'No grand plan' for acquisitions says Yahoo!'s product director.(Stewart Butterfield)(Brief article)

Yahoo!'s director of product management and co-founder of photo-sharing site Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, has admitted that it has "no grand plan" for its acquisitions and that "partly, we're making it up as we go along".

Butterfield also said he agreed with a lot of things said in an internal memo penned by senior VP Brad Garlinghouse and leaked last week, arguing there was no clear leadership at the company and that it should cut 15% to 20% of its workforce.

The last two years have seen an aggressive acquisition strategy from Yahoo! in the social media space that started with the acquisition of Flickr in spring 2005. Since then it has bought widget …