Yahoo's earnings announcement was ghastly in two ways. The bad news: Its revenues were flat and earnings down 64 percent. The worse news: It is only cutting 10 percent of its workforce, or 1,500 employees, which will reduce expenses by $400 million. The cuts are not nearly deep enough. Yahoo is forgoing immediate pain for a prolonged period of uncertainty, as investors continue to abandon the stock and employees expect further layoffs down the road.

We haven't yet heard who will be the entertainment at Yahoo's Christmas party, scheduled for December 6, four days before the company proceeds with mass layoffs. Yet again, it's being held at a convention center by a racetrack — this year, with a Vegas theme. 2007's party featured a Neil Diamond cover band. For this year, how about Money For Nothing, the Dire Straits tributaries? We're sure they're cheap. Good thing, because a tipster familiar with Yahoo's budget says the company will spend $8 million to $10 million this year on holiday parties alone.Not just the bash in San Mateo, but also festivities for Yahoo's offices in Los Angeles, New York, and around the world. Oh, and more for the divisions. "Each department below Jerry has a party, so you end up going to at least four parties, all for the same company," says our source. For Yahoo, this is just business as usual. "The company leadership is in denial and there are parties every week," our source continues. If a Hollywood producer were to order up a company born out of California's touchy-feely, you're-okay-I'm-okay self-esteem movement, Dreamtown's best screenwriters would be hard pressed to come up with a more risible example than Yahoo, a company devoted to celebrating itself, at the expense of doing anything worth celebrating. Yahoos may not be doing OC-80, but they're addicted to fun for fun's sake — conveniently paid by shareholders. Bread and circuses; but four days after the circus is over, many Yahoos will lose their bread. (Photo by isaacschlueter)

"Yahoo will almost certainly fire too few employees when it announces its mass layoffs this week," predicts Henry Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to. Henry's got a bunch of charts you can look at, or you can read his kicker: "What's the smart amount of spending decline to plan for? We think about 10 percent next year and slightly more in 2010. We would also plan on the decline lasting at least two years."

The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker is a handy reference tool for checking who has or hasn't done the mandatory 20% staff reduction this month. Like CrunchBase, it's a handy resource for looking up baseball stats on Web 2.0 team owners, to predict who may or may not catch the ball this time. (I saw W over the weekend. Bear with me.) What's missing from the Layoff Tracker?Stories. Companies now submit canned layoff rumors to TechCrunch, Valleywag and other sites. They hope to control the story, the way W's pimple-faced speechwriters leaked Bush's "Axis of Evil" text to their moles at the big newspapers. Look at the Source column on TechCrunch's list. Source: TechCrunch. Source: TechCrunch. Source: TechCrunch. Do you think Iron Mike Arrington is hiding behind the potted plants in your office? I hope he makes good on that threat to buy Fucked Company, so he can report Web 2.0 both coming and going.

Heavy, one of 400-some online-advertising networks competing to broker banners in a pale imitation of Google, has laid off 14 of its 71 employees. Layoffs and attrition have reduced its staff by almost half since June. [Silicon Alley Insider]

The market gyrations of recent weeks has nearly doubled traffic to financial websites. Bad news elsewhere should be good news for them, right? Wrong. Their most profitable advertising is sold in advance; neither publishers nor advertisers can anticipate swings in traffic, so the bumper crop of pageviews doesn't mean a windfall in ad sales. As Hamilton Nolan notes in Gawker, this is a good time for new sites like the Business Sheet and Big Money to attract readers — but a lousy one for them to build their own business.

"One of the reasons this is so difficult is simply because the business continues grow," mistypes Rich Barton, CEO of Seattle-based online real-estate startup Zillow. Following the current fad, the company axed 25 percent of roughly 150 employees. Barton's layoff blog post sticks to the formula: I'm sad, this is hard, but business is just fucking great! But I'm sad. The End. I prefer Barton's personal profile on Zillow: "I love houses (I've owned close to 10)." So he feels your pain.

