All Things Digital

It’s starting to feel like a murder mystery over at Yahoo these days, as one vice president after another drops off the senior management rolls at the Internet giant.

Next to go are VP of Media Engineering Bharath Kadaba and the higher profile Rachel Glaser, a senior vice president of operations finance. (Both are pictured here.)

It is not clear when either will leave, although a Yahoo spokesperson said Glaser would indeed be leaving “in [20]08.” Sources said that would likely be sooner than later.

Was it Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in the conference room with a knife? Or was it President Sue Decker in the cafeteria with a rope?

Whoever it was and for a variety of reasons (some jumping, some being pushed), there have been yet another passel of high-level executive departures of late–such as Vice President and Editor in Chief of Yahoo News, Finance and Sports Neil Budde, Marketing VP David Riemer and VP Jennifer Dulski, who headed shopping, travel, autos, real estate and local.

“They’re not saying it explicitly, but there just have been too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” said one person close to Yahoo. “This is a continuing acknowledgment of that by this effort at streamlining the executive ranks.”

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Can you believe it? DAY 99!

Yes, this is the day before the last full day of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s 100-day No-Sacred-Cows Vision Quest, which BoomTown has been keeping relentless track of, ever since he told investors in the summer that he was undertaking a top-to-bottom look at his troubled company and that all holy bovines had better watch out.

So far though, in terms of truly dramatic change, it’s Cows: 99, Yang: 0.

Sure, Yahoo has done some acquiring, like the $350 million purchase of emailer Zimbra; it has dumped some tiny products (music stuff, for example); there have been more management reorgs and departures (the latest being marketing head Cammie Dunaway, news of which we broke here); and recent third-quarter earnings have been touted as they-weren’t-as-bad-as-we-thought-they-would-be, which does not exactly set one’s hair on fire.

But no massive cuts, no major management upheavals, no drastic shift in business, no game-changing purchases and no being acquired either.

Then again, there’s still one more day to go!

For Yang, it seems, time flies when you’re not having fun.

At a recent gathering related to Yahoo’s Right Media acquisition, he noted: “It is a lonely job in the sense that you have to make some of the tough calls.”

Did he say lonely? Does he not know yet that BoomTown is at the ready to assuage Yang’s ennui and have a lively lunch, if only he would emerge from the cave he has been living in?

Plus, kids could benefit, if you help BoomTown in the October Tech Blogger Challenge for DonorsChoose.org.

So, click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here to give early and often!

The charity funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors. (AllThingsD.com picked tech projects in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C.)

Besides raising funds for kids who need it, we also hope to win an award Yahoo is sponsoring for the tech blogger who garners the biggest number of donors–a free lunch with Yang!

So far, we’ve raised $12,291 from 49 donors, putting us second behind VC Fred Wilson in the tech sector.

So go now to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here or use the thermometer on the left side of this page to give early and often!

Not convinced by me? Then listen to my persuasive sons, who tout the charity again (here is their last appearance, engineered by their shameless mother).

Here’s the video:

We have almost nothing to report today on Yahoo, except to point out that there are only three more days until the official end of CEO Jerry Yang’s 100-day No-Sacred-Cows Vision Quest.

While we expect the day to pass quietly at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus, BoomTown will mark the moment while on the Big Island of Hawaii, where August Capital VC David Hornik is holding his first gathering called The Lobby. He’s billing it as a “new media salon,” but all I know is that there are a lot of Silicon Valley types I can annoy in paradise!

Speaking of annoying, the departure of Yahoo’s marketing chief Cammie Dunaway was more than a little confusing in that it was clearly done quickly and without a lot of preparation. That leaves yet another empty slot at the top of the company going unfilled with more changes in the organizational structure of Yahoo.

Essentially, President Sue Decker said in a memo that she was splitting up the Network Marketing Division from the Customer Experience Division, which were both under Dunaway. While there are interim people in place, it is obvious the job Dunaway had will be cut back in power.

While that might be a good thing, and change is often for the best at Yahoo these days, getting major execs to sit still for a while is also advisable. Of course, Yahoo does not always have complete control of this situation.

Right now, for example, there is no CTO in place at Yahoo, following the departure in June of longtime tech head Farzad Nazem.

I have been talking a lot to Yahoo techies about that situation, which remains in flux. According to them, they don’t expect a hire at all (which Yahoo had said it would undertake when Nazem left).

Instead, it is being managed by a troika of execs in three areas–Executive Vice President, Platforms and Infrastructure Division Ash Patel; Executive Vice President of Engineering Search and Search Marketing Qi Lu; and Dr. Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President, Research and Strategic Data Solutions.

Of course, co-founder David Filo, who has remained at Yahoo all this time (even still tinkering with its servers) hovers quietly above it all as the iconic techie of Yahoo.

Chief Marketing Officer and head of its Customer Experience Division Cammie Dunaway will be leaving Yahoo Nov. 2.

Yahoo officials confirmed the departure to me and said Dunaway (pictured here) was seeking “new opportunities.”

Despite the job, the well-liked exec has not been one with a huge profile at Yahoo, so it is not clear to me what this means, as marketing issues have also not been a big focus at the company. That might change as Yahoo seeks to keep its traffic from falling and also reinforce its well-known brand.

Dunaway joined Yahoo in 2003 and was charged with, according to Yahoo’s Web site, “overseeing key initiatives that focus specifically on the consumer, including global branding and marketing efforts, consumer insights, user experience and design, editorial, policy and customer care.”

She had spent 13 years at Frito-Lay, supervising brands such as Doritos, Cheetos, Lay’s, Ruffles and Rold Gold pretzels.

UPDATE: Here’s some lovely memos posted on Valleywag about the departure: Dunaway’s (she still bleeds purple! Ouch!) and one from Yahoo President Sue Decker, which kind of muddies already muddy waters.