Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang opened the Q407 earnings call with a kind of “remain calm” statement—making good progress, confident we’re headed in the right direction, efforts are beginning to pay off—and a reminder that the company is “making profound fundamental changes.”

Job cuts: Yang promises a “strategic workforce realignment” by mid-February. Yang stressed his belief that now is the time for investment and said rather than across-the-board reductions, Yahoo will focus on targeted reductions alongside targeted investments; the plan includes eliminating “redundancies in bureaucracy” and redeploying talent. (In other words, a surgical strike instead of carpetbombing.) This isn’t the dramatic announcement some people predicted or wanted. No number provided although more details could come in the finance portion of the call. (Looking at one of the slides, Yahoo finished 2007 with 14.300 employees, up 700 over the previous quarter and 2,900 over Q406.

Investment priorities: Yahoo is investing in its advertising platform, continuing with an emphasis on building internally supplemented by acquisitions Right Media and BlueLithium. Yang: “With portions slated to be launched in the back half of the year, it’s our goal to accelerate our overall advertising revenue growth by the time we exit 2008.” The second priority is improving Yahoo’s starting points—Front Page, My Yahoo, Mail, Search and Mobile—and the parts of the site that feed them—News, Sports and Finance. And, Yahoo has decided to forego income now to restructure its broadband partnerships. (Not sure how much of the timing was up to Yahoo.) Lots more in the extended entry…

Sue Decker: The Yahoo president wants to remind people that the company already has pruned or outsourced a number of services. She reeled off a list including Photos, 360, Brand Universe, Premium Music, Podcasts, Directory, and Voice, among others. “We’ve also decentralized marketing, consolidated our video development, aggregated lifestyle resources and moved the Answers development to Europe to better optimize resources. You’ll see more of this in the future.”

Yahoo Music: Notice in that list the mention of dropping Premium Music. Decker casually made official what we have expected for a while: Yahoo’s premium music service—still being pitched on the site—is toast. Safe to say making this public this way caught some people in Yahoo off guard.

-- Decker wants listeners to pay more attention to the internal metrics being shared than the ones published by services like comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). “Our internal logs show that the metrics we’ve discussed with you in the past, such as uniques and page views, continue to grow in the double-digits in Q4 with unique users now topping 500 million and page views about 4 billion per day.” Yahoo will use visits to its global starting points and anchor sites as its main metrics going forward. “Our goal is to grow visits to key Yahoo! starting points and properties by approximately 15 percent per year over the next several years.”

-- Third-party ad sales started earlier than expected with Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) and some of the newspaper partners.

-- A lot of granularity but one thing sticks: Decker wants people to hang on for yet another year, predicting improved results in 2009. This might work in some cases but given the number of times people have heard one more quarter or one more year in Yahoo calls over the past couple of years, it’s a tough message to get across and to have accepted.  It’s a bit like a sports franchise that keeps calling the next season “a rebuilding year.” Part of this stems from the costs of restructuring various deals towards an ad model. Yang said he believes the company can reach double-digit growth again by the end of 2008 and into 2009. 

CFO Blake Jorgensen: The detail man finally puts a number on the job cuts: 1,000 by mid-February and a Q108 charge of $20-25 million. (This is one of the things that makes people crazy about Yahoo: why not give the number right off the bat?)

-- As for the broadband restructuring, Jorgensen said the market clearly has moved to an atmosphere where ad-supported is preferred and that the restructured deals with AT&T (NYSE: T) and Rogers “will create better value for Yahoo over the life of the partnerships.”

Q&A: Decker takes a second to clarify the slower growth rate predictions, reminding us that it’s due to the restructured broadband deal, not display advertising.

-- Not the same as 2007: Yang: “I wouldn’t have characterized it as the same as ‘07 where it was a transformation year, meaning that we’re not going to see stuff. I do think you are going to see progress along all of these fronts in the first half of the year; it’s just that the platform pieces will kick in in the back half.”

-- Jorgensen said he couldn’t provide exact details about investments :"you can assume that it’s hundreds of millions of dollars.” Decker emphasized that investments are being made in the areas where they can build inventory as well as monetize it. 

Gluttons for detail can catch the call replay or the transcript at SeekingAlpha.com.