Thought the Yahoo layoffs were over? Not quite... today it seems that George Oates, a high-profile member of the Flickr team and one of the site's early employees, was told that she was being given the chop too. She's recently been in Australia, so the fact that her bad news has arrived a day late could just be a quirk of travelling - but I'm trying to find out if other members of the Flickr team are also being laid off as well. (Update: I'm told two other members of the Flickr team also got laid off.)
Oates - who designed Flickr's interface - is highly-regarded, confirming that this round of job cuts is basically arbitrary - but it also marks a bit of a watershed for Yahoo.
Since its acquisition early in 2005, Flickr has been considered the golden child of the organisation; a cool web application that they bought in and thought was so good they even dumped the more-popular Yahoo photos in favour of it.
But clearly Flickr's no longer untouchable. Despite its reputation (or perhaps because of it) I was told that the site was among the assets Yahoo was prepared to sell to Microsoft. Clearly nothing is untouchable these days, even the success stories.
(More bad news for startups acquired by bigco: Last.fm is making 20 people redundant the day after its Christmas party).
