Today we are restructuring Yahoo! to give ourselves the opportunity to compete and win in our core business. The changes we’re announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done. The outcome of these changes will be a smaller, nimbler, more profitable Yahoo! better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.
Over the last 60 days, we’ve fundamentally re-thought every part of our business and we will continue to actively consider all options that allow Yahoo! to put maximum effort where we can succeed. As part of this process, I believe we have to focus to win in a select group of core businesses globally:
· Core Media and Communications: Our content, media, and communications experiences must be best in class. That includes getting today’s core properties right and innovating on a next generation of great product experiences across all screens.
· Platforms: We must make our core platforms and systems a genuine strength for Yahoo! – platforms that we can really leverage to support our massive scale, drive the deepest personalization, and boost speed to market.
· Data: Our massive data sets must become a genuine competitive advantage for Yahoo!. We have to unlock the value in our data to allow us to really understand our 700 million users, encourage and win their engagement and trust, leverage everything they do with us to more fully personalize their experiences, and to give our advertisers the immediate insights they are rightfully demanding.
We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.
Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate jobs, which means losing colleagues and parting with friends. Today, we will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or a phased transition. We value our people and for those who will be leaving, we thank you for all you have contributed to Yahoo!. We will treat all of our people with dignity and respect, providing resources to help manage through their transition.
Change is never easy. But the time has come to move Yahoo! forward aggressively with increased focus and accountability. Our values have always been about treating all Yahoos with dignity and respect, and today is a day to embrace those values. This is an amazing company with exceptionally talented people and I know we will all do our best to encourage each other through this difficult period of transition.
Thompson-Scott.png
EDIT: The mail sent to us by our respected CEO Scott Thompson.
"The changes we’re announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done."
I always find it amusing that, when big companies keep adding people and byzantine processes to a project, it's so they can "get stuff done." Then, when they fire those people, it's for the same reason, even though most of the people in the trenches could have told them they'd have got more done if they'd avoided the extra overhead in the first place.
It's just PR. You should take it with a grain of salt.
You do need more people to get more stuff done (i.e. taking additional risk to build new things). And you do need to lose people if you're short on money. There's really no way around it. You shouldn't fault companies for taking risks when they have the chance, our civilization would be pretty stagnant otherwise.
PR for emails sent to employees? Oh yes, that's Yahoo. When I was there they actually had a PR department exclusively devoted to internal communications.
Not strange, just depressing that employees are just fungible resources who don't really require a clear explanation for the current situation; and how this layoff is any different to the previous 5 rounds in the last 4 years.
Surely the key thing about these types of emails is to rebuild trust/solidarity in retained employees or bolster confidence that this isn't just another numbers and spreadsheet game, and that this time they have a clear vision, a strategy and a viable tactical plan on how to deliver that.
I'm going to guess they're not eliminating the positions of the key decision-makers that got them where they are, but that's just pure cynicism and stereotyping on my part. :)
Yahoo's research divisions do great work that basically never makes it out into the wider company past the prototype stage. It is an awesome, wonderful waste of money.
Two layoffs ago they cut 'brick house' which was a hands-on innovation cell, purveyors of live.yahoo.com (a 2007 version of chatroullete with many more features and 5-way video chat) and fire eagle, the GEO standard, and other nice stuff.
man, it's depressing to count a company history in 'layoffs'
(1) hadoop enhancements (a friend works there on exactly that), which are a nontrivial cost savings given the size of Y's deployed clusters
(2) ad matching tech, which should be considered of the highest priority, given that Yahoo's business model is to make money off advertising. Small improvements in matching <users, stories, ads, context> can easily lead to material improvements in earnings
Why Y! doesn't consider the two above things important is beyond me. Also, one of their recruiters sent me an email this week! Dude has big old brass ones, that's for sure.
He loves the word "core", I spotted it about seven times. Corporate buzzwords whats up!
I wonder what the delta of their locked to unlocked data solutions are? Hopefully they can map some of their new-found agility to a function that provides higher returns for their valued investors.....
Today we are restructuring Yahoo! to give ourselves the opportunity to compete and win in our core business. The changes we’re announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done. The outcome of these changes will be a smaller, nimbler, more profitable Yahoo! better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.
Over the last 60 days, we’ve fundamentally re-thought every part of our business and we will continue to actively consider all options that allow Yahoo! to put maximum effort where we can succeed. As part of this process, I believe we have to focus to win in a select group of core businesses globally:
· Core Media and Communications: Our content, media, and communications experiences must be best in class. That includes getting today’s core properties right and innovating on a next generation of great product experiences across all screens.
· Platforms: We must make our core platforms and systems a genuine strength for Yahoo! – platforms that we can really leverage to support our massive scale, drive the deepest personalization, and boost speed to market.
· Data: Our massive data sets must become a genuine competitive advantage for Yahoo!. We have to unlock the value in our data to allow us to really understand our 700 million users, encourage and win their engagement and trust, leverage everything they do with us to more fully personalize their experiences, and to give our advertisers the immediate insights they are rightfully demanding.
We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.
Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate jobs, which means losing colleagues and parting with friends. Today, we will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or a phased transition. We value our people and for those who will be leaving, we thank you for all you have contributed to Yahoo!. We will treat all of our people with dignity and respect, providing resources to help manage through their transition.
Change is never easy. But the time has come to move Yahoo! forward aggressively with increased focus and accountability. Our values have always been about treating all Yahoos with dignity and respect, and today is a day to embrace those values. This is an amazing company with exceptionally talented people and I know we will all do our best to encourage each other through this difficult period of transition.
Thompson-Scott.png
EDIT: The mail sent to us by our respected CEO Scott Thompson.