Will We Be Bidding Adieu to Yahoo?

In the latest episode of search engine wars, Yahoo! is bleeding talent and is consistently outbid when trying to acquire new media partners. Recently Yahoo! lost its bid for DoubleClick, AOL and YouTube. These were all strategic losses to Google.

On the upside, Yahoo! has hired a new chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, from Thomas Weisel Partners Group Inc., a specialist in mergers and acquisitions. Hopefully, this will help the bottom line.

The Yahoo! personnel loss is really troublesome. In February, Yahoo! launched a new advertising placement system, Panama. Now, Farzad Nazem, chief technology officer at Yahoo!, is retiring. He just took over as CTO, why is he leaving before the bugs in the Panama platform are fixed?

The talent that is now leaving Yahoo!:

. . . include more people who have been with the company for six or more years of its 13-year existence--not the very top execs, but the seasoned middle managers Yahoo needs to carry out its ambitious turnaround plans . . . [read more at Business Week]

I remember when Yahoo! started with free email and a simple line of text in the footer of each email. I believe in competition in the free market and realize that there will be losers. I hope it is not Yahoo!

Tags: Yahoo, Panama, problems at Yahoo!