Yahoo's Semel Says No Layoffs, Sort Of

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel blasts some of the rumors out there about Yahoo, including reports (by us) of layoffs, that he was leaving and that Dan Rosensweig and Susan Decker were taking a joint role to lead the company until a replacement was found. Semel also says he welcomed the Garlinghouse memo – something we find hard to believe.

He says “They talk about laying off 15-20% of our workforce. That’s not at all the case.”

Just to be clear, these rumors are coming directly from multiple senior level Yahoo employees. What’s being said: Until a day or two before the announcements the other day, the plan was for Rosensweig and Decker to jointly run the company, but that Rosensweig ultimately felt that it was a demotion from his current COO role, and that Decker would end up getting all the credit for the inevitable bump in revenue that will come from the upcoming Panama release. We are also hearing that layoffs are coming, but that Yahoo decided to hold off until after the holidays.

This may be accurate or not, but Semel needs to convince his own lieutenants that this is the case, not bloggers. It seems that the only publication that was pre-notified of the announcements was the Wall Street Journal. The rest of the world was left scrambling, and talking to their internal contacts, to try to figure out what was going on.