No More Layoffs? Yahoo!

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz spoke with a group of reporters following the company’s press conference, discussing the end of layoffs, the Microsoft deal, the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium and Yahoo!’s role in enterprise business, paidContent reported.

On layoffs:

We have no more layoffs; we’re done. That’s it.

On the deal with Microsoft:

Everybody wants what I call a “pre-Lehman deal.” They want the world. I was focused on three things from the Microsoft deal: I wanted ongoing revenue, which is important to funding our strategy; if I’d have gotten the money upfront, every $1 billion gives me $3 million in interest income. That’s it. Because I give half to Obama. So I get about half a million. I get half a percent interest. That’s $2.5 million. I don’t have a balance-sheet problem; I have a strong balance sheet. What I need is revenue so I spend money. So, with the Microsoft deal, I got revenue and my expenses covered.

On business enterprise and consumers:

I don’t think you have to choose which one should be the focus. (The enterprise and the consumer parts of Yahoo!) are two children and they both come to the dinner table. We couldn’t run the consumer business at its scale without getting money from the ad business. So the fact is, we have some of the biggest data centers in the world. We serve up more mail, more photos than any other company. But that is informed by people buying ads against those services. It’s not a separate focus.

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