While it was predicted that Yahoo would have a layoff this month and yesterday I wrote Yahoo expects at least 1000 layoffs today (which happened.. exactly as I wrote it) the bigger story is not so much the layoffs, which after all were expected, but Jerry Yang's leadership, according to Adotas.  Jerry Yang has not turned out to be the same kind of "turn around leader/founder" as Steve Jobs has been for Apple.

"…Many industry insiders have been questioning the effectiveness of Yang and if he’s really the guy to get the job done at Yahoo. This is the eighth straight quarter Yahoo has experienced slowing profits and the three years of declining sales rates.

Since Yang came back on board at Yahoo, they have acquired Right Media, Blue Lithium and invested heavily into the world of mobile, and yet, executives have dropped like flies. Mr. Yang does not by nature come across as an extremely confident leader, but does have the years of experience that even the Google team would envy. At the Right Media Open conference in back in October Yang stated that “I do not see Yahoo as a troubled company, if you step outside of Silicon Valley and evaluate the impact of Yahoo it’s very successful and performing well.”

My sense the Internet environment has changed so much since the mid 90's that just being a founder does not translate to reviving a company.  I think someone who exudes confidence and vision is clearly felt by the onlookers – it's hard to lead a company up, out of a slump without really having it – founder or not.  

Was reading Occam’s Razor today, specifically Measuring Online Engagement: What Role Does Web Analytics Play? and Avanish says pretty much, that Web Analytics can't really tell you, without other measures, how engaged your visitors are in the generally accepted way most marketers view engagement; he distinguishes between kind of engagement and degree of it:

"…This means that both the lowest (apathy) and the highest degree of engagement need to be defined. The easiest way to do this is to define the average degree of engagement (the average score for several metrics of your choice across your site or based on a competitor-specific or industry-wide benchmark), considering everything that falls short of it as (increasing degrees of) apathy and everything beyond it as (increasing degrees of) engagement. In this way a customer’s degree of engagement assumes a non-relative meaning (it remains of course relative to your website’s, competitor’s or industry’s historical performance)."

"…

• Kind: Customers can be positively or negatively engaged with a company/product.

  A more in-depth examination of kind would reveal its content, usually a mixture of emotional states and rational beliefs, such as, in the case of positive engagement, sympathy, trust, pride, etc

• Degree: The degree of positive or negative engagement lies on a continuum that ranges from low involvement, namely, the psychological state of apathy, to high.

  An engaged person is someone with an above average involvement with his or her object of relatedness."

The way I'm reading his post, you can come up with a synthesis of metrics that might equate to degree of engagement but not type (positive or negative).

In a sign that Search Engines are not immune to Recession, Wired reports Yahoo Report Could Disappoint, Analysts Say Layoffs Likely:

"…"I expect [the company] to announce close to 1,000 layoffs. I can't tell you where [Yahoo] will cut from, but I can tell you what they're not going to touch: Mail, Instant Messenger, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Del.icio.us," says Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. "I think Yahoo, like eBay, is fatigued. They've got to get rid of the things that aren't working anymore. They're on a long journey, it could be another two to three years of turnaround."

That may not be Yahoo's only piece of bad news. The company is also expected to provide an update on its deal with AT&T, which is supposed to be renegotiated this spring. Under the current agreement, Yahoo receives fees per subscriber for providing premium web-based services to AT&T's broadband subscriber base. It's not clear how the talks are going, but Youssef Squali, an analyst with Jefferies & Co., thinks the company could lose $200 million to $250 million in access fees under a new agreement."

I wrote about possible Yahoo layoffs earlier this month and it seems inevitable now – I guess we'll find out how many employees are actually going to be fired later today – my guess is 800, let's see what's actually announced.