Yahoos fear loss of fun-loving culture

Yahoo Inc. employees fretted Friday that their fun-loving culture, summed up by early company ads featuring a cowboy yodel, could get quashed by the comparatively stodgy software behemoth that wants to gobble it up.

Everyone sees Microsoft as the big octopus from '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' that wants to swallow everybody up.

Yahoo definitely sees itself as different from other companies. On its site for prospective employees it says, "We believe humor is essential to success. We applaud irreverence and don't take ourselves too seriously. We celebrate achievement. We yodel."

But the company has been singing the blues lately.

The big question for many employees, however, was whether Yahoo's free-spirited, go-getting culture would be embraced by a decades-old tech giant. A lot of people feel like it would be a culture clash.

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