In my experience, google loves outgoing links to authority sites. Google just doesn’t like mass link exchanges.
Google does love outgoing links to authority sites, but yahoo does not like this so much.
For a few months, one of my sites was sitting between positions 6 – 10 on both yahoo and google for the same keyword at the same time. I did that by having 2 or 3 outgoing links on the home page I was promoting, and by having lots of high pr sites pointing to that page.
Then I decided to do a little experiment and removed all outgoing links from that home page. I shot down many positions in google’s serps, but I shot up in yahoo’s serps. When I put those outgoing links back on my page + a few more, I shot back up in google’s serps and didn’t do as well in yahoo.
This is what leads me to believe that yahoo doesn’t like a site to have too many outgoing links, but google doesn’t mind. For me, 3 outgoing links was a good balance to keep both yahoo and google happy.