We’ve just learned that Scott Dietzen, VP Applications at Yahoo who worked on key products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra, has left the company. The surprising news comes on the same day the Sunnyvale company is announcing its not-too-bad yet not-excellent-either third quarter earnings.
Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. He reported to Bryan Lamkin, the SVP of Applications who oversees the global strategy, development and performance for the products cited above.
Before Zimbra, the TechFellow Award winner was CTO of BEA Systems (now an Oracle company) where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family.
So what’s next for him? Well for one thing he will be joining the Board of Directors of rPath, a venture-backed startup that develops solutions companies can use to automate application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The company has posted a Q&A with Dietzen on its website which confirms the rumors of him having left Yahoo.
In the interview, Dietzen says he’s not thinking about what’s next yet, and that he considers himself to be on an open-ended sabbatical for now. He says he wants to ‘disconnect’ for a while to regain some work/life balance and spend more time with his family until he moves on to other things, which will most likely be a startup rather than a large corporation.
Another loss for Yahoo at the senior executive level, and a major one it is.
Not surprised. It is hard, even for companies like Google & Facebook, to hold on to talent for more than a couple years after an acquisition. Heck, one of the members of the FriendFeed team just left Facebook a couple days ago.
Best of luck to both parties.
Flickr has the worst UI in all the land. What the hell is up with having 2 small Slideshow images to choose from and requiring a Page Reload to see the next image?
Seriously!!! How can this site still suck soo bad with so many users.
This guy should have been fired for that feature lack alone.
It makes Flickr unusable for browsing images.
What’s worse is that Flickr hasn’t updated its UI in years and years. Like most acquistions, once Yahoo bought it, Flickr’s team said, “Okay, we’re done.”…
…even worse is the stupid Yahoo ID system, which, unlike Google Accounts or even Live/MSN Accounts, FORCES you to get a Yahoo email address (and thus yet *another* login to remember) even if all you want to do is use something like Flickr. I wonder how many people don’t use Flickr because of that?
yup flickr browsing sucks
I totally disagree with the person above regarding Flickr. Though, it is not easy to browse the photostream once you’re in the stream (that little book he describes is difficult to see the pics). But you don’t have to refresh your page! Have you not noticed the arrows?
In any case, this is a shame for Yahoo! I have been a loyal user for 10+ years and this guy has been in charge of some of my favorite features according to this article.
I hope Yahoo! can continue to develop good work.
“this is a shame for Yahoo! I have been a loyal user for 10+ years and this guy has been in charge of some of my favorite features according to this article”
Uhh… Scott came with the acquisition of Zimbra. I don’t think he contributed that much in the short two years he’s been there.
Seeing that Zimbra is a turd, I don’t think Yahoo!’s losing all that much.
Everybody should understand: THIS IS A GOOD THING.
We complain about problems at Yahoo. Who’s at the helm of these teams?
Scott is one of the most “customer centric” technology execs I know -the number of Yahoo whos willing to listen to your complaints just went down by one – and they probably weren’t listening to him either…
not a surprise, considering that yahoo is about to sell zimbra, and dietzen has probably cashed his options after two years…
also, i hope nustik is right, and dietzen departure means that somebody awesome at the product level will replace him — but i doubt it, since this seems to be more of a personal move rather than a company saying “our products suck, we need to get a great product guy for this job”.
Does anyone know who his replacement is or if Flickr GM Douglas Alexander reported directly up to him? Flickr’s been on a rampage lately nuking groups, customer accounts, user data, etc. Very anti-community. Hopefully whoever replaces him works to restore order at Flickr. It’s become a terribly hostile place from a users perspective and lost much of the community spirit it used to have.
Thomas. Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning.
I heard Techcrunch is always looking for people who are skilled at getting out in front of the parade …
Now maybe I can get my fairytale job back.