Yahoo is trying to show that it's taking hold of its own destiny again.
Phase 1 was the ad deal, under which Yahoo expects more cash by showing Google's more lucrative ads next to Yahoo search results. Phase 2 came Thursday with a
Jerry Yang
(Credit: Yahoo)But two big factors make it clear Chief Executive Jerry Yang and his allies have a long way to go before Yahoo achieves independence.
First on the agenda is the possibility of some partnership with another rival, Microsoft. Despite proclamations on two occasions that its interest in Yahoo was over, it appears Microsoft is still interested, and investors are agitating for a deal.
Second is the pressure by activist investor Carl Icahn, who disclosed Thursday he controls a 5 percent stake in the company. Icahn has proposed a dissident slate of directors and made clear his recommendations should they be elected Aug. 1: move Yang back to his chief Yahoo role and hire a new CEO, open the door to a Microsoft acquisition or partnership, and scrap an expensive severance plan that would kick in if somebody acquired Yahoo.
It looks like Yahoo is showing a bit more of its fighting spirit with the Google deal and reorganization. The moves are somewhat reactive, to be sure, but they also show the company trying to let someone inside the company determine its fate.
Fixes through a reorg?
The reorganization has the potential to clean up some of the company's overlapping structure.
Susan Decker
(Credit: Yahoo)The move creates some new groups reporting to President Sue Decker--notably a business and advertising group for the U.S. region under Hilary Schneider and a group for products such as Mail, Flickr, and My Yahoo under Ash Patel. Also new is the audience technology group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan, which reports to Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh.
Panchapakesan's engineers at the audience technology group will work closely with their counterparts in Patel's audience products group.
"Together we shape the product," said Scott Dietzsen, the new leader of Yahoo Mail and Messaging. "We're in different organizations, but we ultimately function like a single team. I'm so committed to tightly integrated product management and engineering. That's how you do great work."
But it better be tight integration with high interdepartmental communication bandwidth. For Internet companies, technological constraints and possibilities are central to product management.
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Hilary Schneider
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Monetization will be the responsibility of Schneider and her three regional peers, which raises another potential problem. We've heard of Yahoo tensions before between product groups and monetization groups, with Decker mediating the disputes, and the new Yahoo structures at least at first glance does nothing to change that.
"Monetization and product have always been at odds," said one source familiar with Yahoo's inner workings. "Product people by nature don't like ads. Monetization people think Yahoo needs more of them."
But there are a lot of new faces running the show, including in product management, where Patel largely replaces now-departed Jeff Weiner and Dietzen is taking over much of soon-to-be-departed Brad Garlinghouse's job.
Some responsibilities at Yahoo still seem fuzzy. One is the Yahoo Open Strategy transformation--important work that could help Yahoo recover lost ground lost to rivals in the fast-changing vanguard of Internet businesses.
Ash Patel
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)On the flip side, Yahoo set up a specific group to try to get a handle on the important area of cloud computing, in which applications run on central servers. "We have bits and pieces everywhere. This brings it together into one organization," said Balogh, who oversees the group.
Reclaiming the initiative?
Even if the management changes are effective and Yahoo brings its various strategies to fruition--and those are big ifs--there's a problem: time.
The outside pressures on Yahoo, from Icahn and Microsoft, along with potential internal pressures from Yahoo's own board, will come to a boil in the next month as the annual shareholder meeting draws closer.
A good quarter could give Yang and Decker more breathing room. It wouldn't make Icahn go away, but it could make it harder for him to enlist support among other shareholders.
But even with a good quarter, Yahoo's new structure won't change the company overnight, and the Google ad deal won't begin generating revenue for another three months or so even if Yahoo vaults cleanly over the antitrust hurdles.
So at least for now, Yang and Decker don't get to keep the Yahoo reins to themselves.
Yahoo announced a handful of changes to its management team and structure on Thursday. Here's a handy guide to who's doing what at the Web company. These changes follow an executive exodus, which Yahoo says was partly voluntary and partly driven by management decisions.
