Dozen-Year Yahoo Tech Veteran Ash Patel to Take “Time Off”
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 3, 2009 at 1:59 PM PT
Longtime Yahoo tech leader Ash Patel is taking some time off until early 2010.
Yahoo (YHOO) confirmed the break to BoomTown.
In recent days, many inside the company had mistakenly thought the 44-year-old EVP for Product Architecture & Strategy was departing the company for good.
Actually, it’s more of a sabbatical for Patel (pictured here).
“Ash will be taking some well-deserved time off to spend time with his family,” said Yahoo in a statement to me. “He will be returning to Yahoo! in early 2010.”
In his latest of many jobs at Yahoo, where he has been employed since 1996, Patel works with its products organization, run by CTO and EVP of Products Ari Balogh, “to drive the development of a comprehensive product strategy, as well as potential strategic deals, helping to evolve and evaluate its audience product and technology strategy.”
It’s one of many leadership positions Patel has had at Yahoo, as the company has reorganized many times over the years, including as EVP of its Audience Products Division, EVP of Platforms and Infrastructure, SVP of Platform Engineering and chief product officer.
He also played a key role as architect of several major Yahoo products, such as MyYahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Chat and many others.
In fact, Patel ended up in a major exec role in a reorg that former Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang did in the summer of 2008.
But the appointment of Patel to head the new Global Products group was greeted with some internal dissent, since many were pushing for faster change and new management at the Silicon Valley icon.
Yang was said to have insisted that Patel remain on as planned. He reported directly to President Sue Decker.
Patel stayed on after new CEO Carol Bartz got the top job in January, which was the subject of much interest among longtime Yahoo staff, since he has been one of the few true Yahoo veterans left in a high-ranking role.
In another reorg in late February, this time by Bartz, Patel got his latest title and was placed under Balogh.
Here is a video interview I did with Patel last December about the launch of some open and social networking initiatives at Yahoo (SVP Tapan Bhat, who had once reported to Patel, is also in the video):
Comments
Maybe Yahoo! needs some new leadership. One of their give-aways, a product that takes time and staff and money, is MyYahoo!!
I have been a heavy user of MyYahoo! for RSS feeds. If it worked, which it did for a very long time, it would be great. Lots of configurations to satisfy the user.
I had seven subscriptions to organize my feeds: news, computing, Classial music and Public Radio, etc, etc.
But some of my subscriptions started getting a message like “Oops – come back later”. Those are not the exact words.
So, some months ago, I went to them and told them. Most of my messages were ignored. But, finally they said it was my problem, too many feeds and too much configuration in any one subscription. They basically told me to simplify my requirements and also to use the available tabs to break things up – for them. So, first, I tried their suggestions. They did not work.
But, hey, the product should be useful. No matter how many feeds per subscription I have and no matter how much configuration I use, their product should just work.
Just problem after problem.
If I can not get my feeds, then no matter how much I like the product, it is useless to me.
So, I have switched to Google Reader. I am configured for only new feeds and no more than one week. This is not the same level of configuration I could get with MyYahoo!
But it works.
If I had those problems with MyYahoo!, then so did many others. I do not do anything that is unique.
They have no forum for users to discuss problems.
I even did a post to my weblog, thinking maybe they have alerts set. No luck.
I am very happy with Google Reader; but I would be happier with MyYahoo!.
Posted by Richard Mitnick at November 3rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm