• Silicon Alley Insider, Friday, December 12, 2008 11:45 AM

An anonymous Yahoo manager who survived yesterday's layoffs sent Silicon Alley Insider her plan to change the company for the better."Yahoo is in need of a reboot," the manager said simply, just like a laptop that starts freezing or stops performing well. Useless software programs need to be deleted and the machine needs to be rebooted so it can start to run better.

However, where the analogy falls short is in the area of personnel, the people who power the machine. Lots of people have left or have now been forced to leave Yahoo, the manager notes. "As a company, Yahoo needs to see that it is not because these people lost value, it's because Yahoo lost value...literally and figuratively!"

Aside from losing real value (Yahoo's market cap now stands at around $17.5 billion), the manager says that too many "useless" directors and VPs remain at the company. As such, Yahoo, she says, is "almost the new AOL." Whereas AOL failed to see the growth of online advertising and stuck instead to its monthly fee model, Yahoo has failed to realize the value of the massive traffic it already has. Fixing this, she admits, is "not as simple as I make it sound but the battle is not over. We just have moron generals leading this battle." Ouch.

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