Add another name to the list of Yahoo employees defecting to Microsoft. Dayne Sampson, Yahoo’s VP of Operations for Search and Advertising, has fled the company for its former suitor, Microsoft confirmed to Digital Daily.
If Yahoo employee defections to Microsoft continue apace, there may come a day when Redmond will no longer need to buy the struggling company’s search business. It will already have acquired it. This week yet another Yahoo alum joined Microsoft: Jan Pedersen, a former chief scientist and VP in the company’s Search and Advertising Technology Group.
Apparently, fear of a deepening recession alone isn’t enough to maintain tech worker loyalty these days–mounting job losses be damned. This week, Google repriced millions of employee stock options that had gone underwater as the company’s share price declined. Now eBay hopes to do the same. The reason: employee retention.
If no mention of layoffs was made during IBM’s reporting of its fourth-quarter results it’s not because the company hadn’t been planning them. IBM sent layoff notices to a number of employees last week–just one day after reporting a 12 percent gain in fourth-quarter earnings and issuing an encouraging financial outlook for 2009. And according to reports, the company is eliminating about 2,800 jobs in North America–mostly in its sales and software units.
Weakening economic conditions have forced Dell to add a new benefit to its already tenuous employee salary packages: a week of unpaid leave. In an effort to “better position the company for long-term competitiveness,” the company is asking workers to consider taking five days off without pay–the theory being that five days off without pay is better than six months off on unemployment in a lousy economy.
The hammer has fallen at eBay. This morning the online auctioneer sacked about 1,000 permanent employees and a few hundred temps, about 10 percent of its workforce. That’s a bit less than the 1,500 workers for whom the company was rumored to be writing up pink slips, but it’s substantial just the same.
Astonishing. The average prole spends more than 25 percent of his or her time online at work on personal activities. That’s the word from IT consultancy Voco, apparently having just discovered that the Internet, which essentially puts a concert hall, movie theater, TV, brokerage firm, shopping mall, garage sale and family/friend gathering on every employee desktop, can be–gasp–a distraction in the workplace.
The word “Nintendo” literally translates as “leave luck to heaven,” but another translation might be “leave luck to your employees.” Because Nintendo’s are among the most productive in tech. In fact, the average Nintendo worker earns more for the video game maker than average Google or Goldman Sachs workers earn for their respective employers.
Shareholders suing Yahoo’s board of directors for its alleged mishandling of the Microsoft buyout offer may find their efforts to pull the company’s controversial severance plan something of a fool’s errand. Because according to a new company filing, their chances of forcing Yahoo to scrap the plan are about as good as their chances of forcing CEO Jerry Yang to use capital letters in his all-hands memos just like a big boy.
Well, that was fast. Yahoo has issued a reply to Carl Icahn’s latest missive. Terse and caustic, it doesn’t really add much to the “conversation” between the two parties. Yahoo’s message to Icahn: You don’t have a credible plan to operate Yahoo either.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Includes “Pigs in a Polka,” “Rabbit of Seville” and, of course, “What’s Opera, Doc?”
Take the famous ballads and duets of West Side Story, insert a dozen mentions of famous social media sites like twitter and facebook, and this is what you get.
An iPod mini rebuilt with a wooden case
Star Wars meets Magnum, P.I.
Music videos recreated with new lyrics based on what’s actually happening in them. Daydream Believer and Total Eclipse of the Heart are particularly good.
In response to numerous e-mails, I have no idea what planet the giant alien creature is from. Judging from its enormous gills, I’d have to guess it’s from a watery planet. Reminder: please let me know if you plan to be in the office on Memorial Day so I can request HVAC for your floor.
For those of you who mock the wolf shirt beware. There is an old Navajo story about a young man who made fun of another man for wearing a wolf trio shirt. Legend has it that in his sleep, the wolves on the other man’s shirt came to life and tore his body to shreds. They never found any part of that man’s body. The Wolf is something to be respected and feared, not treated like a novelty.
Hands down the most inexplicably bizarre game for Wii I’ve ever seen
Yo mama is so attractive she could be on the cover of Prevention.
The inspiration for this project was to determine who could generate the worst flatulence measurable in a personally unbiased manner.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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