All Things Digital

Skip to main content.

BoomTown

Monday, August 31, 2009

The Carol Bartz Is Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore Memo: The Hypoglycemic Edition

19813-1

BoomTown promised a Yahoo internal memo upon our return from vacation today and we will not let you down.

Thus, here’s a doozie Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz recently sent to her troops, telling them to snap out of their sugar low.

One in a series of weekly Friday communications from her, from mid-August, this one got a lot of attention internally since it was a definite back of the hand for those Yahoos who perhaps dwelled too much on whether or not they liked the recent search deal she struck with Microsoft.

Here’s the basic gist of it: Fie on naysayers, stop bellyaching, Yahoo rocks and get back to work!

Read More »

Friday, August 14, 2009

Massive AOL Layoffs? Not Imminent–But Top-to-Bottom Cost Exam Definitely in Process.

funny-pictures-mc-hammer-cat

After a while–in a BoomTown mangling of the old cliché–if you are a nail, everything begins to look like a hammer.

So, it is probably inevitable that the next thing for much-beleaguered AOL staffers to start rumbling about is 2,000 people getting laid off next week.

After all, the Time Warner unit has a long history of whacking employees. So, it is easier to assume things will not be different under the regime of the latest CEO, Tim Armstrong.

Except it’s not actually true that such massive cuts are in the offing, since–as many sources I spoke to said–Armstrong is in the early part of figuring out what to do about the cost structure of AOL, after laying out a company strategy and rejiggering management.

Read More »

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Skype–the Twitter of Yesteryear–Hypes Web Telephone on Television (Plus: Biz Talks Biz!)

skype_logo_1_medium

SiliconANGLE blogger John Furrier found a supersweet television ad that eBay Internet phone unit Skype is running to goose its brand.

The once-hottest-ever start-up–touted up and down Silicon Valley for its explosive growth back in 2003–is still a major global brand with a massive 405 million user accounts at the end of 2008.

In fact, Skype’s size makes media-overhyped Twitter seem, well, twee, by comparison. Twitter had only 9.8 million unique visitors in February, up impressively from 6.1 million in January.

But the hot-or-not comparisons between the two are interesting to think about.

Read More »

Thursday, February 26, 2009

One Last Yahoo Reorg Missive: Bartz Tells Employees What She Already Said. Again.

Photobucket

Goodness gracious, make it stop!

You must know by now how much BoomTown loves internal Yahoo memos. But this is getting ridiculous.

It’s been like a flash flood after a long drought at Sunnyvale HQ today, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz turns on the firehose of a whole lot of communicating.

“I know you guys have reorg fatigue,” wrote Bartz in the latest email to employees about the management reorganization finally announced this morning.

Also memo fatigue at All Things Digital HQ, if you can believe it.

Read More »

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Buyer’s Remorse or Not–AOL Is Not Considering Selling Bebo

Yesterday, TechCrunch’s U.K. blogger Mike Butcher spun the tale of buyer’s remorse run amok with a report that Time Warner online unit AOL was “seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago,” citing poor performance and a bad advertising market.

Later, AOL went on the record saying “there is no truth to this rumor,” although Butcher insisted otherwise from his sources.

Well, actually, no. While Time Warner was crazy to pay that much for Bebo, it is not quite that nuts to sell it for bupkis.

Read More »

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Zimbra Founder Satish Dharmaraj to Depart Yahoo

Satish Dharmaraj–the founder of open-source email start-up Zimbra, which has been at the heart of significant new changes to Yahoo’s key communications services–will be leaving the company.

Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra in the fall of 2007.

And even though he had stepped back from leadership in the communications arena at Yahoo, the departure of an innovative entrepreneur like Dharmaraj–although typical when big companies buy start-ups–is never a good thing, given that it’s more important than ever to keep innovative leaders at Yahoo.

Read More »

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

AOL Gets More Social With Renovation of Bebo (But There’s Much More to Come)

This morning, AOL will launch an updated look for its Bebo social-networking property, with a new “social inbox” profile for its users. It essentially gives its users a one-stop destination, with aggregated social feeds from across the Web, multiple email accounts and media recommendations. But, according to sources, the online service is preparing a more radical series of announcements after the new year, well beyond its release today. Interestingly, the changes to its social-networking and communications properties yet to be announced have been among the things that have impressed Yahoo in its recent merger talks with Time Warner about buying AOL.

Read More »

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

What the Combined Yahoo-AOL Might Look Like, as Talks Drag On–Oops–Heat Up!

As has been copiously reported here and all over, Yahoo and AOL have been engaged in never-ending talks about a possible deal to merge their flagging Internet businesses.

Now, sources tell me, the circle of executives at both companies interfacing with each other has been widened, for purposes of due diligence.

That includes Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who is in New York this week–where AOL parent, Time Warner, is located–to meet once again with its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, to see if they can actually complete the merger.

Now, all this frantic activity does not mean a deal will necessarily be struck.

But it is just this kind of ramped-up blabbery that has many at both companies predicting that a deal will go through, sooner or later, as soon as Time Warner and Yahoo can agree on a price.

Read More »

Latest BoomTown Videos

More Videos »

About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

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.

Read more »