More musical chairs at Yahoo, which BoomTown predicted recently, as top execs at the company move in and out of jobs, and new ones from the outside move in.

Perhaps the most important change to occur is the replacement this week of SVP Scott Dietzen–who has been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo (YHOO)–by former Adobe Systems (ADBE) exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.

Lamkin will become SVP of Applications Products.

According to his profile on LinkedIn, Lamkin (pictured here) was most recently SVP of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit, where the software exec “led product strategy, marketing and product development for Adobe’s flagship software applications, including Photoshop, the Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator.”

Lamkin, who was at Adobe for 14 years, has more recently been an executive-in-residence at two venture firms, New Enterprise Associates and Sutter Hill Ventures.

He will take over for Dietzen, who came to Yahoo in 2007 after its $350 million Zimbra open-source email acquisition

Dietzen–whom sources said is more entrepreneurial than managerial and did not want to lead such a big organization at the Internet giant–will become VP of strategy in the move. Many said they expect he will eventually leave Yahoo to try his hand at another start-up.

His colleague, Zimbra founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj, left Yahoo earlier this year to join Redpoint Ventures as a VC.

In his job since, Dietzen has been busy fixing Yahoo’s mail and calendar offerings. (See my video interview with him below from last fall.)

But that’s not all.

Also afoot is a restructuring of Yahoo’s North American sales unit, with the unexpected promotion of Mitch Spolan, who was a regional sales exec and will now be in charge of all North American field sales.

The paidContent Web site reported the sales changes first, which have been rumored around Yahoo recently.

Spolan jumped over two more senior execs, sources said, who run sales operations for the East and West coasts. One of those execs, Beth Lawrence, will now run Yahoo’s relations with agencies. Both report to U.S. sales SVP Joanne Bradford.

Over the last 18 months, Yahoo has seen a bleeding of its advertising staff to a wide range of Silicon Valley Web companies, including, most recently, Yahoo’s VP of Sales Operations Dan Foehner to social-networking site Facebook.

Lastly, one of Yahoo’s most senior communications execs, Brad Williams, was let go as part of its recent round of layoffs. He had been running PR–admirably and with good cheer, I might add, despite all the bad news–since its head, Jill Nash, departed earlier this year.

Williams’s departure was first reported by The Wall Street Journal tonight. He came to Yahoo in early 2008 from eBay (EBAY).

New marketing head Elisa Steele, who was hired by CEO Carol Bartz, had recently hired a headhunting firm to find a new PR chief, sources said, and Williams was not considered as a candidate for the job.

UPDATE: Yahoo confirmed my report above.

A spokesman sent me the following info about Lamkin’s appointment:

Bryan Lamkin, formerly of Adobe, is joining Yahoo! as senior vice president of Applications Products, reporting directly to Ari Balogh. As a reminder, the Applications Products group consists of several key global products for Yahoo!, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups and Zimbra.

Bryan brings a wealth of experience on the consumer technology front and his background ties in nicely with Yahoo!’s ongoing focus to deliver great consumer experiences across the globe.

Bryan takes over for Scott Dietzen, who was named the interim head of Application Products following the reorg back in February. Scott will continue on at Yahoo!, and will work across Yahoo!’s Applications Products in a new product strategy role.

Bio

Bryan Lamkin

Senior Vice President, Applications Product, Yahoo!

Bryan Lamkin joins Yahoo! as the senior vice president of Applications Products. In this role, he will oversee the global strategy, development and performance for key products within the Yahoo! portfolio, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups and Zimbra.

Lamkin most recently served as senior vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit. Lamkin led product strategy, marketing and research and development for Adobe’s flagship software applications, including the Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, the Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator.

In his 14 years at Adobe Systems, Lamkin held key management positions including Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Imaging and Video and Vice President of Marketing, Professional Publishing Solutions. Lamkin was responsible for product development and marketing as well as the acquisition and product integration strategies that established Adobe’s overwhelming leadership in digital imaging and video and web publishing. Before joining Adobe Systems, Lamkin served in key product marketing and international product development roles at Software Publishing Corporation and holds both a BA and MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

And here is Dietzen in my video interview:

The move, to be announced internally later today, is not a big surprise, even though Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra in the fall of 2007.

Dharmaraj (pictured here) had previously stepped back from day-to-day leadership at the Yahoo communications and communities division, which is run by former Zimbra President and CTO Scott Dietzen.

But the departure of an innovative entrepreneur like Dharmaraj–although typical when big companies buy start-ups–is never a good thing, given that it’s more important than ever to keep innovative leaders at Yahoo.