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Yahoo)
Chief executive officer
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang will stay on as CEO, a position he has held since taking over for Terry Semel in June 2007. Yang founded the company with David Filo after creating "Jerry Yang's Guide to the World Wide Web" nearly 15 years ago.
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Yahoo)
President
Susan Decker will keep her spot as president. The former chief financial officer and head of the advertiser group took on the role of president at the same time Yang took over the reins at Yahoo.
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Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)
Audience products
Ash Patel will head up a new audience products division. Patel was one of Yahoo's earliest engineers and most recently held the title of executive vice president of the company's platforms and infrastructure division. Patel will oversee several consumer products, including Yahoo Mail, Messenger, My Yahoo, the main Yahoo.com page, and Flickr. He will report to Decker.
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Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)
Go-to-market activity for U.S. region
Hilary Schneider, who joined Yahoo in September 2006, will be in charge of a second group, go-to-market operations for the United States region. She had been executive vice president of Yahoo Global Partner Solutions, a division encompassing Yahoo's sales, corporate partnerships, and online channel groups, a post she held for about a year. Schneider will report to Decker.
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Susan Dove/CNET News.com)
Insights strategy
A yet-to-be-named executive will head up a third group centralizing and running a Yahoo-wide strategy regarding use of data and analysis. That person will also report to Decker and will be announced in the next few weeks.
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Yahoo)
Chief technology officer
Aristotle Balogh will stay in his current role, in charge of building and running Yahoo's computing infrastructure. He will now oversee several new groups in the search domain, with David Ku leading the advertising technology group; Prabhakar Raghavan leading search strategy; and Tuoc Luong leading search products on an interim basis.
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Yahoo / Symphony Services)
Audience technology
Venkat Panchapakesan will lead the new audience technology group. The group works closely with Patel's products group to build and run the technology used by that group. Panchapakesan now reports to Balogh.
Another new group will focus on cloud computing and data infrastructure.
Update 1 p.m. PDT: I added further details about the new organization.
Yahoo, under intense pressure, reorganized its upper management Thursday in a plan designed to improve its products, underlying technology, and operational execution, the company said.
Ash Patel will now report to Yahoo President Susan Decker.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)The new structure leaves Chief Executive Jerry Yang and President Susan Decker at the top of the org chart. As expected, Ash Patel and Hilary Schneider will report to Decker, with Patel leading a new audience products division, and Schneider in charge of go-to-market operations for the United States region.
In addition, a third, as-yet-undetermined executive will report to Decker. That executive will run an "insights strategy team," with responsibilities for centralizing and running a Yahoo-wide strategy regarding use of data and analysis. The new executive will be named in coming weeks, Yahoo said Thursday.
The company also is forming some new groups within its technology organization. One, the audience technology group, will be led by Venkat Panchapakesan. Another group, whose leader is yet to be announced, will focus on cloud computing and data infrastructure.
Yahoo underwent an executive exodus in the last two weeks, losing three executive vice presidents, two senior vice presidents, and others. It's not clear to what extent those departures were the cause or the result of the reorganization plan, but Decker indicated in a statement that the reorganization has been under way for months.
"The changes we're making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making," Decker said in a statement. "This is a logical next step in light of our success last year in moving to a more centralized approach to developing world-class marketing products.
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"We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalize on the scale advantages while allowing for fine-tuning to meet local market needs," Decker said.
Apparently at least some of the executive changes were involuntary.
"Some of the attrition we had was voluntary, and others were decisions we made because we wanted to take the company in a new direction with leadership," said Scott Dietzen in an interview. He joined Yahoo through its 2007 acquisition of online e-mail provider Zimbra and now also runs Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger.
Yahoo has been suffering punishing pressure. In addition to steady business pressure from Google, it's been trying to fend off an unwelcome Microsoft takeover attempt, hammer out a narrower Microsoft partnership, fight a proxy battle with investor Carl Icahn, and begin a deal under which rival Google will supply Yahoo with search ads.
