The story of big lay-offs at Yahoo has been doing the rounds without any confirmation from the company, now being run by Jerry Yang. However, now The New York Times has covered the story, and it says: "The final number of layoffs from Yahoo's work force of about 14,000 is yet to be determined and is likely to be announced around the end of the month, perhaps during Yahoo's conference call on Jan. 29 with analysts after it reports fourth-quarter results."
In an e-mail statement, a company spokeswoman, Diana Wong, said: "Yahoo plans to invest in some areas, reduce emphasis in others, and eliminate some areas of the business that don't support the company's priorities. Yahoo continues to attract and hire talent against the company's key initiatives to create long-term stockholder value."
In a guest column at GigaOM, Yahoo, Please Put Up A Fight, Sramana Mitra points out that Yahoo has a presence in several very profitable "hot" parts of the market -- Flickr, HotJobs, travel, finance etc -- but is not monetising them properly.
The reason I believe that Yahoo can become the jewel of Web 3.0 is that it already has strong or interesting positions in multiple verticals, among them news, sports, finance, jobs and photo sharing. My entire Web 3.0 thesis is based on the web becoming verticalized, and therefore, to do justice to its potential, Yahoo needs to win in the verticals, and monetize them.
It's all to play for.
