Yahoo! deckchair! shuffle! filled! with! insight! and! clouds!

Microsoft shame unit tabled for now

By Ashlee Vance in Santa Clara • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 27th June 2008 01:15 GMT

Free whitepaper – PowerEdge M610 technical guidebook

Trying to become less of an organizational disaster, Yahoo! has shuffled around some executives and even formed a cloud computing division. "Take that, activist shareholders, we've got everything under control."

The people who brought you the botched Microsoft acquisition bid remain in charge. So, that's chief Yahoo! Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker still at the helm.

Yang and Decker's new plan of attack includes some bold moves like the creating of an "insight strategy team" and tweaks to the company's technology innards that will let it "optimize the use of data and improve coordination between product and engineering teams." Visionary stuff, right?

Yahoo! will also form an Audience Products Division which will lead the company's product strategy and product management. Ash Patel, the previous head of the Platforms and Infrastructure group, will lead this new division and report to Decker. A new group focused on US activities has been formed as well. It will be run by Hilary Schneider, the former chief of the Global Partner Solutions group. And that wicked Insights Strategy team will gain a fearless leader "within the next few weeks." A chicken and egg type of hiring problem, obviously.

The Technology organization led by CTO Ari Balogh will now work on "developing a world-class cloud computing and storage infrastructure; rewiring Yahoo! onto common platforms; and creating a stronger partnership between product and engineering teams." Which makes you wonder what Yahoo! has been trying to do to date.

Part of the Yahoo! rewiring will include the formation of a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group.

Add all of these moves together, and you can see how Yahoo! is addressing its core issue of making more money off a massive web property.

There was no word on the Pink Liberation Army's future. ®

Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer: 30-day free trial.