Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Yahoo Closes Lab, Among Other Things (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the closed-in-a-flurry dept.

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.

11 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isn't she supposed to be gone? by Alomex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Bingo! by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:Bingo! by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's always the problem with R&D at Fortune 500 companies. The bean counters will scream bloody murder that traditional R&D is an expense to the bottom line, doesn't apply directly to existing or future product lines, and a true research breakout would kill all the cash cows. If R&D is integrated into the product lines, most companies just make a newer version of an existing product with some added features to justify a higher price tag.

    2. Re:Bingo! by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

  3. Re:Ya-who? by sunderland56 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Research divisions by ZipK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Isn't she supposed to be gone? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:Ya-who? by tsotha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Can anyone state a reason why Yahoo still exists?

    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.

  7. How many executives let go? by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  8. Re:Ya-who? by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Isn't she supposed to be gone? by Z80a · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Social justice is not justice, thus why its called Social justice, rather than justice.
    Same applies to politically correct versus correct.