The Next Web

» fired Archives – The Next Web

   

Archive of thenextweb.com

“Thank you, reader, for coming in…”

Boris Written on 11th December 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS some text
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Thank you, dear reader, for coming in. I have some information regarding our organization I’d like to tell you in person. I appreciate what you have done for The Next Web. As you know, The Next Web has had a challenging year and is focused on reducing costs. We’ve had to make some tough decision around eliminating a number of readers. Your position is one of these being eliminated.

Nah, just kidding!

The text you just read is straigh out the Yahoo! “How to Fire Employees for Dummies” manual. Condensed into a few easy to understand PowerPoint slides. Valleywag obtained the slides (clearly marked “Yahoo! Confidential. Do Not Forward”) and published them on their blog. Here is one of the the slides:

Thank you, reader, for coming in...

As you might know Yahoo! is ”getting fit” this Wednesday by firing 1500 people. That procedure is painful for all parties involved so management is trying to coach managers doing the actual firing with these slides.

Expect more Yahoo! documents to leak the following days as those 1500 apparently ‘unfit’ ex-employees use the web, blogs and, no doubt, all the Yahoo! tools to upload every bit of confidential info they can get their hands on.

Yahoo in 2008: Victory or Death!

Boris Written on 20th January 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS some text
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

2008 is going to be an extremely exciting year for Yahoo. With Jerry Yang back as CEO, massive layoffs coming up, the integration of Delicious into their search results and their traffic dipping below that of Google (see graph below) again for the first time since the end of 2006 a lot of people are wondering what 2008 will bring for Yahoo. Or they just wonder if their stock will ever recover again and are waiting anxiously for the earnings announcements on January 29 in little more than a week.

Alley Insider claims to have access to an insider at Yahoo who told them that if the stock price doesn’t rise above $20 per share before the 29th Yahoo will fire 1,500 to 2,500 employees. Earlier this week Techcrunch reported that about 250 employees at Yahoo had been asked to turn in their computers. Yahoo has more than 11,000 employees so firing a large percentage like this will sure have a huge effect on the company as a whole. That might be precisely the effect that Yang is after as he is perceived as too much of a nice guy to run such a mammoth of a company. Taking harsh decisions like this might signal a much needed change at Yahoo, or simply the signs of a death struggle and nothing more than an attempt to please shareholders.

Either way, Yahoo shall not go silently into the night or give up without a fight. And why should they? They still have a market cap of more than 27 billion and are the number 1 news source on the web, Flickr is catching up to Photobucket and Yahoo Mail (with more than 250 million users) is still THE number 1 webmail solution.

The first thing Yahoo should work on is its image. They appear to have lost everything to Google. Unless it can change this perception it might turn into reality. After all, perception IS reality.

Traffic results for Yahoo.com VS Google.com over the last three years:
Yahoo VS Google

Yahoo stock price over the last 3 months:
Yahoo Stock Price


Add your button here too.
Only €99 a week (100.000+ pageviews = less than € 1 CPM!)
Upload your button now.




Copyright 2006-2009 © TheNextWeb.com - Entries (RSS) / Comments (RSS)