Another Yahoo Exec Jumps Ship
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 2, 2008 | Share This
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Steve Souders, Chief Performance Officer at Yahoo, is ending his seven-year tenure with the #2 search engine to move on to the #1 search engine, Google, next week. Souders is the most recent Yahoo exec to leave the company; 2007 also saw the departures of CEO Terry Semel and Chief of Sales Wenda Harris Millard. Market leader Google has also had its share of departing executives, most notably going to Facebook.
Henry Blodget at the Silicon Alley Insider wonders if Souders’s departure is may be a poor sign of what’s to come for Yahoo:
“Is Yahoo going to zero? Judging by the number of senior folks who are leaving, plus reports of pitiful sales service, plus search share trends, plus the apparent lack of urgency at the top, this certainly doesn’t seem an outrageous conclusion.”
While Blodget gives Yahoo a year to turn itself around, I think they can afford at least two more years before they figure things out or implode… but others wonder if Yahoo is instead preparing to sell, citing that a diminishing number of execs actually makes the company more attractive to another big company (namely, Microsoft) because it would reduce redundancy on the management level. Whatever Yahoo is doing, it still has not articulated a broad strategy that will re-inspire the confidence of its shareholders and help it gain on Google.
Topics: Yahoo! |