So it's no surprise there's major change. In fact, it's a safe bet there will be more major changes soon.
In the new order, Patel will oversee several consumer products available worldwide. Among those reporting directly to him is Dietzen, who now also runs Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger. Another is Tapan Bhat, who ran Yahoo properties including Buzz, My Yahoo, and the main Yahoo.com page, and who under the new structure also runs Flickr and Yahoo Groups.
Patel's new area previously had been run by Jeff Weiner, who left Yahoo for a stint supporting venture capitalist work. Brad Garlinghouse, who's leaving this summer, had run the new work moving to Dietzen and Bhat.
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Hilary Schneider
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Schneider and her peers will have the profit-and-loss responsibilities, though.
Yahoo already had executives in charge of other regions: Toby Coppel for Europe, Rose Tsou for Asia, and Keith Nilsson for emerging markets. They and Schneider are in charge of signing up advertisers, cutting business deals, and working with Yahoo partners.
Meanwhile, Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, who still reports to Yang, is in charge of building and running Yahoo's computing infrastructure.
Balogh's audience technology group supports Patel's consumer products, with tight ties to corresponding product managers within Patel's group. And his cloud computing group initially will focus on providing internal services to the company--though that could change over time, he said in an interview.
"The primary focus is internal. But much like Amazon and Google, when you have something at scale and integrated, there are opportunities to offer services," Balogh said. "Based on some innovations, we may be able to leapfrog."
Reporting to Balogh in the search domain are David Ku, leading the advertising technology group; Prabhakar Raghavan, leading search strategy; and Tuoc Luong, leading search products on an interim basis, Yahoo said.
Makhijani will be president and chief executive of Yandex Labs, the company said Friday.
"Vish and his group at Yandex Labs will help to develop and improve Yandex's core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience," said Arkady Volozh, CEO of parent company Yandex. "We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent." (Though with Yahoo's recent management turmoil, the distance looks to have been shortened considerably.)
Now might be a good time to join Yandex, which maintains an edge over Google in Russia if not the globe. Yandex appears bound for an initial public offering soon on Nasdaq, hoping to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion, according to a recent Reuters report.
Voluntarily or not, it looks like Yahoo will be getting a lot less top-heavy.
The pioneering but troubled Internet company is headed for a reorganization that, combined with an exodus of top Yahoo executives, will in all likelihood put power in dramatically fewer hands.
A lean management structure can be good for building a nimble, responsive organization. The problem with that idea at Yahoo is that the company is losing many of the executives who have control over day-to-day operations.
Ash Patel
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)And in some cases, the departures spread multiple steps down the hierarchy, depriving Yahoo of talent to promote and of expertise to train any new arrivals. Major turnover on this scale can turn succession planning into improv theater.
It appears the executive departures and an imminent reorganization are inextricably linked. From our discussions with Yahoo insiders and people familiar with the matter, it appears some executives want to leave, which means some reorganization is inevitable, while others aren't happy with just how that reorg appears to be shaking out.
To recap our and others' coverage, here's where Yahoo's upper echelon appears headed. First, the exodus:
Last week, two executive vice presidents--Jeff Weiner of the network group, and Usama Fayyad of research and computing infrastructure--said they'd be leaving. A third EVP, Qi Lu, in charge of search and monetization, joined the list this week. Two senior vice presidents also are departing, Brad Garlinghouse of communication and communities, and Vish Makhijani of search.
Second, what comes next? The reorg, as we reported Thursday. Some details on the possibilities have emerged. President Sue Decker is leading the revamp, according to the Wall Street Journal and others.
Patel, Schneider ascendant
Ash Patel--one of the company's earliest engineers and a man who still enjoys talking with programmers--looks to be ascendant overall by leading a new Yahoo products group. That would include areas such as search, Yahoo Messenger, Flickr, and Yahoo Mail.
