"He has been running the company for seven months, and the only major change he's made is a layoff," Enderle said. "He hasn't shown any creativity in terms of fixing the problems of the company. In fact, he seems to still be trying to figure out what they are."
Ali Diab, a former Yahoo executive who had worked on the company's search technology for four years, said the criticism wasn't fair.
"Yahoo acquired a lot of companies in the last five years," Diab said. "As a result, there were a lot of redundancies."
Yahoo's decision this week to cut 7% of its workforce will help streamline the company, which had grown slow and cumbersome in recent years, Diab said.
"Decisions were taking much longer than they should have for key areas, like search, maps and e-mail," he said. "As a result, we let Google get ahead of us."
By pruning back staff, Yang is "doing quite a bit to get people to focus on fewer things," Diab said. "He's returning Yahoo to the early days of being very entrepreneurial. That's a good thing."
alex.pham@latimes.com
jessica.guynn@latimes.com
