The golden parachute was not for those employees who had been laid off on 12 February 2008 such as myself. It was for those remaining employees should they lose their jobs in a Microsoft buyout.

Maybe Yahoo! should be less concerned with retaining the employees they have, particularly since some are leaping from what looks like a sinking ship, and checking into what those employees are doing and have been doing wrong.

According to the PC World article:

Reporting to President Sue Decker will be three new teams:

-- the Audience Products Division, which will oversee product strategy and product management and will be led by Ash Patel, former manager of Yahoo's Platforms & Infrastructure group;

-- the U.S. region, which will be led by Hilary Schneider, previously chief of the company's Global Partner Solutions group; and

-- Insights Strategy, which is in charge of centralizing and executing "a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo!," and the chief of which will be named later.

The new organizational structure will improve Yahoo's products and speed up decisions, the company said.

Apparently the customer-centric policies of June 2007 weren't so effective. I and every employee of Yahoo! did receive a purple card to remind us of our purpose in the house of purple. One one side it reads:

Our Purpose (in orange) Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers and publishers—all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust. YAHOO!

The other side reads:

OUR VALUES Excellence, Innovation, Customer Fixation, Teamwork, Community, Fun OUR BEHAVIORS Delight, Decide, Deliver, Act as One Yahoo!

I wonder how much time and money was spent on those little "Our Purpose" cards, made to fit on our lanyards along with our ID cards. Looking at this all now, it reminds me of that IBM commercial about "ideating."