Sue Decker sent out a long email to all Yahoos which was promptly leaked and roundly lambasted by Mike Arrington, Paul Kedrosky and others. It's so full of corp-speak obfuscation, that Arrington didn't even try to summarize.
I'll give you one nugget: Steve Mitgang is gone. Who's he? He was ostensibly in charge of the Panama re-vamp. He was the Jim Allchin of Panama.
Panama's development was such a disaster - it was 2 years too slow - that it was very predictable that Yahoo would do some house-cleaning, and regret-shunning (i.e. find someone to take the fall). In fact, I wrote a post saying that Yahoo should clean house at Overture:
Fix search monetization. The Panama rollout is underway. Once that happens, clean out Overture of the people who failed to deliver it 2 years ago. Then make an all out run at Google - develop a way for advertisers to dump entire Google campaigns right into Yahoo. Respond to advertisers better than Google.
So I think this email mainly shows that in their own, convoluted, shuffling-of-the-deck-chairs way, Yahoo is attempting to clean house.
PS: I love that Sue Decker's last name always reminds me of Blade Runner. And "Mitgang" sounds pretty Phillip Dick-ian as well, to me: Decker gets rid of Mitgang - just sounds gritty...
¶ 2/15/2007
