Semel Takes A Stand

from the don't-fire-me,-please dept

As expected, Yahoo! CEO! Terry! Semel! finally got around to announcing big changes today. The biggest, of course, is laying off 400 people (though, they say they're hiring 100 more for other jobs, so net it out at 300). They're also cutting the 44 current business units down to six. He also, of course, highlighted the announcements from the past few days - such as the SBC deal and the "paid listings" service. It's unclear if any of this will help, but it does seem clear that Semel got the message that Wall Street hadn't been happy with his quiet approach to working out Yahoo's problems. So, now he's made some noise, and you can bet Wall Street will probably come up with some reason to criticize him for that as well. Update: Business 2.0 explains why the new Semel strategy won't work. His basic point is that all they're doing is pissing off their loyal users to earn a few bucks that won't make much of a difference in the long run.