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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.
Mayer hasn't quite shone with her performance, but do you think anyone else would have done any better?
Yahoo might well be beyond repair.
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?
I had a interviewed at 3Dfx in 1997. The interview with the QA manager went fine. The next person I interviewed was with... the marketing director. A thousand Dilbert comic strips flashed before my eyes. An engineering company being run by the marketing department is always a bad idea. The interview with the marketing director went south in a hurry. A few years later, the marketing department got this brilliant idea that 3Dfx should make their own boards and compete with their own customers. A few years after that went down in bankruptcy.
Why doesn't Meyer just close the company down. She can be the last one out so she can shut off the lights.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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.
No, Matrox was ruined by it's two co-CEOs. Neither of them had a clear vision of the future; but having two competing leaders never works well.
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.
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.
Well, beside Alibaba stock they handle email for a few paying customers, for example Rogers corporation outsources email handling to them.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
Matrox didn't die, the internet says they still have "3-5% market share" for video cards, and they're a market leader in multi-monitor cards. I didn't know any of that until I checked, since they don't have a track record of *nix support, but 3% of the current video card market might be more than the whole market was worth when they were a market leader! Are they "ruined," or were they saved by having a lot of smart employees and being able to grab niches even right after stumbling?
Social justice is not justice, thus why its called Social justice, rather than justice.
Same applies to politically correct versus correct.
No, no... He's not making it up. Really. The Pope said something about Trump not being a good Christian because a good Christian tries to build bridges and not walls. Needless to say, this has made some folks unhappy and they are (now) very much in favor of keeping the religious leaders (or at least this particular one) out of politics. Then, to top it off, one of the persons given airing and a voice, one that voiced agreement with this principle, was none other than Jerry Falwell Junior.
Yes, yes I was (and still am) confused on a whole bunch of different levels. I guess it's more nuanced than I might have expected. They have brought up Kennedy and how he was a Catholic and the people were afraid that the Pope would be running the country - that Nixon's adds warned of this and how we needed to keep a separation between Church and State. It's a bit confusing when taken into account with a number of other views that are held and offered.
How do I know? It's a long story. In short, Pope (our Slashdot Pope) mentioned Fox News Radio so I turned it on. I must admit, it's among the most entertaining things I have ever come across. Albeit, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be entertained in the manner that I am. I find it immensely funny. It is thought provoking and there's even some insightful comments. And no, there's propaganda outlets that rile people up on the opposite side of the political spectrum. They're dishonest, misleading, and selective just like Fox.
However, I've been enjoying my Fox News Radio and have left it running for a few hours a day since. I switch to NPR or BBC later. But, hands down, it's some of the most entertaining radio I've heard in a long time. It's comedy gold! And yes, yes I do hold the opinion that the people at either end of the political spectrum tend to be dimwitted and reactionary. There are brilliant and astute views and opinions on the Right just as there are on the Left. They seldom are exciting enough to get media attention. There's even a few candidates (at various levels) on the Right (and the Left) that aren't bad at all.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."