Currently, Patel is EVP of platforms and infrastructure. That may sound like a behind-the-scenes infrastructure job, but a big part of the company's turnaround plan is the Yahoo Open Strategy, a plan to expose Yahoo's inner workings to outside programmers, and that's Patel's domain.
But should an engineer run all of the products group? Kara Swisher at AllThingsD believes the prospect of reporting to Patel is what was behind the Garlinghouse and Makhijani disgruntlement.
We're also hearing word of a regional organization for other areas, and Swisher reports that Hilary Schneider will oversee the U.S. operations involving advertising and media. She's currently EVP of global partner solutions, where she signs up display advertisers among other things. In the new order, she'll be Patel's peer and will report to Decker.
As for the other regions, Toby Coppel will run Europe, Rose Tsou will run Asia, and Keith Nilsson will run emerging markets, Swisher said.
CTO Ari Balogh will absorb some of Lu's engineering team, Swisher also said. One source we spoke to wasn't optimistic about that arena, believing that Yahoo needs a technology leader who's a young Turk rather than someone from the old guard--VeriSign in Balogh's case.
Hilary Schneider
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A fresh start?
It's apparent from assorted insiders that there's worry about Yahoo brain drain.
But would that necessarily be a bad thing?
Yahoo remains a powerful Internet property, but much of the initiative has shifted to Google when it comes to online innovation. Google found a way to make search ads immensely profitable, is expanding aggressively into many traditional portal activities such as e-mail, and is pushing cloud computing technology with Google Apps.
So, for all the current executives' accomplishments, Yahoo has yet to match Google's overall ascent. Perhaps it's a good time for fresh faces. Corporate turmoil, like war, can quickly promote a captain into a colonel.
Freshness will go only so far, though: the two at the top, CEO Jerry Yang and Decker, are committed to Yahoo "for the long haul," I hear.
I'm not convinced the pair's abilities are in a dramatically different league from most CEOs, but they are suffering under an unusually intense spotlight. Yahoo's bruising battle with Microsoft, replaced now with a bruising battle with billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn, exposed Yahoo vulnerabilities and simultaneously gave shareholders a taste of Yahoo stock above $29.
Even though Icahn was trying to push the now seemingly doomed Microsoft acquisition, he hasn't gone away. He's expected to propose an alternative board of directors soon in anticipation of the company's August 1 shareholder meeting.
CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber believes Wall Street will effectively oust Yang and that Decker is the likely successor. I'm not willing to make that pronouncement yet, but certainly one challenge at the company, putting several individually strong properties together into a coherent whole, is a task for high-level management.
Wall Street seems mildly pessimistic about the changes so far, though not as much as when the possibility of a Yahoo-Microsoft partnership fell off the table. The company's stock gradually slid over the week from about $23 to about $22. What it does after the reorg and Carl Icahn could determine Yang's fate.
Joshua Schachter, the founder of the Delicious social-bookmarking service Yahoo acquired in 2005, is joining the executive exodus from the Internet giant.
"Just time to move on, I think," Schachter said in an e-mail, but didn't share further details.
The Internet company also confirmed on Thursday evening that Schachter will leave at the end of June; TechCrunch reported it earlier.
"Joshua Schachter has contributed greatly to Delicious' success and Yahoo's success in our social search efforts...Yahoo wishes him well in his next endeavor," the company said in a statement.
Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)He's one of an ever-longer list of recent Yahoo departures, which also includes the following just from recent days:
Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the network division; Qi Lu, executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology; Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions; Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and community; Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of search; Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr; Jeremy Zawodny, an open-source developer and evangelist of what's now become the Yahoo Open Strategy; and Jason Zajac, who has been general manager of social media, head of finance for the audience division, and vice president of corporate strategy.
Yahoo believes there are plenty other folks to keep Delicious healthy: "His departure leaves behind a seasoned team that will take Delicious to the next level, as well as carry forward the mission of Delicious to continue to be the shared memory of the web and the world's largest social bookmarking site."
