

Yahoo to lay off 1,400 employees - razorburn
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/technology/companies/22yahoo.html

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markessien
They will save more than 50 million a year from this. Considering that their
yearly income is just 200 million, this is quite a good move financially.
Assuming of course, that these workers were excess.

But I like Yahoo. Nothing like tough times to help a company get lean, mean
and start innovating again.

~~~
fallentimes
I agree. What the majority of the mainstream media ignores is that they have
the most popular sports site (yes, even bigger than espn), most popular mail
service, most popular portal, top 3 fantasy sports site, and top 3 finance
site.

So in short, they have a lot of good going for them. They just need to stop
horsing around with bullshit social networks (3 failed tries to date) & the
like and focus on what they're good at.

~~~
alecco
Yeah, and in key web technologies like Javascript they are kings.

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fallentimes
Why does Yahoo have so many employees to begin with?

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lacker
Middle management doesn't have so much to do with it. It's simply because
their business is huge. It takes a lot of behind the scenes infrastructure
work to run one of the biggest websites in the world. Include ad sales,
marketing, HR, et cetera and 14,000 employees is reasonable.

In terms of revenue per employee Yahoo seems reasonably staffed for its
business size, at least for the tech sector. For comparison, revenues per
employee:

Yahoo: $504,559 [http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-
quote/?story=profile&sym...](http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-
quote/?story=profile&symbol=YHOO)

Microsoft: $663,956 [http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-
quote/?story=profile&sym...](http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-
quote/?story=profile&symbol=MSFT)

IBM: $272,896 [http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-
quote/?story=profile&sym...](http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-
quote/?story=profile&symbol=IBM)

Amazon and Google are a lot higher, around $1 mil revenue per employee, so it
really varies, but it's not totally crazy for a business of Yahoo's size to
have 14,000 employees.

What it boils down to is, problems that are so small they affect 1% of your
users, for a small site that isn't worth worrying about. But for Yahoo it's
worth it to have a whole team work on the problem.

~~~
jdavid
Nintendo is pretty sick, with like $500k in profit per employee and $2.5
million in revenue per employee.

[http://www.joystiq.com/2007/05/31/fortune-nintendo-is-
beatin...](http://www.joystiq.com/2007/05/31/fortune-nintendo-is-beating-
microsoft-and-sony/)

We should all aspire to build companies like Nintendo, that are not the
largest company in their space, but are still able to have the largest wins.
Think of the chances that company has taken over the years to reinvent
themselves yet they win big when they do.

~~~
lacker
Definitely. Nintendo is also a great example of launching, getting customers,
and iterating over time to meet the market.

One cool thing a lot of people don't know is that Nintendo actually predates
the NES. They had a version of Duck Hunt that plugged into a TV in '77.

Check it out - [http://www.japan-games.com/Database/images/Nintendo/TV-
Game/...](http://www.japan-games.com/Database/images/Nintendo/TV-
Game/Duckhunt/index.htm)

