Techtree News Staff, Jun 24, 2008 1709 hrs IST
Blame the recent flight of top executives from Yahoo! on the advertising deal the company recently forged with arch rival Google.
Yahoo! is facing some real issues. Least of them being the recent flight of top executives from the company, all of whom seem to be scurrying for the exit door.
Blame it on the advertising deal the company recently forged with Google; Yahoo! will now sell advertisements online using none other than Google's presence online. A Yahoo! employee who wished to remain anonymous squarely placed the blame on the deal. He said, "With this deal, senior management in Yahoo! was unsure about their role/s in the company".
Significantly, the deal comes after Yahoo! famously spurned Microsoft's $47.5 offer of a buy-out. More recently, the latter even offered around $9 billion for a 16-percent stake in Yahoo! -- especially its search business. But Yahoo! seemed to favor a partnership with its arch-rival vis-a-vis penning any kind of deal with Microsoft.
Soon, it appeared the deal had claimed its first victim - Executive Vice President of the Network Division, Jeff Weiner, who quit Yahoo! a week ago to work at a venture capital firm.
Even as naysayers protested against the deal with Google, President Sue Decker announced a grand reorganization for centralizing Yahoo!'s mail, search, and homepage divisions. Decker maintained the deal was not about to dilute Yahoo!'s position in the Internet search market or compromise in any way its Panama search advertising system. On the contrary, it would bring in more cash off of less popular search items, she insisted.
Decker's claims notwithstanding, there was a flurry of top executives -- all within a week of Weiner's exit. On Friday, Russian search engine Yandex announced hiring Vish Makhijani as their new President and CEO of their San Francisco Bay Area Lab. Until last week, Makhijani was happily serving as Yahoo! Senior Vice President in charge of Search.
Brad Garlinghouse, hitherto in charge of Yahoo! Email and Instant Messaging, put in his papers too. Garlinghouse criticizes Yahoo! for its fuzzy policies in his document suggestively titled "Peanut Butter Manifesto".
In the past week or so, the company has lost many other top people: Qi Lu, Executive Vice President - Search and Advertising Technology; Usama Fayyad, Executive Vice President - Flickr; Stewart Butterfield; Caterina Fake; Jeremy Zawodny (Craigslist); and Joshua Schachter (Delicious). Nearly 114 executives have left Yahoo! since January this year, says noted tech blogger Michael Arrington. See for yourself here.
Exodus apart, shareholder confidence seems to have waned as well. On Thursday, Mark Nelson, partner in Mithras Capital which owns 1.7 million Yahoo! shares, urged Microsoft to take its most recent partial investment proposal directly to Yahoo! shareholders -- to prove its worth vis-a-vis the deal with Google.
A similar stunt was earlier pulled off by billionaire investor and Yahoo! shareholder Carl Icahn who threatened to oust Yahoo! Co-founder Jerry Yang and the existing Yahoo! Board for failing to re-consider Microsoft's take-over bid. However, Icahn is now said to have softened his stance as he has failed to garner sufficient support.
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Microsoft playing a big game behind the door
rahul | goa | 24/06/08 10:23 PM | Report abuse Reply