Yahoo! have just announced another round of job cuts. This is the third round in the past 15 months, although this is the smallest at only 675 jobs. Smaller services have been closed down and most of the job losses come from middle management. CEO Carol Bartz says they had one project manager for every three or so engineers and they had little to do.

The full news story can be found at the San Francisco Chronicle. This quotes Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research as saying that Yahoo Maps might be outsourced to another company. Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine disputes the logic behind this.

Yahoo! Maps is currently seeing a lot of competition and is not in a particularly strong position. The consumer market is dominated by MapQuest (the old stalwart but in decline) and Google Maps (who's market share is growing). The developer / site integration market is dominated by Google Maps and Virtual Earth who are currently in very active competition with each other.  I think Yahoo! Maps might have lost its chance. The future might be for it to be simply a "skin" around one of the competition.  Now, if Microsoft buy Yahoo...