Not even the biz reporters we reblog have much to say about Pandora laying off 20 of its 140 employees. Last month, founder Tim Westergren had sent out warning signals that online music royalties could be a problem. Cutting 14.2 percent of staff this week, though, seems more pro forma than panic. Westergren's "A Sad Day" bears no news, but serves as an intriguing template of that new writing genre, the layoff blog post. Spot the patterns:

Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Hornik's invite-only dealmaking conference, The Lobby, takes place again next week at a plush resort in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island of Hawaii. Camp Cyprus was nothing compared to this funeral pyre of cash. Who cares that twentysomethings spent their own money to vacation with friends, and filmed an over-the-top video of their frolics? Hornik's hoedown is the ultimate marker of what-me-worry excess in an age of recession. And Valleywag has the complete list of who's going.Here's what should enrage you as you read it: Unlike the Cyprus trip, this one is ostensibly a work event, paid for by investors and shareholders. (I suppose a handful of entrepreneurs may have bought their own tickets, but in the hopes of paying themselves back by scoring an investment.) What's the agenda for this passel of languorous corporate dealmakers, ebullient entrepreneurs, and phlegmatic venture capitalists? They party. You pay. Later on, they consummate some deals with their pals that they would have struck anyway, crediting the boondoggle junket for "making the connection." Last year's event was an epic caper, marked by drink-throwing, late-night excursions, and salacious rumors of barside canoodling. Here's whose exploits we're looking forward to reporting, thanks to the moles we've placed throughout Hornik's guest list:

"Visual search engine" company SearchMe had, according to CrunchBase, 52 employees and $43.6 million in funding, led by Sequoia Capital. Just two weeks ago, TechCrunch ranked the company No. 76 in "Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn." But VentureBeat confirms the company has fired 20 percent of its staff. Using the ad-hoc Sequoia formula, "you need a year of cash and a revenue model," here's my guess: Too much spending. And it doesn't help that the first demo I clicked on the site's front door broke Firefox.

When will Yahoos get real? The global economy is seizing up. Management is planning layoffs in the thousands. The stock sank below $12 this week, with only the prospect of a takeover lifting it. BusinessWeek, we're told, is preparing a devastating story on CEO Jerry Yang, calling for the board to fire him. Yet the mood at the Sunnyvale headquarters is perversely sunny. Thursday, Yahoo spent some of its shareholders' money to hire the Elvis impersonator pictured here. This is the sickness of Yahoo's purple-with-pride culture: It has emphasized self-celebration at the expense of having something to celebrate. "Funness" is prized above all — above excellence, focus, and achievement.

Is Yahoo cutting 3,000-plus jobs? A source inside the company says plans have been set to slash 3,500 jobs on December 10. And, briefly, Fortune's Techland blog agreed, reporting that Bain & Co. had recommended Yahoo cut 3,000 of its 15,000 employees. The Fortune post has been unpublished, though it still appears in Google News. I've called the writers to ask what happened to the story. Here's the excerpt which ran on Google News:

They were supposed to transform the financial landscape: Prosper.com, Zopa, Lending Club, and other peer-to-peer lending startups brokered loans from one Internet user to another. But they are now on the ropes. Another victim of the credit crisis? No. What's killing the nascent business of peer-to-peer usury is a lack of forethought.Lending is heavily regulated; why should Internet lending be any different? State and federal regulators, including the Securities & Exchange Commission, are looking into the business, and Prosper, the largest of the pack, stopped taking money for loans from individuals yesterday while the rules get sorted out. (It's still trying to lend to borrowers through more traditional sources of financing.) This much is true: Worsening credit among consumers makes it harder to find profitable borrowers to match up with lenders. But these companies should have sorted out their legal situation long before the market went into crisis.

Some Valley investors succeed by spotting good ideas and nurturing them. Some succeed through utter ruthlessness. In that latter category lies Sequoia Capital, the investor behind Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google. Skyrider, a file-sharing startup which had raised $25 million or more in venture capital, has shut down, according to VentureBeat. Startups fail all the time. But Skyrider was backed by Sequoia — and Sequoia, which zealously guards its reputation, rarely lets startups die so visibly. Skyrider was started as an ad-supported file-sharing service; its homepage suggested it was shifting into content distribution. But BitTorrent, a far better known name in file sharing, has struggled to crack that market. What's telling about Skyrider's failure:Sequoia, which recently summoned the CEOs of startups it invests in to an emergency meeting and told them to cut costs, is doing the same with its own portfolio. Rather than continuing to invest in the losers, it's culling the herd now. This despite the fact it just raised $1.7 billion in new funds — money that's destined for new ideas, not old ones. AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins, my old boss at the Red Herring, has a trenchant analysis of Sequoia's message to entrepreneurs, disguised only thinly as satire. His point, as a longtime observer of Sequoia, is that the venture capital firm's sudden panic is as much about its partners' losing face in front of their investors — the endowments, pension funds, and wealthy individuals from which they raise funds. Appearances matter, now more than ever. And if keeping up appearances means dropping a company? Sequoia's newly hungry partners will do it in a heartbeat.

