Yahoo loses two more prominent executives
June 21, 2008 – 11:49 am
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Yahoo lost another two executives yesterday as the company continued to lurch from crisis to crisis following the board’s decision to reject Microsoft’s $47bn (£24bn) takeover bid.
This comes as no shock after mass exodus of Yahoo’s talent in last few weeks.
The latest departures include the Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and Brad Garlinghouse, the search division’s senior vice-president who wrote the infamous manifesto that criticised the internet firm’s strategy.
Delicious-founder Schacter commented to the announcement on TechCrunch, saying:
I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart [Butterfield] in terms of pushing my point of view.
Yahoo’s management has been criticised for failing to strike a deal with Microsoft, which had offered up to $47.5bn to take over the company. The board, led by co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang, said the offer was too low and eventually agreed a search advertising deal with Google which was greeted with derision by parts of the industry, who viewed it as an admission that Yahoo cannot compete with the search company. Yang faces intense scrutiny and has to deal with the exodus of high-profile staff.
The company said in a statement that it had confidence in its management team. “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.”
Naturally, Google and Microsoft are trying to capitalize on the situation by offering Yahoo’s most talented staff new jobs. Microsoft took a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News to tempt Yahoo search staff to move to Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus.
