oceandude

Yahoo's Future: The Employee Perspective

You obviously don't know much about Yahoo culture. The phrase 'bleed purple and yellow' is thrown around pretty often. Despite a lot of folks leaving in the past couple years there are still many people who are quite loyal. And again: not all the engineers are in Silicon Valley! Not sure why I have to keep mentioning this.

Yahoo's Future: The Employee Perspective

I keep hearing remarks like: "Microsoft is not a Valley company."

That's funny in a search advertising context, since Yahoo's Search Advertising group isn't in the Valley either. They are in Burbank, CA (Southern Cal) -- the result of Yahoo's Overture acquisition.

Yahoo is in a no-win situation. All three major options are depressing to employees.

1. Microsoft buys Yahoo. Ick. "Real" engineers hate Microsoft.
2. All deals fall apart. Stock slides back to 18 or so. Shareholder lawsuits filed. Believe me, Yahoo employees don't care about the stock's "upside". They want the highest price for their options, now. Plus the lawsuits would be a huge distraction.
3. Outsource to Google. Basically this would be giving up. Not much worse for employee morale. And what happens to all the employees replaced by Google? Pink slips?

The News Corp. thing is okay, except it will probably massively overvalue MySpace. It's obvious to everyone under 25-30 that Facebook is far superior to MySpace. Frankly I think MySpace started it's decline in 2007. And what's so great about MySpace anyway? Google themselves complain about the advertising revenue from it.

Yahoo is simply in a very tough spot.

13 Predictions for 2008

Virginia Tech marketing professor, the "internet types" that don't vote make a conscious decision not to vote because the choices are usually the lesser of two evils (I'd argue they should vote 3rd party, but anyway that's the reality). In other words they are disillusioned.

I can't count how many stories I've seen on the Internet of people that plan to vote for the first time specifically for Ron Paul. Many tales are out there of "selling your soul", i.e. registering Republican, just to vote for Dr. Paul.

The simple truth is that very few politicians understand economics. To them it is purely about taxes. Ironic that no Democrats understand inflation, since inflation is essentially a targeted tax on the poor.

The milk-for-$6 prediction is exactly right. I'm sure the 2008 candidates will be making a big deal out of the cost of milk and bread as the election draws nearer. They'll probably think that Congress can do something about it. Maybe they'll start sending out more food stamps. Yeah right. The only thing Congress can do is to start overseeing the Fed -- a job they've ignored for 90 years.