Results tagged “yahoo” from The Daily Nugget

A year ago, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for substantially more than the current $44.6 billion offer, but Yahoo turned them down. Now, after all of the mistakes that Yahoo made over the last year, it looks like the sale is almost an inevitability. They've making mistakes for a while. Yahoo had the opportunity to buy Google in the early days. Hell, in the last two years it had an opportunity to buy YouTube and Facebook for a fraction of their current valuations. Yahoo would damn near own the Valley today if it had pulled the trigger on just one of those deals (guess which one). But now, the only deal on the table is Yahoo itself. Hopefully, they won't mess up that deal too, or they may have to officially change their name to Boo-hoo-ooo!

Yahoo is expected to layoff as many as 500 peeps fairly soon.

Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo, was chastised by congress for Yahoo's role in helping China identify and jail a journalist in 2004. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," said Tom Lantos of Yahoo. Lantos also instructed Yang and Yahoo's chief counsel, Michael Callahan, to turn and face the dissidents' families, seated in the front row, and plead for forgiveness. Nothing like a public beatdown to change how a company does business! Let's see if they learn a lesson.

What happens when you are the CEO and you get paid over $70 million the same year your company's stock price drops 30 percent? They fire your ass and then tell the world that it was your idea.

A couple of nights ago, I was chillin' on the Inter-nizzle, when I discovered Konfabulator. Konfabulator is a little program that runs widgets on your desktop. What kind of widgets, you ask? Just about any kind under the sun and there are new ones everyday. The default installation comes with some fly widgets like a picture viewer, analog clock, and weather widget. But if you visit the Widget Gallery, you can hit up hundreds of cool things to put on your desktop. What are you waiting for?!?!?!

I want to take a time out and give props to Yahoo! The dot-com boom and bust came and went, but the company has held steady to its cultural roots. Here are some of the perks that the employees still enjoy: free specialty coffee stands throughout campus--as good as Starbucks for free; game rooms with foosball tables, pool tables, and air hockey--all free; an awesome cafeteria called Eat at URLs that boasts an awesome variety of food, great prices, and free copies of the Wall Street Journal; hit movies are regularly screened on campus--today it's Chicago; and the list goes on and on, not to mention the permanent name prestige on the resume. It's an informal atmosphere that makes you feel warm and fuzzy, like you are still safely nestled within the cozy Internet Bubble. Yet with all of these things the company is still making a quarter million dollars per quarter. The Internet legend does indeed continue, at least here anyway.

Okay, so check this out. I went to Yahoo! today to work on a project for work and was a little surprised to see that it still hadn't lost its culture. The purple and yellow cubes are still there. I was immediately reminded of the bottled pre-bubble-burst naive optimism that every dot-com used to ooze from its pores. Yahoo! alas is no longer a little snot-nosed kid, it's transforming itself into a mature organization. Sure, the foosball tables and the free soft drinks are all there, but things are a little different. Don't get me wrong, it's still a dot-com, but it seems to be much more now.

So, I am sitting in the cafeteria with Kevin and Chad talking about our work there, when we see Jerry Yang walking across the floor. Funny, he didn't seem to be any smarter than anyone else in the room. Actually, deep inside he probably knows that he got lucky, very lucky. Either way it was weird to be four feet from a guy that is a billionaire of the "new economy." He's a celebrity for geeks everywhere, for better or for worse. I wanted to talk to him, but I was with some of my work peeps. Maybe next time I'll be able to give him a quick hello, from one optimistic geek to another.