Yahoo! hooks Adobe digital-media veteran

Yahoo! has reportedly hired an Adobe Systems veteran to head up its online applications.

Bryan Lamkin has been named senior vice president of applications products, apparently taking over the portfolio from Scott Dietzen, who joined Yahoo! with its $350m purchase of open-source email start-up Zimbra. Dietzen will become vice president of strategy.

It's not clear what Lamkin's mission will be at Yahoo!, but he does bring 14 years of product development, management, and marketing experience on some of Adobe's signature digital and media products. Lamkin worked on Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, and the Creative Suite as a whole.

He left Adobe in November 2008 after Adobe began grappling with the challenge that open source and online poses to closed-source, desktop software from companies such as Adobe.

Adobe has released a Photoshop.com for online photo sharing, editing, and hosting, and Acrobat.com to create and share PDFs. On open source, the company released its Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and released AIR for Linux, but while its SWF specs for Flash have been released to encourage implementations and expand development, the company has stopped short of actually opening the player.

Lamkin will be taking over Yahoo!'s Open Strategy to increase advertising and traffic for the company's mail, portal, music, and media sites. ®