Yahoo is constantly in a reorg hoping one day they might just stumble on the right structure and figure it out. The problem is, the people requiring the reorgs are the problems themselves. I know a senior level person that left Olivo's group, presumably and in part because he wouldn't reorg his part of the group — opting instead to stabilize morale and develop the talent already in place. Perhaps one reason he's a "well traveled Valley marketer" is because he's a mildly skilled manager and completely ineffective leader.

It's imperative that we set up for blurring of the lines between Portal and Search to drive experiences that enable more seamless exploration of content across the search-browse continuum.

Today, Microsoft made some major company changes in multiple divisions of their business. Some long time execs including Amir Majidimehr and others are affected and multiple divisions have been reorged. Lots of changes that will affect multiple product lines. I expect we'll see the changes announced shortly, if not tomorrow.

Rubash noted that, though the new job would have given him authority over Glaser's group, he believed life would be "more enjoyable and rewarding elsewhere." Wow. As unpleasant as Glaser is to work for, could she really be that unpleasant to have as an underling, too? Apparently. Rumor has is that former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel banned Glaser — like Semel, an air commuter from L.A. to Yahoo's Sunnyvale HQ — from the corporate jet.

"Revenue is down 10-15% in this group year over year," says one tipster, of the marketplace unit. As part of the reorganization, Weiner's getting most of those businesses back, except for Yahoo's job-listings site, HotJobs. But here's the rub. To do any moneymaking deals, Weiner's group will have to "partner" with Schneider. That's unlikely to go over well, given the clear rivalry between the two. So much for Decker's claims that the reorganization will speed decisionmaking.

Update on President Organization — CONFIDENTIAL and PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD.

Fellow Yahoo!s,

Over the past two months, Jerry and I and the rest of the management team have been taking a close look at our business - from top to bottom - and have been working hard to refine Yahoo!'s strategy and longer-term objectives. With that in mind, today I would like to tell you about a number of organizational changes that will help us achieve our goals to better serve our customers, accelerate the speed of making fast, smart decisions, and create cleaner lines of accountability across key leaders.

Building on the success that we have had in aligning our sales and distribution organizations around customers, rather than around advertising products like search and display, the two major changes we are announcing today are designed to take this to a higher level. They will also better align our resources and priorities focused on building key audiences.

First, we are placing responsibility for all of our "partners" - advertisers, agencies, resellers, publishers, ad networks, developers, or others — in a new division called, Global Partner Solutions (GPS), under the leadership of Hilary Schneider. This new group will be charged with creating, delivering and coordinating global best practices for solutions to all of our partners. Furthermore, this unit will have direct responsibility for our U.S. go-to-market efforts (i.e., sales, marketing and business development) across:

all ad formats, including search, display, video, mobile, listings, etc.
all online marketing objectives, including brand, performance, promotional, and
all customer types and sizes, including large enterprises, small online businesses, and local brick and mortar companies

Business development deals for Mobile and content the will continue to be led by Connected Life and the Yahoo! Network Division, respectively, and will work in close coordination with GPS.

Global Partner Solutions will be responsible for segmenting the business needs of our partners into actionable groups, understanding the needs of these segments and our ability to meet these needs, developing holistic business strategies to delight and surprise these segments, and executing on these strategies.

This approach will help us achieve faster, smarter decision-making and improved execution in support of better serving our customers. For example, we will be able to much more quickly identify and secure the ad inventory that best meets our advertisers' objectives and partner with advertisers that best meet our publishing partners' objectives as well as provide the most compelling experience to the vast audiences we reach.

Hilary is a strong executive with a tremendous track record of success - most recently in building the Yahoo! Publishing Network and spearheading the Newspaper Consortium deal - and I believe she is ideally suited to lead this effort.

