Daily Debrief: Yahoo turns the page Video

Daily Debrief: Yahoo turns the page Video Transcript

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>> Yahoo finally dropped the big one. The company today announced its long awaited reorganization. Jerry Yang and Sue Decker are still in charge but there are changes at play. Welcome to the CNETNews.com Daily Debrief. I'm Charlie Cooper here with CNET's Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber and Dan, the take away from today's announcement was?

>> I think it was widely expected in fact Kara Swisher from all things. She has been on top of this and she predicted Sue Decker is going to be running a different group than she had before. She already, again, still has all the same direct reports she has but not much operational responsibility at this point which is really the same as it's always been since she took over in June of 2007. What are the changes? Well, basically Hillary Schneider who used to run a global group is now in charge of all ad marketing and sales for the US. Ash Patel who is in our technology group is now in charge of a group called Audience Product Development and then they have one more group that they formed with no one to head it up yet which is an Inside's group who are obviously they're taking step in the data warehouse. Now, what's interesting to me is the fact that they're just saying this is the way to extreme line operations but there's a huge amount of dotted line because you have the whole technology group which is run by Arebalo [phonetic] who came in early this year from Verizon. He is running all the technology groups but all the products are managed out of a different group. So, and then all the sales is from a different group. Now, that's pretty traditional that you have always different areas of expertise and people do it together but it requires super high-bandwidth communications for them to create the technology, develop the products and sell them.

>> The idea behind all of this share shuffling was to cut the bureaucracy to respond to marketing conditions to move more quickly.

>> Well, I think those are all conditions that lead people to make changes but I think a lot of changes are given by the fact that they had a huge amount of defections, key people in key positions.

>> In the last month and a half. Yes.

>> For example, Brad Garlinghouse who is running all the communications products which would be all the mail products and messaging products as well as Flickr and other things, apparently, he's gonna leaving this summer, so Scott Dietzen who came over with the Zimbra acquisition will be running most to that group and he is reporting into Ash Patel which is on the product development side as opposed to the technology side. So, to me it means that they successfully depend on how well they can execute in this very matrix kind of environment. How much time do they buy by setting the message through Wall Street? We know what needs to be done and we've taken steps. Now, let us get to the business of making [unintelligible].

>> I don't think this really does much for Wall Street. I think it's much more what can they show in terms of their products and their result. So, it's all based on show me what you can do. So, it is an organization helps them to get something like Yahoo open strategy out which is their concept for creating a social network through out the entire network for unifying so that everybody has a single profile instead of a profile for Flickr and a profile for mail, and a profile for the Yahoo 360. If they can do those things, if they can get their new add engine, if they can generate more revenue, if they can solve this kind of search issue and seems that Microsoft is still nosing around, then Wall Street will love them. If not, a lot of people there today might be gone.

>> Lots of this. On behalf of Dan Farber, I'm Charlie Cooper for the CNETNews.com Daily Debrief. ^M00:03:44 [ Music ]