Delicious (aka del.icio.us) lets people save Web site bookmarks on a central server, adding tags and text to describe them. People also can subscribe to feeds showing others' bookmark activity, whence the term social bookmarking.
Schachter started the project in response to challenges he encountered sharing bookmarks at the Memepool site he helped found and run.
Yahoo released a delicious plug-in for Internet Explorer on Thursday, but it's had a Firefox plug-in for years and can be used with a more ordinary browser interface, too.
Qi Lu
(Credit: Yahoo)The executive parade from Yahoo could well be getting a lot longer.
Three more executives are leaving the company: Qi Lu, executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology; Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and community; and Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of search, TechCrunch reported Thursday.
Yahoo didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Update 12:17 p.m. PDT: Lu, who leads search and monetization work at Yahoo, can't be in an easy position. Yahoo just announced a major agreement under which Google--Yahoo's top rival--will supply its own search ads next to Yahoo's search results.
Garlinghouse is best known outside Yahoo for his "Peanut Butter Manifesto", in which he complained, "We want to do everything and be everything--to everyone...The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."
The pressure has to be strong for Makhijani, too. Yahoo is interested in search, but in the last year, search queries performed at Yahoo in May declined 13.8 percent to 1.33 billion while Google's increased to 4.65 billion, according to statistics released Thursday by Nielsen Online. And third-place Microsoft, whose search queries increased 72 percent to 1.04 billion, is trying to poach Yahoo search employees.
Yahoo already lost several high-level executives in the last week:
Brad Garlinghouse
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)• Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the network division.
• Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr.
• Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions.
• Jeremy Zawodny, an evangelist of what's now become the Yahoo Open Strategy.
• Jason Zajac, who has been general manager of social media, head of finance for the audience division, and vice president of corporate strategy.
Update 1:17 p.m. PDT: A source familiar with Yahoo's situation confirmed that Lu is in fact leaving the company.
Update 3:40 p.m. PDT: Yahoo offered a statement, but it's only general:
"We have a deep and talented management team across all areas of the company. Our successful implementation of our core strategies and the timely rollout of key products this year testifies to the effectiveness of our team, and we continue to recruit outstanding talent. Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that's to be expected in the Internet industry."
I have to wonder: Is this the level at which attrition is "expected"?
Update 5:07 p.m. PDT: I've confirmed all three departures from multiple sources familiar with the situation.
And there's more: Yahoo plans a major reorganization, potentially to be announced as soon as next week, one source said. This change will be of much bigger magnitude than the rejiggerings of recent quarters.
"It's definitely not a shuffle," the source said. But while some have called for the ouster of Chief Executive Jerry Yang, the change won't affect him or President Susan Decker, apparently. And it likely won't involve layoffs.
One factor contributing to some of the executive departures is dissatisfaction with how they'd end up after the reorganization, the source said. Another is what amounted to the choice of recommitting to Yahoo or moving on.
But one source within the company had a more skeptical view of the reorganization, believing it a forced reaction to executive departures rather than the cause.
"You can see that Jerry does not have the support of the leadership inside Yahoo," the source said.
Update 6:34 p.m. PDT: The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the reorganization will centralize product groups into a central product organization.
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Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's network division
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Jeff Weiner, a top Yahoo executive who announced his departure from the company last week, is indeed joining two venture capital firms.
Accel Partnerse and Greylock Partners both announced Monday that Weiner is joining as "executive in residence."
"Weiner will advise the leadership teams of existing Accel and Greylock consumer technology portfolio companies, and will also work closely with the firm's partners to evaluate new investment opportunities," the firms said.
Weiner was executive vice president of Yahoo's network division, overseeing many of the Internet company's most important products.
According to a memo from Yahoo President Susan Decker, reported on TechCrunch, "On an interim basis, Jeff's team will report to me as we consider how to best move the organization forward."
