14 DAY TRIAL // The date it will all go down, unless a miracle happens and the Yahoo! stock grows overnight to a beautiful sum, is January 29th. The rumors have been first heard in mid-December 2007, when AOL was forced to cut its numbers in a similar way because of low performance by its team.
The Silicon Alley Insider was tipped off by an un-cited source that the amount of people to be laid off by the Sunnyvale-based Internet company is of about 20 percent of its total numbers. Knowing that Yahoo! has somewhere around 12 thousand people on its payroll, that would give a huge 2,400 people to be forced to join the ranks of the unemployed. And taking into consideration that they won't be firing the cr?me de la cr?me, it's not likely that the employees targeted by this decision will find it easy to jump beds with Google.
The list of unlucky Yahoo!ers has been put together, according to SAI's source, as a result of a project that took wings in the last quarter of 2007, that had all group heads consider their teams and think about potential cuts. By putting all of those lists together, Jerry Yang has in front of him the document that no boss and owner of a company, who invested a little more than money, should.
For the CEO, it's a make or break moment right now. He either makes the decision and lets those people off, or he breaks and will be forced either to give up his job, sell out or shop the company around. January 29th will be for him either the moment of inspiration that the remaining Yahoo!ers will look at when considering the future, or it will be a sign of weakness. Dead simple, dead difficult.