Hasta La Gadget!

It would have pretty tough for Yahoo to have had worse timing on this one–just a week out from Christmas. It’s a subject that Carol Bartz doesn’t really broach in her internal memo. Rather she chooses to focus on what the changes at the company mean for the coming year.

Bartz’s internal layoff memo surfaced this week, explaining away the recent four percent staff cut the company underwent. “You’ve heard me say before that I didn’t come to cut Yahoo! to greatness. That’s still true,” Bartz explains in the memo, going on to explain that the cuts were “about more than cost savings.”

Its not a particularly empathetic letter, but these things never are. Bartz tells her staff that “we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others.” The company is cutting “underperforming and non-core product,” to focus on stronger properties “like e-mail, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content, and more.” All in all, it’s sounding a bit reminiscent of the whole peanut butter thing from a few years back.

Bartz then shifts for “one last thing before I go,” a focus on the “growth” and “turnaround” the company is experiencing.

All in all, it’s a pretty bummer end for what’s been a pretty quite year from the once-dominant search company.