WILL YAHOO-ey GET LESS HOOEY? 12/7/06

Something out of the ordinary is going on at Yahoo-ey. Initial rumors, sometime after the peanut butter manifesto, were that Yahoo-ey will be laying off between fifteen and twenty percent of its y-bots. Then Dan Rosenjweig and Susan Decker were going to lead the company together temporarily after CEO Terry Semel departs, then that Semel is not departing. Maybe there will be layoffs after the holidays and maybe not.

At any rate, Yahoo-ey is going through some big-time shuffling. Focus will be on three areas-- Customers [oh but we aren't customers anymore, we are Audience]; Advertising and Publishing; and Technology. Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosenweig is splitting by the end of March. Lloyd Braun has already left. He was doing Yahoo News, Vid, and Music. A Senior Vice President of International Operations, a guy by the name of John Marcom, will be leaving after the new year.

Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker is being promoted to head up the Advertising and Publishing Sector. Project Panama, new technology which may steal back some of the advertisement profits back from Google, will be fully functional starting in March. Current chief Technology Officer Farzad Nazem will be running the Tech Group. We don't know who will manage the Audience as yet. Supposedly, the customers-turned-audience will get better search, email, and socialization experiences.

I'm from Missouri. Show me. Get rid of the stalkers on 360 and reinstate the antistalker blogger on 360 Ireland, and then maybe-- a very big maybe-- I will believe it. Till then, any so-called improvements in customer experience just plain won't matter.

radical sapphoq

YAHOO VOODOO 11/20/06

So the vp of e-mail and instant messenging at Yahoo has written a "peanutbutter manifesto" complaining about the corporation's lack of vision, focus, and prosperity. His solution is to dump 20% of the folks who work there. Doing more with less has been the motto of human servitude agencies for quite a few years now. I suppose it was only inevitable that technology would follow suit. I suppose that computers could take over the jobs of some of the near-future missing workers though.

I've been referring to the mysterious folks in charge of censoring the Yahoo 360 bloggers as Y-bots. I wonder how many Y-bots will find their ways into the unemployment lines. And what the average Y-bot curriculum vitae looks like. "Yep, I was part of the crew that threw out such notables as Jeremy Crow and Weezie," should not be anybody's claim to fame.

Will a shake-up occur at Yahoo's famed purple and yellow corporate offices? Will Brad Garlinghouse beat up ol' Tony Semmel and toss him out before his retirement date? Will Yahoo's stock continue its' brief climb upward since the leak? Will Yahoo dump some of its' acquisitions? Will Yahoo be able to magically rejuvenate itself? Will I get my long-awaited chance to tell Yahoo to "Wave this?"

I remember some years ago when an off-hand remark by a school superintendent resulted in readers of the Amsterdam Recorder flooding his office with gifts of pencils. Maybe we should send the author of the leaked internal memo some peanut butter sandwiches. No jelly. Just gloppy peanut butter spread thickly on two slabs of Wonder-ful bread. Now that just might be something that would stick to the roof of Garlinghouse's mouth enough to get him to quit the yapping.

radical sapphoq