Struggling US Internet pioneer Yahoo! said Wednesday it would slash some 2,000 jobs in a purge aimed at transforming into a "smaller, nimbler, more profitable" company. Yahoo! chief executive Scott Thompson, who took the helm in January promising to turn the company around after a year of falling income, said the job cuts were a "tough decision" to achieve that goal.
"We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities," Thompson said in a statement. "Our goal is to get back to our core purpose - putting our users and advertisers first - and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal."
The restructuring will center on "select" groups and the platforms that support them, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said. A key focus will be data that drives "deep" personalization for users and return on investment for advertisers. "Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! - smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require," Thompson said.
Yahoo! has been trying to re-invent itself as a "premier digital media" company since the once flowering Internet search service found itself withering in Google's shadow. While striving for a new identity, the company has seen an exodus of talent that commenced during a failed bid by technology giant Microsoft to buy Yahoo! four years ago for about $45 billion.
"They have been bleeding talent for a while," said independent Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle. "At some point, all of the smart people leave because otherwise you are just waiting around to be shot," he continued. "There are places like Google and Facebook they can go work for." While Thompson didn't share details as to "core values" that Yahoo! would focus on, they appeared to involve publishing online content tailored to tastes of website visitors.
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