Among the thousands of workers Yahoo will reportedly lay off at the end of the month are those at Yahoo Research, writes Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily. With staff working at hubs around the country, this is Yahoo's central R&D organization. In the words of its own web page, it's "responsible for big inventions - our goals are nothing short of inventing the future of the Internet and creating the next generation of businesses for Yahoo! " As Lacy sniffs:

Yeah, why would you want those guys around when you can just get revenues by suing competitors? A source says Yahoo is firing at least the New York team of researchers and possibly the entire division. We haven’t been able to get solid confirmation on how wide reaching this is, but the New York team will definitely be out of a job by the end of the month, our source says. (Kara Swisher presaged some of this when she wrote about the head of Yahoo Labs heading to Google a few weeks ago.)

That head was Prabhakar Raghavan, who also oversaw Yahoo's strategy. What he'll be doing at Google isn't clear. (The company also recently lost SVP of Product Management Bill Shaughnessy.) As for the rest of the team, Google and Facebook are already on recruiting missions. Lacy says Mark Zuckerberg is personally trying to get them to land at Facebook. Lately Yahoo's been busy suing Facebook over patents covering, among other things, advertising and online user interaction. It's also been shopping around its advertising platform in an effort to trim costs. None of this sounds like the doings of a particularly focused company.