The rumor that started over the weekend about Yahoo’s impending plan to layoff hundreds of Yahoo staff worldwide seems to be getting stronger than bleaker. NYT, WSJ and Bloomberg are citing reliable sources confirming the rumored mass layoff. Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang and his crew are opting to stay mum about it and would either break out the news or disprove it. We could only wait and see how this story is going to unfold.
But whether this rumored mass layoff at Yahoo is true or not, (ok, I personally belief that it is true), we can’t help but wonder why would such mass layoff happen or if it’s not true (ok, I’m still discounting that it is not true) why would such rumor surface up.
I couldn’t help but wonder how this would affect Jerry Yang’s reign at Yahoo. Such a bad time to be taking on such a great task of managing the second most popular search engine entity. We shouldn’t blame the guy. He inherited a company trying to survive and outclass a stronger opponent such as Google. And it would certainly take a lot to compete with the big G. If you are unfortunate, you would have to resort to such ill fatal management move as the rumored layoff.
If the mass layoff happens, what’s next for Yahoo after then? Would this layoff seal Jerry Yang’s fate as CEO? Hopefully not. Yahoo has been a survivor of a previous mass layoff before. The last of which happened in 2001. Since then, Yahoo still managed to rise up its feet and steadily re-emerge as a tough contender in the battle for search engine and over all web supremacy battle.
Until Yahoo officially announces something about this rumor, we could all just speculate.