New CEO Carol Bartz will have to tap internal leadership if she hopes to turn Yahoo (YHOO) into the kind of fresh opportunity she said it could be when she was hired earlier this month.

Yahoo introduced new email services recently, based on some of Zimbra’s technologies and concepts.

That has been important, since Yahoo Mail has always been a company bright spot and has remained the bigger provider of Web email to general consumers.

But most agree that Yahoo has allowed the Google (GOOG) mail offering, Gmail, to suck up all the oxygen in the room with more flashy features like threading of conversations while not serving up a strong response quickly enough in an arena Yahoo pioneered.

Zimbra vaulted its effort at differentiation from the hyped Google offering forward more quickly.

More importantly, it has strengthened Yahoo’s ability to make online email act more like a computer program than a Web page, which has been the main focus of late of Yahoo, Google, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and Windows Live Hotmail from Microsoft (MSFT).

In addition, since Zimbra was designed with flexible and open Ajax programming tools, it made it easy for third-party developers to make many other applications that jack innovation from the outside, making the communications platform the center of the Web experience with video, search and other tools.

It’s not clear where Dharmaraj is going, but here is a video interview I did with him last year after Yahoo bought Zimbra:

In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.

At first, the beta–current users can register to try it here–will take place in the United States, Brazil, India, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–that will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.

It is also Yahoo’s first attempt at leveraging and integrating technology from its $350 million acquisition of open-source email and calendaring company Zimbra just over a year ago.

And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.

That lack of innovation has resulted in major inroads in recent years by newer entrants like Google, whose calendar launched with more modern features, like color-coding, easy sharing and drag-and-drop functionality.

With its renovation, which is based on open standards, the updated calendar from Yahoo (YHOO) now has these kinds of features and also works more seamlessly with Yahoo’s powerful email product, Yahoo! Mail, which has 278 million users.

The new Yahoo calendar is built on the Zimbra platform, which uses Ajax functionality in its online calendars and iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV3 standards.

That makes it interoperable with other online calendar services, including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Time Warner’s AOL and Google.

One of the cooler features is the ability to zoom-in and zoom-out from a monthly wall calendar view to a single event.

In addition, Yahoo’s new calendar can integrate pictures from its Flickr photo community and also has a “to-do” list.

As the beta is rolled out further in the coming months, Yahoo will add additional synching and event discovery features.

I talked about all this today with Yahoo SVP Scott Dietzen, who came to the company with the Zimbra acquisition and now is in charge of all communications products at Yahoo.

Here is the video interview I did with him:

And here are the screenshots of the new calendar, along with one of the old calendar, for comparison (click on images to make them larger):

The old main Yahoo calendar

The new main Yahoo calendar

The “zoom” feature

The integration with Flickr

The Upcoming.org integration

Yesterday, Yahoo trotted out a range of top execs who were unusually loquacious at its “open house,” where the company made a valiant effort to explain an aggressive strategy to open up its platform and products.

In an attempt to redefine and refocus itself, Yahoo has correctly wed itself to the trend toward more-open platforms, rather than locking consumers into its once tightly closed portal gates.

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to search and ad infrastructure. Now it is trying to show that it can be open all over the company.

BoomTown liveblogged the event, here and here, but nothing is as good as hearing all about it from the horse’s mouth. Or, in this case, the Yahoos’ mouths.

So here are video interviews I did with a range of Yahoo’s top execs, including Audience Product Division EVP Ash Patel, Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore (who cleverly used a Barbara Mandrell line to explain Yahoo’s open strategy), social media guru Marc Davis, Yahoo! Mail kingpin Scott Dietzen, Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries and PR minion Brad Williams:

After all, Garlinghouse’s infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” was the key ur-moment that one could point to as the one in which the curtains were pulled back at the troubled Internet company to reveal, well, a very sticky mess.

Garlinghouse (pictured here), who ran communications and communities for Yahoo (YHOO), is set to be replaced in part by Scott Dietzen, who was the president and CTO of Zimbra (and before that CTO of BEA Systems). Yahoo bought the highly innovative open-source email startup last fall for $350 million.

(By the way, Dietzen will get only 50%–communications products and services–of Garlinghouse’s job, while Front Door head Tapan Bhat will get communities.)

But back to Brad and peanut butter: The 2006 internal document, penned by the Yahoo senior vice president, essentially unfairly impugned delicious peanut butter by using it as a metaphor for Yahoo spreading its resources too thinly.

As far as I am concerned, life is all in the spreading–you can go thick with peanut butter, Brad!

