Valleywag: Reorgs

Reorg costs Time Inc. Web chief his job

Owen Thomas — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:00:00 PDT

Time Inc., my former employer, goes through spasmodic bouts of reorganizations, switching between centralization and decentralization as frequently as its magazines redesign themselves. CEO Ann Moore's latest reshuffle, which is costing 600 jobs, has created three new groups, each with its own head of digital operations. That seems to have put Ned Desmond, the head of Time Inc. Interactive, out of a job. (Desmond is better remembered in the Valley as the former president and editor of Time Inc.'s Business 2.0, where I used to work.)

Not that it was ever very clear to Time Incers what his division did: Until last year, it didn't even run Time Inc.'s Web servers, and several of Time Inc.'s more successful websites, like CNNMoney.com and SI.com, have made a point of staying outside of Desmond's reach.

Intuit gives 575 employees permanent, unpaid vacations

Jackson West — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:20:00 PDT

In a press release yesterday, financial software company Intuit announced a realignment, and by realignment, they mean laying off seven percent of the company's workforce — mostly in finance, according to a tipster. The press release went out well before individual employees were notified of their status, which can't have helped morale with everyone thinking they might get a pink slip. The company also revised earnings expectations downward. How did Wall Street react? After a brief boost Wednesday morning, the company's share price was right back to the level before the layoff announcement. Yahoo may be using the word reorganization instead of realignment, but in the end it will mean the same thing.(Photo by Peter Kazanjy)

At long last, Yahoo reorg to put employees out of their misery

Paul Boutin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:40:00 PDT

Yahoo is about to perform that dreaded big-tech-company maneuver, the "reorg." For you young-uns who don't get why reorg is such a scary word: Think massive layoffs, lost mortgages, and people like your parents with no back-to-school money for brats like you. Multiply by 10,000-plus. I can only wish a soft landing for the folks who designed, built and shipped Yahoo's new search engine interface, and the marketers who dreamed up those radio ads that got me to — I can't believe I'm admitting this on a blog — actually use Yahoo to find stuff.

This is my first afternoon back at the 'Wag, so I've got nothing to report that pint-sized supersleuth Kara Swisher hasn't already posted. (Note to Swisher: Great job! Now please stop patting yourself on the back, it's embarrassing.)

The only other journo as obsessed with Yahoo is Valleywag's editor-on-vacation Owen Thomas. I thumb-typed Owen to deliver Valleywag's official analysis from fog-free Florida. "I don't think of this reorg as a layoff," Owen replied. "I think this is more about promoting those who don't have enough sense to leave. I mean, the more power Sue Decker has, the worse Yahoo gets. Why is she still there?"

Sue Decker's idiotic Yahoo reorg

Owen Thomas — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:42:54 PDT

No tech executive draws more bile and disdain than Ash Patel. So why is Yahoo president Sue Decker promoting him to fill the place of several departing executives? Let me keep it short and sweet: Decker is a charmless Wall Street type who's bad at managing people. Patel's main skill, one that has kept him at place in Yahoo for 12 years, is managing up. His second talent: making excuses for the fact that he's rarely seen on campus before 10:30. No one who's serious at Yahoo has any respect for Patel, and no one who's sensible cares to report to him. Decker's plan is succeeding in one regard: All the departures Patel's promotion is sparking will surely reduce costs.

Bleeding purple

Owen Thomas — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:40:00 PDT

This is the week to leave Yahoo, it seems — not because something's happening. But because nothing is. Jeremy Zawodny (badge pictured here) and JR Conlin, two Yahoo veterans with 18 years of tenure between them, both took pains to say that their departures had nothing to do with Microsoft or Carl Icahn's bids for the company — believable, since an expected Yahoo-Google search partnership seems to have put both of those overtures into a deep freeze. Higher up the chain, reports confirm the departure of Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's chief data officer, and Jeff Weiner, head of Yahoo's Web-content properties.

Fayyad, a commenter tells us, is planning to return to Microsoft, where he worked before Yahoo. Had Microsoft's bid for Yahoo succeeded, he likely would have been welcomed back; now Microsoft is getting him much more cheaply. (Bassel Ojjeh, who worked with Fayyad at Microsoft and several startups before joining Yahoo, will be promoted to fill Fayyad's spot, a tipster tells us — but how long will he stay without Fayyad?) Weiner is taking temporary gigs with two venture-capital firms — a likely prelude to a CEO job somewhere. If he ever entertained that ambition at Yahoo, he was clearly thwarted by Sue Decker.

