The week just passed melded Inauguration week and the first week of earnings reports into one giant package filled with exuberance and resignation. Conventional wisdom says to start with the bad news and end with the good news, but that’s not how it went down: It started high with the momentum and promise of change embodied by Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States and ended low with some heavy hitters feeling the pain of the downturn.
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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.
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It was an eventful week–a new President-elect, Yahoo still playing the field with no takers, and the hovering recession beginning to hit a little harder, a little closer to home. It was hard to keep the storylines straight, so let’s approach it thematically.
Election 2008
Whether or not those voting machines malfunctioned or miscounted votes, Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, much to the chagrin of comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who–since the beginning of the McCain/Palin partnership–were handed once-in-a-lifetime material. Between the brilliant Saturday Night Live parody sketches of (and by) both Palin and McCain, and Obama’s victory speech, the other big winner (by a mile) was YouTube.
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“If she wins, I’m done. I can’t do that for four years. And by ‘I’m done,’ I mean I’m leaving Earth.” That’s what Tina Fey had to say about the future of her uncanny impersonation of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. And while that’s understandable, it’s a pity for “Saturday Night Live,” which has been enjoying record online viewership thanks to Fey’s performances.
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The week ending Oct. 3, 2008 was a momentous one, and not solely because of ongoing McCain-Obama high jinks like Tina Fey’s encore as Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live” or the one and only Web site where you can decide the race in a Kung-Fu Election.
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First and foremost, this week’s big slide on Wall Street hit tech stocks with a vengeance, too, disproving Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s assertion a little more than a week ago: “My guess is that the drama is New York and not here.” Ouch. But don’t say BoomTown didn’t warn you.
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Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s new general counsel, has “strong ties to the Republican Party.” Including a stint in former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office, where, as chief of staff, he handled the government’s response to the the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s indentity. “Ted’s arrival demonstrates we’re a little more grown up.” No word on whether or not you need to change your status immediately.”
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The week just passed melded Inauguration week and the first week of earnings reports into one giant package filled with exuberance and resignation. Conventional wisdom says to start with the bad news and end with the good news, but that’s not how it went down: It started high with the momentum and promise of change embodied by Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States and ended low with some heavy hitters feeling the pain of the downturn.
