Groans are issuing from the Googleplex over this year's holiday bonus. In the past, the search engine paid cash — as much as $20,000 or $30,000 per Googler, we hear. This year? A cell phone.

Two years after he left, the ghost of TV executive Lloyd Braun still haunts Yahoo. Which is why a report of lost perks in Yahoo's L.A. office turned into an evisceration of the ex-exec.

Google is throwing not one, not two, but three holiday parties for its New York employees this year. Such is the cash-flush search engine's definition of austerity.

"There should be no Business Group, Technology Group or Business Unit-funded holiday parties." That's the extra bullet through the heart in an email being sent around Cisco. I've screencapped only part of it, because I promised not to provide any pointers to my leaker. Here's the ASCII text version:

Prepare to die, entitled Conde Nasties! Conde has always had a well-deserved reputation as the most opulent and self-important of all magazine publishing companies. Those days are coming to an end. The (gender-neutral!) diva culture that spawned The Devil Wears Prada and a million young aspiring media people who…

The economic pain continues to trickle down: Cisco is cancelling a two-week sales conference planned for next August in San Francisco. Conferences like this are a combination of boot camp, old-fashioned tent revivals, and frat keggers, held to rev up a company's revenue generators; ostensibly meant to educate…

As recently as a year ago, Google was scrambling to get more office space in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. Now, just as swiftly, it's trying to offload it, putting 50,000 square feet up for sublet. The company has cut back on snacks in New York, as elsewhere — but real estate is a far more serious thing to trim.…

Call it Company (Red). Michael Dell is asking employees at his computer maker to take five unpaid days off and thus help the company trim costs instead of slashing jobs. Extorting your people by suggesting they take a small hit now as opposed to a larger hit later on isn't particularly original. “We’ve seen a slowdown…

Yahoo has spent millions on consulting fees with Bain & Co. to come up with cost-cutting schemes — bold ones like hiking cafeteria prices. A tipster blames President Sue Decker and CFO Blake Jorgensen for upping his lunch bill by three bucks:

In January, Yahoo launched Yahoo Live, "social TV, where you're the star!" Ten months later, Yahoo Live currently has 1,381 people watching 47 live channels. No surprise that Yahoo's going to pull the plug next month. Boilerplate bogosity by Yahoo techie Keith Thornhill: "Without all of you, Y!Live would not have…

A giant datacenter on 800 acres of land in Pryor, Oklahoma, won't start operating until 2010, Google spokesbots now say. The $600 million datacenter was supposed to open early next year, employing 100 people. Local and state officials had bent over backwards to attract Google to the site, even passing a law which made…

Is hogging elevators evil? RhymePhile is today's featured commenter for suggesting that Google's kitchen cutbacks could lessen the environmental impacts on fellow tenants of its New York office building:

Google's offices in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood are the latest to feel the pinch, with hours curtailed and snack service cut back, according to an internal memo. To understand what a shock to the system this is, remember how, when Google went public four years ago, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin swore they…

Food is at the center of Google's corporate culture, a sign of the company's Pollyanna worldview and the outsized financial success which enables this largesse. So why is Google is closing a café? Off The Grid, one of Google's 18 in-house eateries at its headquarters, abruptly shut its doors this week. Employees are…

Is Yahoo cutting 3,000 jobs? 3,500 jobs? 1,500 jobs? Fifteen percent of its operating budgets? We're going with "none of the above." What Yahoo management is really tackling are Yahoo's out-of-control salaries and titles. Yahoo, an insider tells us, has relatively narrow pay bands for specific job titles. That means…

Patrick Pichette had an easy time of things in his new job as Google's CFO with his first quarterly earnings announcement last week. Part of the surprise Google delivered for investors was an unusually tight grip on expenses. Googlers, now the fun really starts. In an interview with Canadian Business, Pichette hinted…

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.…

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…

Was Seth Sternberg, the CEO of Meebo, not in attendance at Sequoia Capital's recent summit for all of the venture capital firm's startups? In its now-famous "R.I.P. Good Times" presentation, Sequoia's partners scolded the entrepreneurs the firm has funded to cut all unnecessary costs. The online-chat startup's…