
As I said previously, with any luck the web designers and those who approved the new design are included as part of the force reduction. If anyone deserves to be fired, they most certainly do.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Research divisions are useless anyway.
IBM Research: ATM, floppy disk, Winchester disk, scanning tunneling microscope, magnetic stripe card, relational database, UPC, FORTRAN, SABRE, DRAM, FFT, DES, Fractals, RISC, etc.
Oh wow, now SJW are responsible for the entirely broken CEO culture where apparently they can do no wrong how however badly they fuck up. I'm going to add that to my list of insane things people blame on SJW, for when I need to point out that anyone using "SJW" without irony (or quoting) is a raging idiot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Two reasons. One, they have a $32bn equity stake in Alibaba, which is hugely successful.
And two, they still have a billion active users on their portal sites (Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, etc), which is why they were trying to rebrand as a "media company".
At its nadir Apple looked ready to go bankrupt because it didn't do anything that wasn't done better by someone else. Yahoo has smart people and money to invest in new services and products. Yahoo could still pull off the business equivalent of a moon shot.
Because 90% of the company woes lie in their laps with their stupid decisions and their incompetence.
Why is it they lay off everyone else yet keep the dead weight that actually destroys the company employed?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Social justice is not justice, thus why its called Social justice, rather than justice.
Same applies to politically correct versus correct.