Boomtown has a post speculating that Carol is taking the :bull by the horns” and charging hard to make changes. First up an earnings call that will surely be a bad report. In the NFL they talk about franchise players. In business and startups they talk about the management team. Here Yahoo has...

Earlier today Microsoft decided it would drop the bomb early by moving its second-quarter earnings conference call with Wall Street analysts to 8 a.m. PST, instead of 2:30 p.m. PST. Microsoft earlier reported a sharp decline in revenues and net income, as well as layoffs of up to 5,000 employees and...

Here is the full memo to employees from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured here) about the 5,000 layoffs and other cost cuts just announced, due to economic slowdown, which also resulted in weak financial results for the second quarter. It is not a happy missive, obviously. But tough times have a...

One of Yahoo’s top marketing execs, Eric Hadley, who came to the company with a lot of acclaim in only November, is set to leave for a new job working in branding and global marketing for Microsoft’s MSN online service, several sources said. Hadley had previously worked at Microsoft (MSF...

BoomTown’s been just one week gone and yet another goofy, traffic-generating debate “erupts” in the blogosphere, involving the usual suspects. (Hey, it’s Loïc Le Meur and Michael Arrington again, fresh from their equally meaningful Are-French-folks-lazy-or-what? debate!) Thi...

[UPDATE below.] Yesterday, the one-man-band of a tech blogger, Michael Arrington, let loose with yet another outrageously indignant diatribe–this time that he and his TechCrunch site would forthwith break all news embargoes. Not content with the traffic generated last week by his obviously fak...

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Yahoo and AOL were still chit-chatting about a possible deal–non-news, actually, given the pair have never stopped talking. Nonetheless, it set off yet another flurry of excitement on Wall Street that a deal to merge the two troubled Internet companies was im...

Here’s part of an internal memo BoomTown obtained about some small, but interesting, changes at Microsoft’s MSN unit, sent out by the GM of its Global Media Group, Greg Nelson, which is under the leadership of–well, frankly–a confusing panoply of execs. Essentially, Nelson no...

As BoomTown expected, the popularity of the chaste-yet-lustful vampire movie for screaming teen girls everywhere, “Twilight,” has inspired more online video spoofs than you can shake a braided rope of garlic at. Rabid fans of Stephenie Meyer’s book series flew into theaters all wee...

[Updated with new details about deal, including who worked on it and info on a cash component.] About three weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter ended several weeks of serious talks, in which Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock, which also included a cash component. Whi...