Yahoo! is searching for growth on Google's Earth Blake Irving, the man in charge of Yahoo!'s products, resigned over the weekend. Last Wednesday the company announced plans to cut 2,000 staff, reportedly saving £236m. New chief executive Scott Thompson said of the job losses: "Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! - smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. Some would say it's too little, too late for a company that Microsoft tried to buy for more than $44bn in 2008. Think Equity analyst Ronald Josey said in an research note: "We are more focused on revenue growth, which has proven elusive and has declined every year since 2009 given increased competition and share losses in the domestic display market." Maybe Google has been lucky and just been in the right place at the right time. It certainly missed the tech bubble that popped so spectacularly in March 2000 - Google didn't float until four years later. But it's more than that. Google has a long tradition of staying ahead of the game and leaping on "the next big thing." In 2004 it bought Keyhole, which developed a product called Earth Viewer that gave a three-dimensional view of the Earth. This eventually morphed into the Google Street View application. In 2006 it bought YouTube, which as of January reportedly streams 4bn videos every day. Four years later Google released the Nexus One mobile phone, the latest version of which has seen sales of more than 20m and is considered a real rival to Apple's iPhone - thanks in part to Google's Andoid operating system. Where Google has speeded up, Yahoo! has struggled to log on. Yahoo! bought web hosting service Geocities for $3.57bn in stock in 1999 - 10 years later it was closed. Yahoo! Photos was shut down in 2007, in favour of integration with the much more popular Flickr. Go, a Java-based phone application with access to most of Yahoo! services, was closed in 2010. In the ultimate example of the contrasting fortunes of these two internet giants, from 2000 to 2004 Yahoo! actually used Google for search results. Now led by former PayPal president Thompson after a mixed two years under Carol Bartz, Yahoo! has been playing catch-up ever since. But the new chief has entered the fray during a legal battle with current internet darling Facebook over patent infringements. The legal spat is expected to last years. Thompson was only hired in January, and has wasted no time in enforcing his blueprint for a leaner company in this most digital of ages. "It may be the only way Thompson can effectively focus on the next generation of Yahoo!," Mr Josey said in his research note of the 2,000 job cuts. But swinging the axe may not be enough. It's easy to come in and cut heads. Profitability is no longer the issue with Yahoo!. You can't cut your way to revenue growth," BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said. Hedge fund Third Point, Yahoo's largest institutional shareholder, said it was disappointed that the layoffs occurred before the Thompson had "articulated his strategic plans for the company." Thompson reportedly plans to do exactly that at the meeting on Tuesday. Reuters stated that the reorganisation is likely to focus around the three main businesses that the chief executive cited in a memo to staff last week: "Core media and communications," "platforms" and "data." "The immediate next step for all of us is to get clear on our goals, and then take action and move," he reportedly said in the memo. As Yahoo! looks over its Silicon Valley fence with envy at its bigger, louder neighbour, that $44.6bn bid from Microsoft just four years ago must be one search that isn't "Googled" much by Thompson and his team.