Kara Swisher thinks that another reorganization is coming at Yahoo, one which would not have Weiner directly replaced by one of his underlings. That makes a sort of sense, at least in being predictable. Yahoo is famed for its perpetual reorgs, and a pending reshuffle would explain why Yahoo still hasn't said anything publicly about Fayyad and Weiner's exits. This next one, Swisher thinks, would put Decker ally Hilary Schneider higher up the food chain, and undo a split between Yahoo's sales and product groups — one that Decker herself instigated, in a push to move from her previous job as CFO to an operational role.

What will this accomplish? “It would be nice to have sales in the room now, as we develop services, instead of totally separate,” a Yahoo executive told Swisher. Nice, but not game-changing; rather, it would simply undo a mess Decker made on her way up.

A whole lot of noise, about a whole lot of nothing. Silicon Valley is built on the idea of change — but not change for change's sake. Developing new products, not new org charts, is what excites people here.

Even Zawodny, a longtime Yahoo loyalist, the type of person who describes himself as "bleeding purple," is leaving to do a startup. I believe him when he says his departure has nothing to do with Microsoft or Icahn. But it has everything to do with Yahoo.

How Disney's Steve Wadsworth plays the game

Owen Thomas — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:20:00 PDT

Is there an old-media Internet chieftain with a longer tenure than Steve Wadsworth of Disney? Just a finance guy when he first got involved in Disney's Internet projects in 1995, he survived corporate shakeup after corporate shakeup. He was first named chief of the online group in nine years ago by the long-forgotten Michael Eisner, and held onto that role through spinoff and reorg, bubble and bust and bubble. His latest power grab: seizing control of Disney's videogames unit. A memo from current CEO Bob Iger yammers about synergy between the Internet and mobile content operations Wadsworth oversees and the games unit he's taking over. It all makes a passable amount of sense, as business moves go. But the real explanation for the creation of Wadsworth's new Disney Interactive Media Group?

Disney's ABC and ESPN are eager to have more control over their websites, as their destiny increasingly goes online, shrinking Wadsworth's empire. Adding videogames expands his authority into an especially fast-growing and lucrative area. Perhaps this is how Wadsworth has managed to hold onto power for so long — what serves his interestes in corporate politicking also happens to profit Disney..

Leaked memo details Microsoft search reorg, while the bosses try to replace them all

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:40:00 PDT

A leaked memo from Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella says Microsoft's Erik Jorgensen will now lead MSN's content programming and engineering team. Greg Nelson, Nadella writes, will report to Jorgensen. Why the reshuffle? Nadella explains, in something close to English:

It's imperative that we set up for blurring of the lines between Portal and Search to drive experiences that enable more seamless exploration of content across the search-browse continuum.

Meanwhile, Microsoft higher-ups continue to hold talks with Yahoo in an effort to make all of the reshuffled executives redundant. The memo is embedded below.

Scott Moore shakes up Yahoo Media Group, music chief leaves

Owen Thomas — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:40:00 PDT

Scott Moore, the former Microsoftie now running Yahoo's media businesses, has reorganized his group, which runs Yahoo's original-content websites. Out the door: Ian Rogers, the outspoken head of Yahoo Music, who had loudly criticized the music industry for insisting on copy protection. Rogers says on his blog that he's joining Topspin Media, a music startup, as CEO. Rogers also oversaw some of Yahoo's video efforts, which Moore now says he'll run personally. The reorg comes in advance of two days of all-hands meetings in Sunnyvale and Santa Monica in two weeks. Moore's memo:

And now for the Kremlinology: Karin Gilford, head of Yahoo Entertainment, seems like the big winner here. Amy Iorio, the widely disliked executive whose team launched women's site Shine, loses out. Moore's mostly winnowing the number of direct reports he has — which should give him more time to call old pals in Redmond. And Rogers? Got out while the getting was good.

EBay rearranges deck chairs

Nick Douglas — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:00:00 PDT

EBay has two important properties outside its core auction business: PayPal and Skype. The former is a profitable enterprise now threatened (eBay thinks) by Google's new Checkout payment system — thus eBay's recent decision to ban Google Checkout as a requested payment system. The latter is a money-sucker some blame for the company's staggering stock.

Now PayPal president Jeff Jordan is stepping down to "spend more time with his family" (read: kicked out gracefully). He's being replaced by Skype president Rajiv Dutta, whose role will be filled by Skype VP of products Alex Kazim.

It's the sort of half-hearted swap made while biding time. Picture eBay as a treadmiller running backward to exercise different muscles — it may not see where it's going, but since it's headed nowhere, that doesn't matter.

EBay changes execs at PayPal, Skype in shakeup [Reuters]