In any case, as a memorial to the Garlinghouse era, BoomTown decodes the manifesto:

Brad wrote: Three and half years ago, I enthusiastically joined Yahoo! The magnitude of the opportunity was only matched by the magnitude of the assets. And an amazing team has been responsible for rebuilding Yahoo!

I proudly bleed purple and yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company.

Translation: This is the borderline cultish kissing-up part, before I deliver the coup de nut.

Thus: Blah, blah, blah–love it! Blah, blah, double blah–so profound I think I shall weep!

And the nuclear blah, blah, blah–I pull out the bleeding purple and yellow expression, used way too often at Yahoo, which, when you really think about it, is just gross.

Brad wrote: But all is not well. Last Thursday’s NY Times article was a blessing in the disguise of a painful public flogging. While it lacked accurate details, its conclusions rang true, and thus was a much needed wake-up call. But also a call to action. A clear statement with which I, and far too many Yahoos, agreed. And thankfully a reminder. A reminder that the measure of any person is not in how many times he or she falls down–but rather the spirit and resolve used to get back up. The same is now true of our Company.

It’s time for us to get back up.

Translation: Cue ominous music! Drag out the “Rocky I-VI” cliches (except for V, which sucked)! Order those I’ve-Fallen- and-I-Can’t- Get-Up thingies for the entire company. Also, insult the media, even though that’s exactly where all Yahoo employees get the most up-to-date information about what’s what here.

Brad wrote: I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity–in fact the invitation–to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change. Our current course and speed simply will not get us there. Short-term band-aids will not get us there.

It’s time for us to get back up and seize this invitation.

Translation: You realize, of course, this was written in 2006! Um, almost two years ago. And nothing has, well, changed all that much.

Strong, clear and powerful message that we understand our problems and are charting a course for fundamental change?

A cow could fall through the crack that task disappeared into!

Brad wrote: I imagine there’s much discussion amongst the Company’s senior most leadership around the challenges we face. At the risk of being redundant, I wanted to share my take on our current situation and offer a recommended path forward, an attempt to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Translation: No one in senior management is listening to me. I’ll show them Tom-Cruise- Jerry-Maguire style!

Show me the money!

Brad wrote: Recognizing Our Problems

Translation: Help me, help you. Help me, help you.

Brad wrote: We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything–to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like–rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

Translation: This, of course, is the description of the basic family setup of “The Sopranos.” Except we have no Bada-Bing.

I so wish we had a Bada-Bing at Yahoo, instead of that not-Google cafeteria.

In fact, I wish we had Tony Soprano running the place, except I personally think he got shot during that annoying “Don’t Stop Believin’” ending (see video below!).

Brad wrote: I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

Translation: I hate peanut butter. We all should.

That is, those of us whose parents did not know how to make a proper sandwich.

Brad wrote: We lack clarity of ownership and accountability. The most painful manifestation of this is the massive redundancy that exists throughout the organization. We now operate in an organizational structure–admittedly created with the best of intentions–that has become overly bureaucratic. For far too many employees, there is another person with dramatically similar and overlapping responsibilities. This slows us down and burdens the company with unnecessary costs.

Translation: Again, this was two years ago. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

That’s French for peanut butter.

Brad wrote: Equally problematic, at what point in the organization does someone really OWN the success of their product or service or feature? Product, marketing, engineering, corporate strategy, financial operations…there are so many people in charge (or believe that they are in charge) that it’s not clear if anyone is in charge. This forces decisions to be pushed up–rather than down. It forces decisions by committee or consensus and discourages the innovators from breaking the mold…thinking outside the box.

There’s a reason why a centerfielder and a left fielder have clear areas of ownership. Pursuing the same ball repeatedly results in either collisions or dropped balls. Knowing that someone else is pursuing the ball and hoping to avoid that collision–we have become timid in our pursuit. Again, the ball drops.

Translation: It is like Al Haig gone wild at Yahoo–I’m in charge here!

And then right onto the business-as-a-baseball game cliche, as we are like “The Bad News Bears” at Yahoo. Except we could use a drunk coach like Walter Matthau right about now.

Brad wrote: We lack decisiveness. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late. Without a clear and focused vision, and without complete clarity of ownership, we lack a macro perspective to guide our decisions and visibility into who should make those decisions. We are repeatedly stymied by challenging and hairy decisions. We are held hostage by our analysis paralysis.

Translation: Yahoo Held Hostage! This is an eerie precursor to CEO Jerry Yang’s 100-day No Sacred Cow Vision Quest, isn’t it?