A tipster tells us that Yahoo plans to cut 3,500 jobs, chiefly in sales and finance, on December 10 — while keeping plans for a multimillion-dollar holiday party days before the cuts:

Elon Musk, the Tesla Motors investor who has freshly installed himself as the electric automaker's CEO, has explained his management coup and the company's pending layoffs in a blog post. Tesla's $47 million engineering center outside Detroit, near the automotive industry's biggest pool of technical brains? Gone. Tesla's much-anticipated Model S sedan? Delayed until the middle of 2011, at best; the company is ceasing all real activity that would lead to a car getting built. The $109,000 Roadsters customers have ordered? "I personally stand behind delivering a product that you will love," writes Musk. Musk has not yet enumerated how many of Tesla's employees will lose their jobs.

The Wall Street Journal snagged a copy of an email sent around the world's fourth-largest enterprise software company. I'm impressed that a firm with 50,000 employees and two CEOs managed to restrict its leaks to the Journal. Here's the raw email reconstructed from the Journal's blog post, which spends too much time framing and excerpting the missive. Notice how the story gets the awful irony out of the way first — SAP is freezing its own IT spending — then spells out a three-pronged plan that never once says "layoff."

There's a thin line between "cheerleader" and "liar." And Cisco CEO John Chambers likes to wave his pom-poms over it. Speaking at a Gartner conference, Chambers said the company wasn't planning any cutbacks, commenter sample032 noticed. On Monday, Cisco filed papers to start a mass layoff of 129 employees in its Richardson, Texas facility. Not technically a lie, a Cisco spokesman maintained to the San Francisco Business Times, because the company "continuously evaluates its businesses to align human and capital resources to address key growth opportunities and improve efficiency." The new euphemism for "layoffs" is "business as usual."

Where's the debt crisis in Silicon Valley? The knock-on effects are all too real, but frozen credit markets have had little direct effect on business operations, aside from possibly scotching the debt-fueled sales of Alltel and Nextel. That's because technology companies are run by paranoid sorts who like to keep large cash reserves, in case some upstart renders their market obsolete. In good times, activist shareholders whinged about their parsimonious habits, but the cash hoarders are now sitting pretty — and could be set for acquisition binges.One company which listened, to its detriment, to shareholders was Microsoft. When Bill Gates ran the software company, he liked to keep a year's worth of expenses on hand, in case things went awry. Microsoft is no longer quite so stingy with its cash; it dribbles some out in dividends, and gave shareholders a $32 billion payout a few years back. Good thing it didn't shell out $44 billion for Yahoo; that deal would have left it cash-poor and debt-ridden, at exactly the wrong time. Even so, Microsoft's balance sheet is no longer the most sterling in tech. So who's got cash on hand? Here are the 10 richest tech companies, from a Yahoo Finance screening. (I left out companies, like IBM, whose cash was matched by equally outsized debts.)

In our inbox, rumor of a staggering blow to one of Silicon Valley's new growth industries: Tesla Motors, a tipster tells us, is laying off 100 people, about half of its staff. CEO Ze'ev Drori is also leaving, he claims. Update: Tesla VP Darryl Siry called Wednesday morning to tell us that the number our tipster supplied is "exaggerated" and that the company is "refocusing" to get through "a tough nine months." Sad: A few years ago, electric-car enthusiasts talked up the Valley as the new Detroit, home to a vibrant new automotive economy. Last month, Tesla had set plans for a $250 million electric-car factory in San Jose, along with a new headquarters.But autos are an expensive business, thoroughly dependent on free-flowing credit for their manufacture and sale. Tesla's high-end electrics, a status symbol in good times, now seem excessive; who wants to drive a $109,000 car into a half-empty parking lot? Siry says that the company's moves aren't driven by demand, which remains healthy.