With executives leaving Yahoo at a steady pace, the company is contemplating a major reorganization. According to a report in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Yahoo’s management is considering a plan that would centralize various product groups into a single global-product organization, instead of the current, separate divisions for mail, search and home page.
The Journal said the change is being sought by Yahoo President Susan Decker as a means of improving communication between product teams and overseas sales units.
The Peanut Butter Manifesto
The reorganization follows the announcement this week that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division, will exit the company. No successor has been named.
Weiner’s exodus is only the latest in a series. The senior vice president of search, Vish Makhijani, is leaving to work for a Russian search company. The executive vice president for search and advertising technology, Qi Lu, has also said she’s leaving.
Executive Vice President Usama Fayyad and two people involved in the creation of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, have also left or are in the process of doing so.
And Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president for communications and communities, has said he’s quitting. His position covers e-mail, messaging, Yahoo Groups, and Flickr.
One of Garlinghouse’s claims to fame is something he wrote called the Peanut Butter Manifesto. Originally penned as an internal memo, it was released to The Wall Street Journal. It criticized Yahoo for spreading itself too thin across too many products, as peanut butter might be spread on bread.
Yang, Icahn, Microsoft, Google
That diluting of the Yahoo brand was seen by outsiders as one of the reasons that cofounder Jerry Yang assumed the position of CEO. Like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple, Yang’s top leadership role was seen as possibly providing a…