While Nicki Dugan (pictured here) was not one of the top execs at Yahoo, she certainly is typical of many at the company who stuck with it through many ups and downs.
No longer, according to a memo BoomTown obtained, since the longtime PR staffer–who has been at Yahoo for almost a decade and who was previously with an outside public relations firm that worked for Yahoo–will leave the company Monday.
Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about the status of the regulatory investigation for the Microsoft-Yahoo search and online advertising pact, which most expect to get approved.
One of the few vocal critics of the deal, though, is Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group, who lobbed MicroHoo some important questions.
Here are the answers.
Last week, a cougar was reported to be roaming on the Redmond, Wash., campus of Microsoft.
Here’s an image the very fine global alert from Microsoft Global Security first sent last week, which assured employees of the software giant that “Microsoft Security will conduct frequent patrols of all wooded areas of the campus.”
That’s more than you can say about how the software giant handles hackers!
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!
From vacation, that is–an activity that I highly recommend (and getting toasted at Burning Man this week does not count, although that is also apparently highly recommended in order to endure that digital dustfest).
In any case, we begin Yahoo memo-bombing in five minutes.
That is all.
Starting today and through next week, BoomTown is headed south down California’s lovely Highway 1 for as much of a vacation as I can possibly take.
Which is to say, just a week off from posting.
In other words: Partovis, Wenda, Owen, play nice! Yahoos, please hold your internal memos. And I hope Apple’s tablet is not delivered from on high this week while I relax beachside (it won’t be).
Yahoo is closer to naming a new international head, according to sources, the last big slot left in the top management structure of CEO Carol Bartz.
While BoomTown is endeavoring to get the name of this international man of mystery, the suspect list is long, since Yahoo’s headhunter for the job–Heidrick & Struggles–has pretty much talked to the gamut of international Web muckety-mucks since the search started six months ago.
In a memo to Yahoo staff after her reorganization in February, Bartz said that “international growth is critical for Yahoo!, which has become too reliant on its U.S. business over the years.”
BoomTown just got this interesting memo that Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele sent out to her staff immediately in the wake of the deal for Microsoft to take over Yahoo’s search technology business two weeks ago.
I render it unto you, dear readers, since it shows just how intent the top managers of Yahoo are, especially internally, in reassuring those concerned that Yahoo had not just gutted itself and how it would remain as innovative as ever.
Also amusing–for reasons I cannot understand since it is an internal memo–is the use of the code name for Yahoo, which is called Yale, after the famous university in New Haven, Conn.
A few weeks ago, when I was having breakfast with legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen about his new venture fund, he talked about what he thought was critical to being successful as an Internet company.
Ticking off names, from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen said he always favored technical entrepreneurs for one key reason: “You need someone who lives and breathes product.”
It’s a refrain I have heard a lot recently from a wide range of people in the sector, most especially when talking about two of the more challenging renovations of key Internet brands going on of late.
That would be: Yahoo and MySpace.
For all the noisy hubbub over should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish confidential documents hacked from password-protected accounts of Twitter employees, as well as a Twitter spouse, it is actually pretty simple.
Stolen equals stolen.
But, because this is a “hot” issue and it concerns an even hotter Web 2.0 company–Holy traffic-gooser, Batman!–the debate will surely go on and on, even as the stolen information inevitably leaks its way out.
Still, let’s not pretend what it is and is not.
BoomTown has had some good leaked internal memos from Yahoo, but I have never enjoyed one quite as much as this one from newly installed Yahoo PR head Eric Brown, who started today.
While it is clear Yahoo has had its troubles in understanding and offering social-networking products to its users, Brown certainly knows how to share.
Yahoo could use some of that DNA!
Here’s his introductory memo to his new troops.
Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.
Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.
Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.
But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.
Here’s Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s memo on the AOL spinoff, which was approved by the media giant’s board last night and announced this morning.
BoomTown reported a lot of the deep details of the new structure of the online unit, which sweeps aside the previous one and includes a new venture unit.
Here’s the memo.
According to an internal memo obtained by BoomTown, Joanna Shields, who came to AOL via its troubled acquisition of the Bebo social-networking site, will be returning to London to spend more time with her family and to “pursue entrepreneurial interests.”
Until recently, People Networks has been the third leg of the Time Warner-owned online site’s businesses, which also include advertising and content.
But under new CEO Tim Armstrong, who was one of the top sales execs at Google, AOL is largely abandoning its business-unit approach for a more functional and centralized structure.
A major Yahoo investor yesterday told me that he liked what he saw so far from new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, but he was wary.
“I like the sizzle,” he said, referring to Bartz’s decisive take-no-prisoners style. “But I am still waiting to see if steak is there too.”
Well, Bartz sizzled at its first-quarter earnings conference call today, tossing off some ribald words as she also handed over some tough news to chew on, announcing Yahoo’s much-expected weak first-quarter results. The company also said it would cut five percent of its staff of 13,600, which is close to 700 employees.
BoomTown liveblogged the call with Bartz, who noted about Yahoo: “The most important takeaway was the importance of having a ‘Wow!’ experience.”
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.
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.
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