Employees could be notified of the cuts as early as today, according to sources inside the organization. Because Yahoo has not publicly announced the downsizing plans, no official comments have been forthcoming from company spokespeople.
Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO for the last two years, believes the housecleaning will help the floundering search provider to restructure and grow more strategically. But other insiders say the layoffs are, ironically, more akin to “corporate euthanasia.”
On the condition of anonymity, one employee with Yahoo’s human resource division told The Bennington Vale Evening Transcript, “AOL has been making aggressive bids to buy Yahoo. And even though the Board won’t bite, the pressure’s becoming too overwhelming. The layoffs accomplish two objectives. One, they make the company more solvent so we can refuse the offers from AOL. And two, in case the worst should come to pass, we won’t be putting our valued co-workers into an even worse situation, which is what would happen to them at AOL. I mean, until I heard the news of their bid, I didn’t even know AOL was still around. I mean, who uses that garbage anymore? Are there still dial-up subscribers out there? I think this decision is for the best; you know, putting these employees out of their misery. A life at AOL is no life at all. It’s just an awful shadowland between a heaven and a hell, where the soul has only a sad awareness of itself alone. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”