The organizational changes that will accompany this change are to move Global Sales, the Online Channel, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, Corporate Partnerships and Hot Jobs under the single umbrella of Global Partner Solutions. Reporting to Hilary will be David Karnstedt - SVP, North American Sales; Jacki Kelley - VP, Sales Strategy; Dan Foehner - VP, Worldwide Sales Operations; Mark Rabe - VP, Cross Border Sales; Rich Riley - SVP, Online Channel Division; Todd Teresi - SVP, Yahoo! Publisher Network; Jim Schinella - SVP, Corporate Partnerships; and Jeff Kinder - SVP/GM, Hot Jobs.

As many of you know, Greg Coleman has been actively engaged in leading the integration of Yahoo!'s search and display ad sales teams and communicating the benefits of our more integrated capabilities to our major clients, who have been very receptive to this holistic approach. This integration is now well underway, and his leadership and expertise have helped enormously to effect a smooth transition. He and I have discussed for some time the need to further integrate Yahoo!'s capabilities in order to better support the needs of our key customer groups.

Therefore, with the decision to create this new Global Partner Solutions unit under Hilary's leadership, we mutually agreed that Greg would leave Yahoo! to pursue other opportunities. We are fortunate that he will continue to assist us in this transition through February, closely advising the team. We deeply appreciate Greg's contributions to Yahoo! over the past six and a half years, a period in which our advertising revenues have increased from $600 million a year to more than $6 billion, with substantial growth not only in the U.S. but in Europe, Asia and key emerging markets around the world. We wish him the best of luck in the years ahead.

The second major organizational change we are announcing today is that we are moving the properties in the Local Markets and Commerce Division (LMC), excluding HotJobs, from Hilary's organization into the Yahoo! Network Division under Jeff Weiner's strong leadership."As a key member of the executive team, Jeff has held a number of pivotal roles at Yahoo! including SVP of Search and Marketplaces where he oversaw a number of these properties. As a result, the transition to Network should be seamless. Jen Dulski will continue to lead Shopping, Travel, Auto, Real Estate and Local under Jeff and Anna Zornosa will continue to lead Personals. This move will drive further organizational alignment around our key audience properties and result in clearer accountability and faster, smarter decision-making and better integration overall. In addition, the engineering function will also moved to align with the product team and will report into Venkat Panchapakesan.

Also, in an effort to create better alignment with the core business units, we are moving Cammie Dunaway, CMO, and her Customer Experience organization to report to me.

As a result of these changes, my direct reports now include Hilary Schneider — EVP of Global Partner Solutions; Jeff Weiner - EVP of the Yahoo! Network Division; Marco Boerries - EVP, Connected Life; Toby Coppel - Head of Yahoo! Europe; Keith Nilsson - Head of Emerging Markets; Rose Tsou - Head of the Asia Region; a soon to be hired EVP — Marketing Products Division; Cammie Dunaway — CMO; Jeff McCombs - my Chief of Staff and VP, Business Management; and Greg Coleman (through February 2008).

I know there have been many changes at Yahoo! over the last few months, and I know that change is not always easy. But I greatly appreciate all of your patience, dedication and hard work. As we look to make Yahoo! the partner of choice for our customers and partners. I am confident that we are putting the right people in the right positions to focus on the right opportunities.

Congratulations to all.

Sue

the flickr staff rarely uses the central-admin backchannel. when they do, it is to coordinate the activities of running the "flickr central" group, a job that is mostly left to volunteers. ... that link was posted in the backchannel feb 12th. i checked the backchannel and to comment with the link currently has no comments from anyone, let alone flickr staff.

The post in question didn't even get replies until someone posted a link to your post, and even then, it's not exactly like we know anything you don't. ... As to Hawk getting "a lot of referral traffic" from us, I rather doubt it, seeing as we have a grand total of 30 members, many of which don't check the group that frequently.

I betcha Flickr keeps going more or less on the same path (always evolving, sure, but more or less the same) for a long, long time to come.

It's interesting to hear all the different perspectives on this. ... Very different from the inside, but it's mostly stuff I can't talk about. However, I can say that I'm really, really happy about all the recent changes. Valleywag has a lot wrong (just factually wrong, but it shows up in their interpretations) so I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it. All good! And in particular, all good for Flickr and it's future :)