Yahoo (YHOO) is announcing its Q407 earnings on Jan 29th, so one school of thought is the company will do the call, see what the hit is to its stock and then decide on the cuts, one way or the other.
Yesterday Techcrunch reported on a small bunch of layoffs including from the Yahoo's Brand Universe project (which Vince Broady was heading, and after that project got killed, left last week) and Yahoo Answers team. Broady's group got its severance packages yesterday, we have heard.
My guess is that the a big part of the layoffs, if they happen, may come from some European units, as the company has hinted recently. Toby Coppel, the head Yahoo's European business, gave an ominous warning in an FT story in November: Yahoo staff was given until Q1 2008 to revamp the poorly performing parts of its European business, or these would be closed down or sold. Also, the FT story said Yahoo could think about outsourcing some European search operations to third parties, which would affect the company headcount as well.
In a related BreakingViews/WJ opinion article yesterday, the authors make a case for completely outsourcing Yahoo's search operations worldwide, to Microsoft (MSFT), or even Google (GOOG), for a big fee...this isn't the first time it has been proposed...many analysts have said the same thing. Then, there are Yahoo's stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, which the column says could be spun-off into a different unit and spun off.
This may be the radical rethink Yang had promised in the first 100 days of his taking over as CEO, only delayed by another 100 days or so.
(Pic courtesy: Yodel Anecdotal's feed on Flickr: Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yang's CES keynote earlier this month)
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