Yahoo On Strike In The Alps Over R&D Closure
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It doesn’t take much for a Frenchman to strike. And that’s what French Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) engineers did Wednesday, protesting - very publicly - Carol Bartz’s decision to close an R&D centre that only opened a year ago.
SEE ALSO: Yahoo Opens R&D In Grenoble; UK Too Expensive, Too Few Engineers?
The centre at Grenoble in the Alps had belonged to price comparison site Kelkoo but, when Yahoo off-loaded the site at a loss of more than €375 million last year, it turned the location in to what it said were its “key strategic priorities” of developing search (specifically, semantic search) and internationalising Yahoo Answers.
Yahoo already announced engineering 52 redundancies - most of them engineers - in January, but, by the time Bartz came in and outsourced search to Bing, that had risen to 78, with the closure of Grenoble. Curiously, some 60 engineer roles are due to be recreated in the U.S. and elsewhere in western Europe.
The Grenoble staff launched a blog site, Yahoo It Was You (hosted on Google’s Blogspot). The French government ministers who spoke warmly at the opening of the R&D site last year must feel pretty disappointed.
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