Coming out from a near-escape of Microsoft’s takeover bid and jumping to a 55% inflated stock value due to the raucous, my earlier prediction missed the mark. What did happen is worse IMO — massive lay-offs and exodus of key executives.
The rumors have revealed itself and over a thousand Yahoo! employees have been given the pink slip early today. Some Twittered their imminent exit, others blogged about it.
Here’s a running list of bigwig names walking out the door:
- Susan Mernit, Senior Director, Product at Yahoo!
- Salim Ismail, Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal ‘ideas factory’
- Bradley Horowitz, Head of Yahoo’s Advanced Technology Division
- Jessica Bowman, Senior SEO Manager and SEO Evangelist at Yahoo
- Jeff Bonforte, Vice President for Social Search
- Patrick Houston, VP Content & Programming
- Randy Ksar, Brand Marketing Manager
- Subhhash Bhatia, Sr. Director
- Brad Ramsey, VP Marketing
- Ryan Kuder, Sr. Manager
Horowitz will be moving to Google and will be joining the OpenSocial initiative.
Dark days for Yahoo. My $18/share prediction is getting a second lease in life.
On the other hand, Steve Ballmer is resolved in buying Yahoo! despite the latter’s rejection of the $31/share offer. Analysts says an increased offer to $35-$36 will put enough pressure on the executive board to give in.
too bad, I for one really preferred using google as my search engine than yahoo because yahoo is full of ads unlike google’s search page and I seem to get what I want more often at Google than Yahoo.
Now if google would only try to rival Yahoo’s Messenger then I would gladly switch to that since Im starting to hate YM right now.