Yahoo News Moves Product Development to Taiwan

Yahoo is undergoing some major transformations, as it intends to shift towards more editorial content and away from search. Having sold its search business to Microsoft, Yahoo says it will focus on some core properties like its homepage. In an interesting move, though, the company is in the process of splitting several departments in its Yahoo News unit, moving the product management, engineer and UI design teams to Taiwan.

As BoomTown reports, the editorial staff of Yahoo News will remain stateside, mostly at the company's offices in Santa Clara, California, but the other departments have already been moved across the Pacific. Yahoo News is the largest news site online, with over 48 million unique, monthly visitors and is an important part of the Yahoo ecosystem.

While some at Yahoo went so far as to say that this wasn't a cost-cutting move, but rather one that would spur faster changes by “leveraging a global team,” it comes in a time when Yahoo is cutting costs hard with several layoffs and other measures, even closing a number of underperforming ventures. Still, many at Yahoo News are less than happy with the move and believe it would make it much harder for the unit to grow and maintain its status as the number-one online news source in the world.

“We are losing more and more of our ability to make quick changes and react to new technologies, which has worked pretty well so far, since we are #1,” one employee told BoomTown. “First, we all worked together across a room, then hundreds of miles away and now it is thousands.”

Yahoo insists that the move won't affect Yahoo News too much and that the Taiwan team was selected for its dedication and for the quality of the work it had been doing. Other large Yahoo properties will not be seeing the same type of changes, with the Yahoo Sports, Finances and Entertainment divisions remaining intact in the US.