Summary: Both Yahoo! and Microsoft are having a hard time in search, but Yahoo! is a victim rather than incompetent

EVER SINCE Microsoft's hijack of Yahoo! began, many employees of Yahoo! quit or got sacked. Microsoft ruined this company. Now we discover that not only will Microsoft nick some of Yahoo!'s engineers (to work on Windows rather than something reliable like BSD and GNU/Linux) but it will also let many of them be fired. If it were not for the outsourcing of search, none of this would happen.

The company has cut an undisclosed number of jobs in its search team as part of a reorganization, Yahoo tells us.

[...]

Yahoo had said it would move at least 400 employees to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) as part of its search-ad deal with that company and had said there might ultimately be some layoffs as well—although Bartz’s comment seemed to contradict that. The layoffs were first reported by TechCrunch; please e-mail us if you have any details on how extensive they were.

According to another new report, Yahoo! might end up being sold off cheaply, based on the Microsoft partner which Icahn et al. ushered into the company's CEO position:

Seems unlikely—for one, Alibaba has said it plans to spend $200 million on acquisitions by 2012—not billions. But it’s worth noting that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said the company would “absolutely” entertain buyout offers—as long as they were at the “right price.”

Microsoft's plan was probably to just cannibalise what was easier to digest (not Google) and as part of its date with destiny Bong [sic] it has just been sued. That's right -- software patents!

A company called AlmondNet has filed a law suit against Microsoft alleging the software giant has infringed three patents related to advertising incorporated in Bing.

The mess which is Bong [sic] is losing a lot of money and on the face of it, Microsoft can no longer afford to actually pay people to use it. What an atrocity. After Microsoft gives up we might be left with no choice other than Google. Microsoft just killed Yahoo! search (which has some valuable/dangerous patents on search). ⬆