It's also really terrible, in a way that veers on high camp, but doesn't quite cross the border.

Michelle Chappel is a singer-songwriter and "international creativity consultant" who says she's worked three separate consulting gigs at Yahoo, because she "likes the people so much." After turning her recent experiences into a music video, we doubt she'll be getting much more work at Sunnyvale. No worries! "What are you going to do / when we all get jobs at Microsoft?" she sings, taunting Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for laying off 1,500 people last week.

No one seems to think the right employees were let go at the bloated Internet giant. The more we learn about Yahoo's layoffs, the more we can understand why Yang's security detail feared trouble. Read one Yahoo's account of how the company showered bonuses and praise on what managers said were its best employees — and then put them out on the streets a few month later:

You wanted more baffling stories on Yahoo's lay off? Well, I am one of the laid off employees. I have been with them ever since they acquired my company (Overture), which was over 7 years now.

Here are some good and laughable bits of information:

1. They honored some of us back at the end of September with the Yahoo Superstar award. The cash price for this award is quite big, and the party up in San Francisco was spectacular. Numerous people who received this award (which is given out only to 50 people out of 14,000 employees worldwide) got laid off.

2. After the first lay off in February Yahoo gave out so called "retention bonuses" in April. The bonus was given to those employees who deem so valuable that Yahoo cannot afford to lose them. The bonuses came with a nice letter from Jerry, calling you one of the "most valuable employees" in the company. Some of us "most valuable players" were laid off last week.

3. Yahoo said they wanted to get "fit" but in reality kept a bunch of non-producing, constantly calling in sick losers. It isn't surprising that the company is going down hill. Yahoo has a history of getting rid of the actual talent, while the ass-kissing, incompetent slackers remain around. Problem is, after most of the truly talented people who actually knew what they were doing got laid off, or quit, it leaves the one with fancy titles and no clue in charge.

4. Also, a funny piece of info: Yahoo gave passes for the Southern California holiday party, which took place last Saturday, to laid off employees. I guess numerous "happy" laid off ex-Yahoos went to the party to give a piece of their mind to Jerry, who oddly enough attended. I thought two comments were pretty hilarious:
1. See you at Microsoft
2. You laid off my husband in February, we just had a baby, I got laid off on Wednesday. Now you at least can put a face with some of the people you put out on the street.

I am actually happy about no longer working there. I already have another job lined up with more pay, better people and no bullshit. Most of us feel relieved that we are no longer there. The company has been run into the ground for the past 2 years. The mood is horrible, people are scared and demoralized. What was once a great work environment and such a fun place to work for is now a morgue. Let's hope that the next severance packages will be as generous as these ones.

There are still a few "good" Yahoos left working there. Some of them are simply too scared with the current economy to go and look for something else, especially if they have children and families. Not all Yahoos consist of execs who make enough money to not give a damn. There are some left who simply need a paycheck to survive. To those guys my heart goes out.

Sincerely,
Expelled

Nothing sets the office rumor mill going like a layoff. Everyone's jockeying for position and looking for information; no one actually works in the runup to a corporate cull. Here are some of the things I heard in the aftermath of last week's layoffs at Yahoo:

• At one Yahoo office in southern California, 20 out of 50 employees on a single floor had their mail slots removed from the mailroom and placed on top of a bookcase — a week before the layoffs. "Talk about forewarnings," a Yahoo wrote us. "I thought yahoo had more class than that. I had worked at AOL for many years and they were not as bad as that."
• A host of small projects launched right before the scheduled layoffs — suggesting that their creators were worried they'd get laid off and the projects would never see the light of day if they didn't rush them out.
• Saddest note from a Yahoo: "I am currently with Yahoo as QA Lead and looking for opportunities with Valleywag. PFA my resume herewith. I can be reached at 408-XXX-XXXX."
• Yahoo aid off a bunch of people who had just finished training their replacements in India. A sensible business move, and yet oh so Dilbert.
• From a fired Yahoo up north:
  

  I got laid off in the Canadian office a couple of months ago. The idiot HR person followed the script you leaked to the letter.

  Here's some background:
  - My manager went on mat-leave.
  - Her temporary replacement was THE stereotypically awful manager: ignorant, mean, interested only in kissing the CEO's ass by slagging everyone who reported to her, and proposing ridiculous changes to a set of processes that the particular teams had established over three years of development and constant success (really: this particular team was the only team in the entire Canadian and European collection of offices that had this level of success).

  - I was the senior member of the team, and I had been at the company longer than this temp-replacement, so we butted heads.

  - The temp-replacement was close friends with the brand new HR manager.
  - The temp-replacement and her HR friend gave me a disciplinary letter, in which they flat-out lied, claiming that co-workers had said things about my performance that they hadn't. When those co-workers found out, they complained to HR, and my letter was suddenly taken back.