Yahoo's long-awaited deal to show Google ads on search results and an unrelated executive reorganization in its technology group could be announced today, CNET News.com has learned.
The Google deal, tested for two weeks in April and under development since then, could help improve the revenue generated by Yahoo's search. But investors probably shouldn't expect a significant financial lift until 2009, because the deal won't necessarily kick in immediately, a source familiar with the plan said.
The Google ad deal isn't the only change afoot at Yahoo, which has been under intense scrutiny with Microsoft's acquisition attempt and the machinations of activist shareholder Carl Icahn. The company is also dealing with at least two executive departures.
Jeff Weiner, the executive vice president who runs Yahoo's network division, is leaving, but another senior executive also is departing Yahoo's technology group, the source said.
The technology group runs Yahoo's infrastructure and its Yahoo Open Strategy effort to make the Internet company a foundation for others' Web applications, among other things.
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Hilary Schneider could be taking over some duties at Yahoo held by the departing Jeff Weiner.
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The executives who report to Weiner could report to Hilary Schneider, Yahoo's executive vice president of global partnerships and the leader of Yahoo's efforts to make money from its products, the source said.
Update 11:20 a.m. PDT: TechCrunch reports the Yahoo-Google deal could be announced after the market closes this afternoon.
Update 11:54 a.m. PDT: The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Microsoft is no longer willing to pay $33 per share for Yahoo and that talks between the companies ended without a deal. Icahn earlier had told Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to offer itself to Microsoft for $34.375 per share.
Update 12:03 p.m. PDT: Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions, is the departing technology executive, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Usama Fayyad, chief data officer at Yahoo
(Credit: Yahoo )Update 12:15 p.m. PDT: Microsoft talks are indeed over. Yahoo said in a statement that "discussions with Microsoft regarding a potential transaction--whether for an acquisition of all of Yahoo or a partial acquisition--have concluded...with respect to an acquisition of Yahoo's search business alone that Microsoft had proposed, Yahoo's Board of Directors has determined, after careful evaluation, that such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders."
Update 12:32 p.m. PDT: It looks like another departure is Jason Zajac, who'd at various times has been general manager of social media, head of finance for the audience division, and vice president of corporate strategy for Yahoo. He's bound for Hewlett-Packard, a source familiar with the situation said.
Update 12:48 p.m. PDT: Yahoo's search-ad partnership with Google raised Microsoft's antitrust hackles; Google dominates the market. But Google's top executives, who have said they would rather Yahoo remain independent than be acquired by Microsoft, have downplayed Google-Yahoo antitrust concerns by arguing that the relevant market is online advertising, not just online search advertising.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated that point Wednesday in an onstage interview.
Google is a "relatively small part" of the advertising market, Schmidt said. "Yahoo is the No. 1 player by far in the display ad business...If we were to deal with Yahoo or the like, we would be sure to structure in such a way that (antitrust) concerns were not the primary concerns."
A source has said that in order to allay antitrust concerns, the Yahoo-Google ad deal would involve an open bidding process in which Microsoft also could participate, with the ad being delivered by the company that would generate the most revenue when a searcher clicked on the ad. Further details about the scope of the deal remain unclear.
Update 2:16 p.m. PDT: Hewlett-Packard confirmed that Zajac will start working in the company's Personal Systems Group on June 23.
News.com staff writer Erica Ogg contributed to this report.
Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network division
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network division and leader of many of the company's core products, is leaving the company, CNET News.com has confirmed.
A source familiar with the executive's plans said he is departing, a move reported earlier Thursday by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.
Swisher also said Weiner will become an entrepreneur in residence at two venture capital firms, Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, neither of which immediately responded to requests for comment.
Weiner joined the company in 2001 during the reign of former Chief Executive Terry Semel, who left last year and was replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang. Weiner was in charge of a multitude of products, including Web search, news, finance, and the Yahoo front page.
Yahoo declined to comment for this report.
