Yahoo has undertaken a series of mid-December layoffs and other cutbacks, axing about 650 workers right before the holidays. Hardest hit will be its product groups. It's also nixing several Web properties, including Yahoo Buzz, AltaVista and bookmark site Delicious. Meanwhile, hackers hammer Gawker, spooks hit OpenBSD, and Microsoft winds up for another swing at tablets.
For a long time now, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) has suffered a bit of an identity problem. What does it want to be? King of search is Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) thing, and Facebook owns the social network scene, so what is Yahoo's identity, besides being a really big email provider?
This week, Yahoo apparently started looking toward a new role model: The Grinch. It's started dealing out a fresh deck of pink slips, and its timing is so God-awful that you almost have to think it was on purpose, or that the company is so strapped for cash and credit that it couldn't scape together another two weeks' pay for a tiny percentage of its workforce.
The total number of employees given Yuletide Yahoo layoffs will be around 650, or 4 percent of the company. The company's product groups will be the worst hit.
On top of the personnel cutbacks, Yahoo's also kicking a few websites and technologies to the curb. The company's confirmed that Yahoo Buzz will be laid to rest, as will the traffic APIs related to its mapping services. Also reportedly on the chopping block are one-time search contender AltaVista, Yahoo Picks, Yahoo Bookmarks, MyM, MyBlogLog and AllTheWeb. Last but not least, Delicious is apparently on its way out too.
Of course, a leaner Yahoo may be better able to compete with its rivals. The company's been growing in a hodgepodge of different directions over the years, and if this cost-saving measure is accompanied by a renewed effort to focus its direction and vision, then maybe things will work out. A little pruning can be good for a company in the long run.
That's not very comforting for the employees who lost their jobs, of course, and it's especially stinging to see Yahoo rivals like Google giving their workers across-the-board raises just to keep them on board. Those at Yahoo who get to keep their jobs may feel relieved, but a round of mid-December layoffs sounds like something that could really undermine the morale of the entire remaining staff.
In the wake of this news, though, Yahoo's figurative image problem became very literal. On Tuesday, the day news of the layoffs hit, Yahoo Search users discovered a rather odd bug. Innocuous search terms -- anything from puppies to sweet potatoes to wrenches, whatever -- would result in a set of related thumbnail images at the top of the screen. That's normal. What wasn't so normal was what you'd see if you clicked on those images. Users who did so were shown hardcore porn.
No word on whether that little trick was the work of a recently pink-slipped employee. Or it could have been done by a worker who's job wasn't in danger at all -- maybe they just didn't like Yahoo's holiday spirit and figured out a way to pull a prank without getting caught. But if it was just a coincidence ... well, that's one hell of a coincidence.
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