  - After a few months of clashing with the temp-manager, and a few months before the mat-leave was to end, I got the layoff-speech.

  - The temp-manager made sure to re-org (another typical yahoo move), and give herself a new managerial role, so that when the mat-leave does end, that person now reports to the person who was her temp-replacement.

• And from Southeast Asia, word comes that people had access to Yahoo's Backyard intranet a day before the layoffs. That also happened in the U.S. in February's layoffs.
• The leaked layoff instructions we ran proved helpful:
  

  I too received the tell-tale call yesterday, December 9th. It's interesting how the script was posted on valleywag.com, since that is EXACTLY what my manager said to me. LOL! I too find it interesting that the position I was hired for was being cut due to "reduction is workforce" and yet that very same position is currently posted on Hotjobs (which is a part of Yahoo). One would think that if Yahoo is truly making a reduction in their workforce then why would they have a post for the same position which they just laid you off from?

• Worst reporting on the layoffs: Dawn Kawamoto's breathless piece in CNET News, which reported a "twist" in Yahoo's severance package. The "twist"? Yahoo's 1,500-some laid-off employees would stay on the payroll through mid-February. However, that's not an exciting new severance program; it's simply Yahoo complying with a federal labor law called the WARN Act, which requires 60 days' warning to employees affected by a mass layoff.
• A tipster at Brickhouse, Yahoo's San Francisco "incubator" office, reports that layoff plans were clear a day ahead of schedule:
  

  Moving boxes showed up to at the Brick on Tuesday night. if you've ever been to the Brick, you know that there's no receptionist and no way to hide them. Very classy, Sunnyvale, "Don't let the door hit you..."

The sacking of designer George Oates and two of her colleagues might seem too minor to note in a week where 1,500 of their colleagues also got pink-slipped. But Flickr has been spared in past rounds of layoffs. And the seemingly political dismissal of Oates, a well-regarded designer and popular figure in the office, has created a stir of more consequence.

Flickr had become the last great hope of Yahoo, the place where talents frustrated with the Web giant's bureaucracy fled. But it was never meant to be a redoubt of cool — rather, it was meant to be the home base of a conquering army which would transform all of Yahoo, infusing its websites with the buzz of user participation.

Didn't happen. For a while, Flickr rode high; last year, Yahoo shut down its bigger Yahoo Photos site in Flickr's favor. But then Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield left. They put Flickr in the hands of a Yahoo executive, Kakul Srivastava, who made the decision to lay off Oates, I'm told.

I haven't uncovered the specific reason Srivastava and Oates had a tiff, but it seems impossible to argue that the firing had anything to do with performance. Oates had championed a project to post photos from the Library of Congress's collections; Library officials just yesterday declared it a resounding success.

This is how a team falls apart: Remove a key player, and the social bonds that keep their friends on the job weaken. Before you know it, you've got a group of employees collecting paychecks, not a team working for a goal. Bugs go unfixed; servers crash; the design becomes ugly; and users flee. This could well happen to Flickr. Back up your photos now!

If that happens, what it tells us is that the culture of Flickr was always illusory — one built on personal ties rather than more lasting devotion to a cause. If so, the notion of exporting it to Yahoo was a delusion. That's the problem with turning a community into a commodity: Take away the people, and you have nothing left.

(Photo by martinalvarez)

With some perspective, the focus on Yahoo seems a bit strange: 1,500 lost jobs are not inconsiderable, but they pale in comparison to the 533,000 shed by the U.S. economy last month. And yet Yahoo's layoffs get all the buzz — 1,933 stories on Google News in the past 24 hours.

Why all the hullabaloo? It's partly because Yahoo's rise and fall has such an epic quality, making it a proxy for Silicon Valley's boom-and-bust cycle. And it's partly because Yahoo, even in its troubled state, has a place at the future of media — through sites like Flickr, the photo-sharing site which turns every person with a digital camera into a news photographer, and Yahoo Buzz, the headline-voting service which opens up the Yahoo homepage to news stories from the smallest of blogs.

It's precisely because Yahoo sits at the intersection of media and technology that it attracts such attention. Google and Microsoft seem content to wage a technological war based on who has the smartest programmers, the best algorithm, the most servers. Yahoo, meanwhile, sees a place for human beings in a future media landscape that is increasingly automated.

That's why the emotion that Yahoo attracts isn't anger, but sadness; not rage, but disappointment. Yahoo could be so much better than it is, if only it weren't saddled with visionless leaders, subpar management, and a do-nothing board. Ah, the irony: The best hope of humanity keeps getting tripped up by its people.

(Photo by cdye1)

Yahoo turns 15 next month. The site first went live, on a Stanford Unversity server, in January 1994. The years since fall neatly into two halves: the first, its dizzying rise from a campus trailer to $100 billion goliath; the second, its equally stupefying fall. Here's a recap of the past decade and a half.

