Yesterday we reported that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division, had submitted his resignation. Now we are hearing of two more prominent departures from the beleaguered company.
NYT Bits is reporting the departure of Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and EVP of research and strategic data solutions, which is expected to be officially announced later today. According to the report, Fayyad has been “in charge of mining the terabytes of data collected by the company to improve things like the targeting of ads and content to Yahoo users.”
Veteran developer Jeremy Zawodny also has announced on his blog that he will turn in his purple badge within the next few weeks. Zawodny has been with Yahoo since 1999, helping to spearhead important projects like the Yahoo Developer Network.
This has not been a good day for Yahoo. Its stock has plummeted since the news of its expected joint announcement with Google and unraveling of talks with Microosft broke earlier.
Nor has it been a good year for Yahoo’s HR. In February alone, Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo’s advanced technology division; Salim Ismail, head of Yahoo Brickhouse; and Jeff Bonforte, VP of social search, departed amidst broader layoffs. Then in early April, VP of Yahoo Music Ian Rogers resigned as well to join a stealth startup.
Update: Senior Director of International Business and Product Management Matthew Berardo is also leaving for LiveJournal to fill the positions of vice president and general manager.
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This is not a good sign for yahoo!!
The badnews just keeps coming for yahoo.
They need to lose about 2000 more, and not just the tekkies but the advertising parasites too. Slim the place down Jerry. Get things manageable. Then build up again. A, B, C. Sheesh.
Wow, this ship is sinking faster than I thought. Are users running away as fast as executives ?
Yahoo is in major trouble. Internet companies rely on the intellectual capital of their employees to create value and they’re losing value fast. Google’s going to be able to buy them out for half what Microsoft was offering!
Google acquiring Yahoo would never get regulatory aproval
Clearly 99% of the people who read Techcrunch couldn’t identify technology value if it hit them in the face.
Yahoo is going to be just fine. All they need is a little more time to recover from that Hollywood idiot Terry Semel.
But about your phony marketing position at docomwhipsaws.com… please see your manager in the HR office at 4:30 PM.
I alway think these moves are personal. Jerry just doesn’t like MS
Too bad this didn’t happen on the weekend. I miss the stimulation from past Yahoo/MSFT shenanigans
OK, that ticker is seriously outdated.
Decker is in WAY over her head.
Yang, engineers make horrible CEO’s
BUT, they will still get paychecks and those cheap stock options.
Poor shareholders.
Somehwere out there is a class action lawyer setting up a phone bank.
I, for one, would love to see Google acquire Yahoo. The synergy, opportunity of just such a pipe dream would be enormous.
@MikeM
Engineers make up the VAST majority of successful CEOs in Silicon Valley, and far outweigh in successful ventures and net worth of the stroking marketers, lawyers, and accountants that were imported from New England, idiot.
You can actually see the Yahoo revisions of logos by playing with the logo filename y3.gif y2.gif y1.gif
Here’s a pic showing the revisions that I’ve found http://www.simplebucket.com/p/mdi4ntu
Nooooo, not Zawodny!
But seriously, that’s a cool name.
This blog seems to be undergoing a yahoo inundation, and it’s kind of funny to read this post, then look above it and see a banner ad thats says, yahoo “we’re hiring!”
; )
If the data was worthless and the technology was not worth evangelizing that could also cause the heads of data and technical evangelism respectively to leave.
Maybe the outside world realizes that Brad is a total do nothing hollow leader…and therefore the only reason he’s still at Y! is because nobody wants his sorry ass. Y! leadership is truly becoming a ship of fools
Oh BTW, for Wenda having been “pushed” out, she sure seems to be doing quite nicely post Y!
This may just be a brilliant scheme by someone at Yahoo!–This logo only comes up once and a while, so now they have lots of people going to their homepage, hitting refresh over and over. That’ll inflate their pageviews statistic.
Whoops, the above comment was to the wrong Yahoo! related story. Lots of Yahoo! new today.
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jeremy-zawodny
The link to his blog is incorrect.
This is going to be an epic shareholder lawsuit.
How could Yang have miscalculated so badly?
From reading the comments, it appears unthinkable that the people who are leaving are doing so because they don’t want to remain independent. That is, maybe these are the insiders who wanted the M$ deal to happen and now they’re taking their balls and going home.
Zawodny - Chief Technology Evangelist? Wha??? No wonder Yahoo! is having troubles. With titles like these I doubt there are any hardcore business people in the place. I could double Yahoo!s value in a year and triple it in two.
Actually I am watching the Stock! Lets see what is next
@23: Zawodny is a genius. Not giving him his proper respect is a sign of massive ignorance.
Y! is still the most visited website, and still the #1 mail platform and #2 search. Their users aren’t going away, and are in fact among the most loyal. In the same way that MySpace destroys Facebook is usage but no one ever talks about it because of the demographic differences between TC and real life, so too goes Y! and their traffic. They’ll be just fine.
Sure alot of Jedi got killed when the Emperor executed Order 66, but we all know how that story ended eventually.
What a coincidence Fayyad and Zawodny are the names of my 2 cats.
Corporate consolidation at its finest baby… reminds me of the 80s! This might be a good and necessary thing for yahoo, to slim down its workforce, re-align, and go for it again. http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog
Yahoo is a dead bird, what a shame
Fayyad, maybe, but Jeremy Zawodny is famous just because he’s a smart-assed blogger. In his case an 8 year stay at his vague, worker bee job just indicates what a minor player he is.
@Hater
Y! Front Page is having a tough year. If you track their advertisers, and I do, you will notice that this year they have already had a day or two go unsold - that is to say not making the $1MM/day the expect. Also you will notice that some big advertisers are gone - GM for example. And they have also had several split days and days with lower paying advertisers. Y! Front page is having issues and is close to being overtaken in daily visitors by Google
Y! Mail is the biggest free mail program - that’s correct. But Y!’s failure to figure out AJAX on mail and a very slow service is starting to catch up with them
Y! may isn’t going to shutter anytime soon but they will certainly be a shell of their former greatness. And I blame that squarely on the Yang, Decker and the stooges like Brad Garlinghouse - a bunch of do nothing, no risk taking, non innovative mis managers.
“Zawodny is a genius.” LOL
Yahoo is a dead bird, what a shame
Wow! Yahoo is in trouble now.
meanwhile, google had 20 exec departures in same time…these companies are big and average tenures are 2.5 years in valley….with no soaring stock holding on to folks…they look…bad story-stop whining people