What Yahoo Employees Can Expect From Their New CFO

For all the coverage of Yahoo’s new CFO, there’s been little discussion of his track record at his last company — semiconductor firm Altera Corp. It can basically be summarized in three words: continuous cost cutting. And that could mean more restructuring on the way for Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) employees. At a tech conference held shortly after he took over as Altera’s CFO in 2007, Timothy Morse explained the philosophy that he internalized during 15 years at General Electric: “Growth companies and high-tech companies have traditionally been very successful in innovating the topline and finding new ways to grow; it hasn’t always been that balanced equation looking at capital and cost structure.”

To rectify that, he said he had assigned 130 employees to an “internal simplification” initiative. A year later, during a quarterly call in which he said that operating expenses had fallen 4 percent, he was asked whether there was room for even more cost cutting: “We