1994


Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo create Jerry's Guide to the Web, a directory of links to websites, in January. In April, they rename it Yahoo.

1995
Yahoo incorporates in March. Sequoia Capital, a VC firm which invested in Apple and Cisco, buys in. In August, it starts selling ads. The Web is now a business.

1996
Yang and Filo appear on the cover of Wired; Yahoo goes public, beating most of its Web rivals to the punch. But the early stock offering also means Yang and Filo are now subject to the whims of shareholders. Yahoo Japan, a partly-owned subsidiary, launches.

1999


Yahoo spends billions of dollars on GeoCities and Broadcast.com, acquisitions that later prove a waste — save for turning Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban into a billionaire, allowing him to buy the Dallas Mavericks and become an ongoing source of entertainment.

2000
Yahoo's market cap peaks in January above $100 billion. The stock begins a long slide after the dotcom bubble pops. In June, it signs a deal to have Google provide its search results. In retrospect, this is where everything started to go wrong.

2001
After a three-month search, Yahoo hires Terry Semel, the former head of the Warner Bros. studio, as CEO.

2002
Yahoo announces plans to buys Inktomi, a search engine.

2003
Semel follows the Inktomi buy with Overture, which sells search advertising, in a strategy to beat Google.

2004
Yahoo hires Lloyd Braun, a former ABC executive, to run its media operations. Hilarity ensues, as Braun proves laughably unsuited to the job and the online medium, and Yahoo's push into Hollywood-style content production proves a flop.

2005


Yahoo has secret talks to buy Flickr, the photo-sharing site. That deal happens. Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Yahoo reaches the peak of its post-bubble influence — but the surge proves illusory.

2006
Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Lloyd Braun "quits."

2007
Microsoft has secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens. Semel resigns. Yang replaces him.

2008
In a phone call in late January, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bids $44.6 billion for the company — sort of. Semel quits the board that night. Yang and the board dither. In February, Yahoo lays off 1,000 employees. Microsoft eventually walks away. Corporate raider Carl Icahn buys shares, raises a stink, and gets three board seats. Yang steps down as CEO, pending a search for his replacement. In December, Yahoo lays off another 1,500 employees — 10 percent of its workforce. There's talk that Microsoft might be having secret talks to buy Yahoo. Nothing happens.

(Photo of Yang and Flickr's Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield by Ross Mayfield)

Of course not! Check out the unnecessary verbiage — all lowercase letters, as is Yang's too-lazy-for-the-shift-key wont — and the presumptuous empathizing, as Yang sends out a memo about the company's mass layoff of 1,500 employees. Is it any wonder that Yahoo's board has decided to fire Yang, too? He assumes its a "tough time" for all of his charges. It has never occurred to him that many Yahoos might cheer the company's shedding of deadwood — Yang included.

The memo:

yahoos,

today, most of our layoffs in the US are happening, and they've been underway in other regions around the world.

this is a tough time for all of us and i wanted to take a moment to reach out to you.

saying goodbye to colleagues and friends is never easy. they all are dedicated members of our yahoo! family, who worked beside us and shared our passion.

but as you all know, we must take actions to better perform in today's turbulent global economy. while we've found efficiencies in many parts of our business, laying off employees is unfortunately unavoidable. our difficult decision to let colleagues go reflects the changes we're having to make to better align costs with revenues - something businesses in virtually every sector are also having to do.

for those who are affected by these layoffs, i am extremely grateful for your contributions to yahoo!. we realize the impact this will have on you. that's why, consistent with our past practices, we're making every effort to support you with severance packages and other services.

the reductions we're making are very hard, but they are also very necessary - as we focus on the long-term health of our business. to those who are leaving us, i extend my heartfelt thanks on behalf of yahoos everywhere - you will be missed.

thanks,
jerry

Take this poignant goodbye message scrawled on a whiteboard. It speaks to a culture frozen in time — both the hang-loose Northern Californian waverider, and the frantic Web addict, reloading page after page over a 56-kbps modem. (Yahoo, in its early days, employed a large team of "surfers" who were paid to find new websites and add them to its directory.)

On Twitter and blogs, a fragmentary picture of Yahoo's agonizing cut — 10 percent of its workforce — is emerging. Already we've heard of entire offices closing, like Right Media, the New York online-advertising startup Yahoo bougth for $680 million just last year, and Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco-based incubator launched with such high hopes for spinning out new websites. Nothing memorable has issued from the Brickhouse, and real-estate agents have tromped through, suggesting the office in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood, the historic epicenter of the '90s dotcom wave, is being unloaded.

Even Flickr, once Yahoo's golden child, is feeling pain, with employees being axed and runaway spending on servers and bandwidth being reined in.

What else have you heard? If you work at Yahoo, or know someone who does, share your stories and pictures from the day. We'll publish the best later.