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In the latest lay off round hit to tech, Yahoo has announced they will be releasing around 1,600 workers, including half their Business unit, with 1,000 of the cuts coming by the end of the week:
The layoffs are part of a broader effort by the company to streamline operations in Yahoo's advertising unit. The Yahoo for Business segment's strategy had "struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack," according to a Yahoo spokesperson.
"Given the new focus of the new Yahoo Advertising group, we will reduce the workforce of the former Yahoo for Business division by nearly 50% by the end of 2023," a Yahoo spokesperson told CNBC.
Yahoo said the company would shift efforts to its 30-year partnership with Taboola, a digital advertising company, to satisfy ad services.
Those losing their jobs will be provided severance packages.
Related:
- Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?
- Amazon to Slash More Than 18,000 Jobs in Escalation of Cuts
- Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dwilson98052 on Sunday February 12, @05:51AM (10 children)
I thought they died off years ago.... seem sort of weird to me that they're still around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @06:12AM
Yah, apparently they have "struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack".
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday February 12, @07:19AM
Same here. What do they actually do, and why do they need (quick Google search) 8,000 employees to do it? Is it run as a tax loss for Apollo Global Management?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Sunday February 12, @08:06AM (7 children)
So it is still there but really it is part of Verizon, and it seems to be making somebody enough money to justify keeping it going. Although as the TFS points out it is struggling in the same way as many other, larger, tech companies are, and I wonder if Verizon have other plans for the future which don't include Yahoo. I'll bet that it is not worth anywhere near the $4.5B that then originally paid for it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday February 12, @08:09AM (6 children)
I forgot to include the link: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yahoo-makes-money-yhoo.asp [investopedia.com]which is from Dec 2022.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday February 12, @09:16AM (5 children)
Yahoo was doing well until M$ tried to do to it what it later did in a modified form to Nokia.
First their activist, M$ Icahn sneaked onto the board and set his sights on getting the company sold to M$ [reuters.com] by driving it into the dirt. Then he attacked the rest of the board [searchengineland.com], and finally rage quit [reuters.com] leaving only a shambles behind.
Some years later they did almost the same thing [seekingalpha.com] to Nokia [businessinsider.com] but used infiltration of the board to get their mole in as CEO first while the board stood back. With Yahoo, the goal was mostly to crush a major proponent of and contributor to free and open source software. Yahoo was big into FreeBSD [zer0.org] -- until M$ Icahn.
In both cases, the targets were world-class companies with leading core FOSS developers. In the case of Yahoo, it was mostly FreeBSD on the server. In the case of Nokia, it was a Linux-based phone which had been beating the iPhone in the product reviews up until Elop pulled the plug [seekingalpha.com].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Sunday February 12, @11:00AM (4 children)
I read somewhere (I cannot now remember where) that MS may well intend doing the same to Canonical if/when they go public. There was no evidence to support this idea, but the writer made a reasonable case why they might want to (Canonical is of course a major player in FOSS) and there have several reports recently of a closer cooperation between the 2 companies. It is not inconceivable that MS might like a place on the board at Canonical.
However, with no supporting evidence this is merely speculation.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday February 12, @11:25AM (3 children)
M$ is already on the Linux Foundation board [linuxfoundation.org] since quite a few years back now, undermining it from "within". The Raspberry Pi Foundation has some microsofters on the board too. Canonical keeps its board membership list hidden but various press releases have shown several m$ fanbois there. Novell was another example of what happens when m$ gets into the board.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday February 12, @01:53PM (2 children)
It seems MS really DOES love Linux/FOSS!
Sarc/Psyc!
:(
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Funny) by canopic jug on Sunday February 12, @02:46PM (1 child)
It seems MS really DOES love Linux/FOSS!
Context is everything. It does love Linux / FOSS, and in the same context: I love chicken.
It's not necessarily good for the chicken.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @05:17PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday February 12, @05:16PM (8 children)
It sure looks like the plan that's been going around the tech industry for about 6 months now is this:
1. Buy a bunch of stock in a company.
2. Use your position as a major shareholder to push management to announce a big layoff.
3. The stock price goes up in response to the news of the layoffs.
4. Sell your stake.
5. PROFIT!!!
No ???? step required.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday February 12, @05:55PM (7 children)
3. The stock price goes up in response to the news of the layoffs.
The really disturbing and sick twist there is that even firing your your R&D team or other engineers will drive up the stock prices. Basically, the prices have no connection to reality at all. It's all just basically Live Action Role-Playing around a shared set of fantasy rules except with real money at stake.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 12, @10:39PM (6 children)
Keep in mind that the market has a built in fix to this problem. If you buy on the pump, you'll lose money on the dump. Markets have considerable trouble taming short term irrationality, but they do better in the long term which is the time frame where the folly of firing your R&D team hits.
The real question: who keeps giving these people money?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @03:29AM (3 children)
The fed, it's a bottomless pit.. This is all bailout, "quantitative easing" money. Now we have inflation to pay for it out of our pockets
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 13, @03:43AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13, @07:16PM (1 child)
It is exactly, really the only, reason the stock market is so insanely inflated right now. All the action is in mergers, acquisitions, and buybacks. Now the profits are in layoffs. This was always the intent of the bailouts. Nobody "invests" in a company anymore, it is casino gambling, Yahoo, etc. shares are chips. The sole purpose of QE is to serve Wall Street and its political kickbacks.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 14, @01:18PM
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday February 13, @02:06PM
This is also why companies used to pay dividends. It allowed long time shareholders to get some of the profits along the way without having to sell. Investors could have them reinvested, but didn't have to.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 13, @10:11PM
So that will work to tame the price of the stock. It still incentivizes an investor with enough cash or clout to do a pump-and-dump, because you're buying before the pump and then start the dump as the price is moving up on the news. Now, what you're doing can be illegal in a bunch of jurisdictions, but most regulators won't bother you about it, and if one of them does make a fuss there are completely legal ways to buy them off for a fraction of what you made on the scheme.
To summarize: The market ends up OK, but the bad actor walks away with a big fat pile of cash, and that pile was taken from the investors who were slower than the bad actor because they didn't know in advance what was going to happen. And of course it also costs the people who lost their jobs a big bundle.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.