Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2006/12/06/yahoo_rejigs_three_divs/
Yahoo! restructures!
Says goodbye! to chief operating officer
Posted in On-Prem, 6th December 2006 09:59 GMT
Yahoo!'s chief operating officer Daniel Rosenweig and entertainment group head Lloyd Braun are both leaving the company.
Yahoo! is splitting into three segments to try and improve, and speed up, decision making. The new divisions will be an audience division, advertiser and publisher group, and technology team. The appointments are effective from 1 January, but Rosenweig will leave in March next year to ensure a smooth handover.
The audience division will aim to increase the number of people using Yahoo! services. The company is still looking for someone to run that division.
An advertiser and publisher group will look for ways to improve how Yahoo! sells ads to agencies and big advertisers. This division will be run by Susan Decker who has been Yahoo!'s chief financial officer since 2000. She will continue to act as CFO until a replacement can be found and is presumably being considered for the top job when Semel leaves.
Finally, there will be a technology division run by current CIO Farzed Nazem. It will carry on supporting the whole group but will also be responsible for "Project Panama" - the company's new advertising platform.
Yahoo! chief executive officer Terry Semel said: "We're putting the right people in the right places to execute our focused growth strategy. Yahoo! has an extraordinarily skilled and experienced group of senior executives, and we're adding outside senior talent to this already strong team."
Yahoo! has long been criticised for failing to make enough money from its huge audience and from not buying into Bubble 2.0 companies such as Facebook and MySpace. A recent leaked memo said the company was spreading its peanut butter too thinly - offering too many services and a lack of focus.
The company hopes to complete the reorganisation by the end of the first quarter of 2007.
Yahoo!'s press release is here. ®