Brad wrote: We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.

• Global strategy from BU vs. Global strategy from Int’l

Translation: There can be only one! Although one is the loneliest number, which is why we have two of everything.

Brad wrote: We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are “phoning” it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while–at all levels–employees are enabled to “hang around.” Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don’t align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts.

As a result, the employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed.

Translation: By “phoning” it in, I mean from their cellphones at home. By “hang around,” I mean at the bar near the office.

By employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave, I mean me! Buh-bye, Ash!

Brad wrote: Solving our Problems

Translation: And now I return to Jerry Maguire!–Help me, help you. Help me, help you.

Brad wrote: We have awesome assets. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet.

I don’t pretend there is only one path forward available to us. However, at a minimum, I want to be part of the solution and thus have outlined a plan here that I believe can work. It is my strong belief that we need to act very quickly or risk going further down a slippery slope. The plan here is not perfect; it is, however, FAR better than no action at all.

Translation: More Maguire required! I will not rest until I have you holding a Coke, wearing your own shoe, playing a Sega game *featuring you*, while singing your own song in a new commercial, *starring you*, broadcast during the Super Bowl, in a game that you are winning, and I will not *sleep* until that happens. I’ll give you 15 minutes to call me back.

Brad wrote: There are three pillars to my plan:

I emphatically believe we simply must eliminate the redundancies we have created and the first step in doing this is by restructuring our organization. We can be more efficient with fewer people and we can get more done, more quickly. We need to return more decision-making to a new set of business units and their leadership. But we can’t achieve this with baby-step changes. We need to fundamentally rethink how we organize to win.

Translation: In a peanutshell, let’s be Google (GOOG).

Brad wrote: Independent of specific proposals of what this reorganization should look like, two key principles must be represented:

Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU’s so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise–decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.

Translation: Or, maybe we could be Facebook.

Brad wrote: I love Yahoo! I’m proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I’m proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head.

Translation: More yucky purple and yellow bleeding with a cup full of Britney-Spears-crazy hairstyling on top!

Brad wrote: My motivation for this memo is the adamant belief that, as before, we have a tremendous opportunity ahead. I don’t pretend that I have the only available answers, but we need to get the discussion going; change is needed and it is needed soon. We can be a stronger and faster company–a company with a clearer vision and clearer ownership and clearer accountability.

Catch the balls.

Translation: My motivation for this memo is the adamant belief that it will drive my bosses nuts and someone will surely leak it to the press.

Thus, I wind up with the marathon-not-a-sprint cliche, sprinkle in the get-up one and round the bases with the baseball cliche.

Brad wrote: And stop eating peanut butter.

Translation: Despite my unfair impugning of the peanut-loving work of George Washington Carver, I secretly love peanut butter.

But it once got in my chocolate. Or did my chocolate get in my peanut butter?

In any case, soon to come: The Jelly Memo. That’ll be sweet!

And here is the last minutes of “The Sopranos,” where Tony–and here is an exhaustive and convincing explanation as to why–got whacked:

Sources said a more substantial public announcement has been pushed by Yahoo’s board–apparently, an internal email to employees was considered too–to show Yahoo’s new team and that the company still has a strong bench, despite a lot of exec departures of late.

As we already wrote, the structure will pivot on several key execs, reporting to President Sue Decker.

EVP of Yahoo’s Platforms and Infrastructure division Ash Patel as head of a new Audience Products group (its name was changed from Global Products); Global Partner Solutions EVP Hilary Schneider as the head of a new U.S unit; various folks running around the rest of the globe.

There will also be another strategy team group with a new head, who has not yet been chosen.

And Yahoo will name Scott Dietzen (pictured, right) to take over part of the job of SVP Brad Garlinghouse, who running was running all communications properties and products. Dietzen will get the communications portfolio, which includes email and messaging, all under Patel.

(Community properties like Flickr will actually move under Front Door Head Tapan Bhat, who also reports to Patel.)

Dietzen was the president and CTO of Zimbra (and before that CTO of BEA Systems), the highly innovative open-source email startup Yahoo bought last fall for $350 million.

Garlinghouse (pictured, left), as we reported last night, will not be officially leaving until the end of the summer, though. He is currently traveling in Asia, sources said, and has not yet decided on a new gig.

He is, of course, the man who wrote the infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which first revealed deep tension within Yahoo.

Yahoo is likely to also announce changes in the engineering organization under CTO Ari Balogh, who is also orchestrating some massive and much-needed changes in the arena at Yahoo.