Another critical piece of the Yahoo machine has left the garage, as Joshua Schachter, who Yahoo brought in when they acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005, is resigning from his post.
Schachter joins the founders of Flickr, Jeremy Zawodny who was the semi-reluctant voice of Yahoo in the blogosphere, and Yahoo VP Jeff Weiner; who have all moved on from the company over the past week.
Yahoo, given its internal troubles, exodus of multiple high level executives, the Microsoft fiasco, and its current dependency on Google to please its stockholders; looks more like a out of control car flaming down the expressway to nowhere, running on fumes, muffler clanking on the road, with its passengers jumping out before the inevitable happens.
Sure, Yahoo can still slam on the brakes, cut the wheel, and U-turn their way out of their current position, but it could be too little too late; especially when their navigation system is losing its power.
The brain drain at Yahoo is unlike anything we have seen in this industry for years, as Yahoo has almost reinvented itself under its Flickrization of Yahoo direction and open armed acceptance of Web 2.0 and social media years before Google even entered the scene.
Those days are over.
Unlike the start up mentality which fuels innovation, Yahoo has canned their innovative brain juice and stored it away in the darkened corridors of Sunnyvale , like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders, as Yahoo has been frustrating its would be decision makers with the ability to work on ideas and theories, without the instant implementation seen in the independent world of entrepreneurship.
If you were in such a position, would you be sharing your ideas and waking up with a smile on your face knowing that 99% of your initiatives would become Yahoo intellectual property, yet never implemented into their network?
Granted, under Yang regime we’ve seen an opening of Yahoo Search and further acceptance of developed technologies; but this change at big Y! was more reactive than proactive, as a company with nothing to lose starts playing its final card when all chips are down.
I hope this is not the case and that Yahoo picks itself up off the ground, brushes off the dirt, and continues its sweaty uphill battle. Yahoo’s search team is second to none. Second to none. They have invested a lot of time into new directions to search, look at OneSearch for example, its the premier mobile search offering; but mobile to PC synching equals the search loyalty of Google transferring from the office to the home to the car. They have opened up search to human generated content, Weiner opened up the Yahoo homepage to the same… and hopefully these changes will not be a lost cause.
But where is Yahoo going from here?
