Less Yahoos Means More Takeover Talk

I imagine all of you have been fired from a job at some point in your lives. I myself spent 20 years in telecom so I am well versed in the mergers & acquisitions fallout that inevitably finds me laying on my couch in the middle of the afternoon on any given weekday.

Which leads us to our story

I read Jerry Yang’s Yahoo Manifesto last night in which he announced 10% of the Yahoos reading the email would be sacked by year end; Merry Christmas bitches! I guess it had to be done for the survival of the entire outfit, but this entire saga seems odd to me. For so many smart people at Yahoo it appears this company continues to do dumb things. Is it a lack of business acumen? I can’t imagine that’s the case, the joint is packed with gray matter.

Is it bad leadership?

That has to be it, right? Why would Yang think he could come back and turn this organization around considering Yahoo has grown far beyond his skill sets years ago. With that said, I would imagine this should be where the Peter Principle train stops to let off Yang too right? Oh if wishing only made it so. Nothing would make me happier than a bunch of Yahoos singing Yang the Na Na Hey Hey song by the time we are all blowing noise makers and rinsing our mouths out of this God awful year.

Which means they need a professional manager who has the experience working a balance sheet as well as rubbing elbows with the guys that write the code and don’t shower. But Eric Schmidt has a job and Mark Cuban is having way too much fun to mess around with this mess. Besides, it’s too late. The precipitous drop in stock price makes Yahoo an ideal candidate for another hostile bid by some outfit that has deep pockets and either needs to expand its online presence or wants to grow one and doesn’t care about the health care poison pill Yahoo has. Besides, Jerry just did them a favor and lopped off 10% of the workforce for them.

But that’s not the only thing he did. Jerry Yang basically paralized his organization from the moment he hit send until the last Yahoo out turns off the lights! Why would you not have this re-org in your pocket and just execute? Why announce layoffs up to 3 months from now? Just another case of bad leadership I guess.

If nothing else, I envision a lot of sick days and vacation days getting burned up in the coming months. Jerry, please leave this company as soon as possible would you please, it is becoming embarrasing how poor you are at managing this organization.