Every company changes. Along with changes come the effects on employee morale and drive to stay on board for the path a company takes. Instead of a nasty layoff, it appears Yahoo employees are packing their office up on their own and walking out the front door.

Yahoo, once the first search engine and directory on the Web, now faces some growing pains and they need to compete sell out against the likes of Google, AOL and MSN. The company is taking different directions, and can’t seem to choose which path is best to take. Perhaps it could be the arrogance of Jerry Yang or the overall drop in morale among tenured, established employees.

TechCrunch has published a list of potential Yahoo organizational changes and a list of those who have voluntarily turned in their badge. Yahoo is literally letting talent slip out the door as they aim to become a content portal on the Web.

Two notable employees who have punched out are:

  • Jeremy Zawodny, who was Yahoo’s technology evangelist who has recently joined Craigslist for his elitist experience at building scalable and useful technologies that are to be used by millions of Web users.
  • Joshua Schachter, who created del.icio.us and sold the property to Yahoo!; has no immediate future plans.

These are the two folks who have significant meaning to me, of course doesn’t include the dozens of executive staff who have already jumped ship. This phenomenon could be because of a failed Microsoft acquisition, it could because of a moral disagreement with Yahoo and Google holding hands (to dominate search), perhaps it’s because Yahoo has their inner fire, their motivation, their creativity.

Looks like they are planning to dump their logo, soon. It’s not like I haven’t seen that before. Trust me, any time there’s a significant logo change (colors, positioning, typeface), there will be major changes in a company’s corporate objective.

Again, I have respect for Yahoo, they already have a leg up on the competition and just need to improve on their consumer advocacy to take the cake. It wouldn’t hurt to let users opt-out of user-activity tracked advertising, (aka “Targeted advertising”).