October 25, 2009 by James Oliver
Struggling search engine Yahoo is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons after a suspect staff entertainment decision. The number two search engine has been accused of sexism by many commentators after arranging for a ‘performance’ from girls dressed in miniskirts and bras to take place at an internet engineers’ brainstorming meeting called Yahoo Hack Day.
The subsequent outcry has led to a public apology from Chris Yeh, the head of the Developer network…
“This incident is regrettable and we apologise to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again… Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose.”
As a company, Yahoo are not having a good time currently, they are haemorrhaging staff, making very little headway in their search marketing battle with Google and, despite the best efforts of new CEO Carol Bartz their share price continues to flounder. The last thing they need at this point is bad publicity of this sort.
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