Saturday, December 13, 2008
Weekend Update, 12/12/08
Where are Tina Fey and Sarah Palin when we really need a laugh? In this week ramping up to the holidays, good cheer–unsurprisingly–was hard to find. 2008 may well be remembered as the year the econalypse stole Christmas.
Yahoo was bereft of cheer, for sure. BoomTown covered its long-dreaded layoffs and published Jerry Yang’s complete memo to Yahoo staff about the painful process, which began on Wednesday. Ex-Yahoos from all corners of the company spoke (and vented) to BoomTown about the as-yet fruitless search for a CEO to replace Yang, who laid himself off last month. But wait–Digital Daily pointed out a singular moment of misplaced cheer–akin to fiddling while the proverbial Yahoo burns–as the company, uh, celebrated the holidays with a bafflingly lavish year-end party on last Saturday–four days before layoffs began.
If a global manufacturer of computer hardware like Belkin’s not exhibiting at CES, who is? I posed that question jokingly earlier this morning, but turns out there’s a very real and ugly answer to it: Not Seagate. Not Logitech. Not Cisco. Not Philips. Not Yahoo. And not Sanyo, either.
Next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo show floor will be quite a bit easier to navigate than in years past. With registration down by 20 percent over last year, there are likely to be far fewer attendees, and with a growing list of companies pulling out of the show, there’ll be fewer booths for them to crowd. Earlier this week, Adobe said it had decided against exhibiting on the show floor. A coterie of other companies is joining it, top among them, Belkin, which has also pulled out of exhibiting at CES. What’s next–a Super Bowl boycott?
