Oh, one other thing that was interesting... Bloomberg reports: "Under terms of the departure, Yahoo will pay Nazem his salary from June through the end of the year as a lump sum. He earned a salary of $479,167 last year, according to a Yahoo filing. Stock options granted in 2003, 2005 and 2006 will become fully vested when he steps down. The exercise date on those options, as well as others granted in 1999, will be extended for three years after he leaves the company, Yahoo said."

If Nazem had just resigned, wouldn't his unvested options just have been sacrificed. Possible circumstances in which that wouldn't have been the case? Some clause in his contract, maybe a change in reporting lines, which triggered constructive dismissal; or he was offered the acceleration, months ago, as an inducement to stay a bit longer; or he was fired. Anyone else care to speculate?

Now if they'd just flush the rest of the stale deadweight in the engineering team, they might get somewhere. Too many of those guys (and they're 99% men) haven't had an original idea in years, are too petrified of upsetting the apple cart to take any risks, and chant "Web 2.0," "AJAX," and other buzzwords as a mantra without actually understanding them or their implications. You could lop off two or three levels down from Zod and make Y! a much stronger organization. He's a really nice guy, but he let too much stagnate and let too much incompetence get entrenched. Happy trails.

not sure if constructive dismissal is an issue here.

if someone was waiting in the wings to replace him, for example, i could see it being, perhaps.

I'm not an insider by any means (I do own stock, assuming that matters), I think if

a) the guy's been there for 11 years and
b) he played his part over the years
c) stuck around to see panama see the light of day

I don't see the board making an issue to vest options, why have him stick around and be, well, dubya.

nick, remember, boards and snr mgmt are stingy with commoners, snr mgmt always gets a nice exit...

my two cents. also, doesn't this power vaccum create an opportunity for someone to try to takeover YHOO?

Likely candidates? Here are some:
http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=1617

Gosh - hopefully one of Sue's bridesmaids knows some HTML...

@Nick Denton: Not necessarily, amigo. The board could have given him a golden condom simply to make sure he won't impregnate anything in the near term.

Or, god forbid, he actually did contribute something along the way and they wanted to say, "Thanks."

Forget that last paragraph; I was holding a puppy when I wrote it.

Farzad, now you're a free agent, come join our team: Team Tastyr :-) seriously do you want to get back into world of startups?

judging by the accelerated option grants and subsequent dumping of them "zod" knew he was leaving over a year ago. Capital gains taxes are such that you need to make a decision about large option grants at least one year in advance in order to have them not qualify for ordinary income.

BTW "wayne" up above...is there no one or nothing on this board that you don't kiss ass up to?

M

"But just begs the question: given all that notice, why would Semel have to tap Jerry Yang, who hasn't had an executive role in years, as interim head of tech? Of the three key positions under Semel -- sales, product and tech -- two are open."

Precisely. Just try to get an answer out of Yahoo on that. Good luck. Maybe the company is just slow. It took them five months to find a new CFO and who was it? The best man at Sue Decker's wedding.

This looks terrible to the Street, it looks incompetent, but that never seems to bother Terry very much. I can't imagine they'll be able to fill the slot soon. People will probably wait for the next earnings call to see how well Panama is doing.

Well, at least the commoners in Search Marketing know where their raises went this year. To help pay for severance packages for Zod, Dan and whathisname down in Santa Monica.

Everyone's bracing for the next shoe to drop. That will probably be Terry's Home Depot style retirement package, the size of which will depend upon whether Panama is a success. It fails, he probably goes out with a couple hundred million. Succeed and it goes up by another hundred million. Unless he and the board decide he should stick around.

Maybe now with Zod gone, the HQ engineering geeks can get back to hacking BSD as the de facto standard for all of Yahoo. Never mind that you can't integrate worth sh** to it if you are an acquired company using dotnet, j2ee, webservices. But, hey who needs to build things that actually contribute to Yahoo's bottom line when it's more important to mentally masturbate in hacking a BSD kernel.

Let's build more "reusable" APIs in C++ that runs only on a BSD box. Let's pick a platform that lacks official Java 1.5+ VM support and lacks official Oracle driver supports. Then we can mentally masturbate to to create y-odbc, y-jdbc, y-jdk, y-j2ee. ..That will work. Oh, forgot about all the php script kiddies too. Sorry.

Yahoo has (or had) good engineers, but Yahoo's engineering management lacks vision, makes bad decisions and moves too slowly. BTW, Yahoo is now finally requiring all software to run on Linux, though IMO it's at least 2 to 3 years too late. The only thing Zod has been doing well in his entire tenure at Yahoo is selling his options.

Zod's departure is good for Yahoo. But please don't let that POS Semel involve in picking the next CTO.

Zod has not done anything good for a number of years. He used to be a rockstar, but for quite a number of years - he has been a ZERO. He has made himself very wealthy along with his buddies up there on the 4th floor and his nephew into a VP, etc.

Zod never seemed to take the heat for things going bad like search, M&A, etc.

I have seen it listed in other places that Y! failed in regards to Google on the datacenter and fiber network space. That is for sure - y! was sitting on Billions of cash and could have bought up this stuff for pennies on the dollar - stupid move. It is called vertical integration. Now they are spending a lot more money to build that out. Can you say - lack of vision and leadership?

I think Yahoo is just another example of how we are loosing our leadership skills. The leaders don't lead and they sure as hell don't take responsiblity.