SiliconBeat

Could it be that Yahoo is finding it harder to hire a new chief financial officer than it expected. Its current CFO, Blake Jorgensen (pictured) is still leaving, as the company announced Feb. 26 when he became one of the first casualties of the house cleaning done by the Internet company’s new chief executive Carol Bartz. Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo is shutting down its Briefcase tool that allows users to store files online and then access them from anywhere. We know because Yahoo sent a message to our Yahoo mail account telling us.

We will be officially closing Yahoo! Briefcase on Read the rest of this entry »

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At least four professors at the Wharton School of Business contributed to an article about the challenges faced by Yahoo’s new chief executive titled: “Carol Bartz’s Challenge at Yahoo: Choose a Path, Build a Team and Do It Fast”.

Don’t worry about a lot of deep academic analysis. Here’s a sample of what Wharton management professor Lawrence Hrebiniak had to say: Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo said today it has amended a controversial employee severance agreement it adopted last February less than two weeks after Microsoft made its unsolicited offer to buy the Internet giant, according to a regulatory filing. The severance program guaranteed a mix of cash and stock payments to all 13,800 Yahoo employees if they were fired or quit after being reassigned to a new job within two years after a Microsoft takeover.

The number of months of severance that were to be paid under the plan were called Read the rest of this entry »

Two  directors on Yahoo’s board traded in opposite directions earlier this month. Eric Hippeau, who has served as a Yahoo director since 1996, decided to rid himself of 40 percent of his Yahoo stock holdings Nov. 6, a day after Google dropped plans to enter an advertising deal with Yahoo, when he sold Read the rest of this entry »

Carl Icahn placed a bet on Advanced Micro Devices in the third quarter, acquiring 1.6 million shares of the Sunnyvale chip maker, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday in which his investment company, Icahn Capital, periodically details its holdings.

The stake was valued at Read the rest of this entry »

Nielsen Online released its U.S. search share rankings for August this morning. Depending on your point of view, the failure of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo may have been a blessing, at least in the short term. Yahoo Search handled 1.3 billion queries in August, down 16.5 percent year over year, and representing 18.1 percent of all search requests in August.

And Microsoft? Even worse, Read the rest of this entry »

California Attorney General Jerry Brown (pictured) is evidently reviewing company documents about Google ’s proposed partnership with Yahoo, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

The review was disclosed in a letter from Brown’s office to California Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican from El Cajon,  who asked Brown to start an antitrust investigation to determine whether the proposal is anticompetitive, according to the article. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another dispatch from Mercury News reporter Elise Ackerman, who has been covering the Yahoo saga for us. She’s been examining some materials related to the shareholder litigation brought about regarding Microsoft’s proposed takeover:

Now that the Yahoo shareholder meeting is over and Carl Icahn has been appointed to Yahoo’s board of directors he will be working to rescind severance plans adopted by the board’s compensation committee on February 12 , 2008.

According to a declaration filed in Delaware Court by John Fox, a veteran Silicon Valley employment attorney, the plans were highly unusual. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is it so difficult for Microsoft to compete with Google? Steve Ballmer tried to explain at the software giant’s annual analyst day up in Redmond on Thursday. (Thanks to our colleague Elise Ackerman, who covers Google and Yahoo for the Mercury News, for providing this to Docu-Drama.) Read the rest of this entry »