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Internet and Media, Internet

Abandon Ship! Yahoo Suffers From A Brain Drain


According to various tech blogs it seems that there are going to be some more senior executive running for the door over at Yahoo. The latest four scheduled to leave are: Delicious founder Joshua Schacter, senior search division VP Brad Garlinghouse, Vish Makhijani seniot VP in the Search division and Qi Lu a Search advertising technology VP.

This comes on the back of the departures of Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. With Wall Street taking another 3.3 percent bite out of Yahoo's value on Friday, the many departures come at a particularly awkward time for the embattled Web company. Google seems to be benefitting from the slow demise of it's one time search competitor, with an ever increasing share of the search segment, this despite the introduction of Google Ads to Yahoo's search, as a collaborative effort to boost revenues for both companies. Yahoo's stock closed down at $21.99 and has fallen 15 percent since the Google Ad's deal was announced and is well off $33 a share offered by Microsoft.

Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, stated earlier that a re-org was needed with all the product teams, but as to how far this will go, who can really say. On Monday, Jeff Weiner, former executive of Yahoo's network division, announced his departure, apparently to enter into the VC world. Whether this was part of the Decker 're-org' is pure speculation at this juncture.

"Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that's to be expected in the internet industry," a company statement said, optimistically.

All I can gather is that if the disgruntled, activist-investor, Carl Icahn, has his way with the proxy fight at the shareholder meeting on August 1st, it could be a clean sweep—all across the board—so to speak.