Longtime Yahoo tech leader Ash Patel is taking some time off until early 2010.
Yahoo confirmed the break to BoomTown.
In recent days, some 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.
In a week, the entire advertising sales staff of MySpace will gather at a swanky new seaside resort about 20 miles south of Los Angeles to get a first glimpse of the fresh direction the company is preparing to take under its new management.
The beleaguered social networking site has been in the midst of an effort to reinvigorate its image, spur innovation in its product and–most of all–pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival Facebook has seen explosive growth.
On the possible agenda: A new strategy aimed at music and entertainment; a new look; and, perhaps, a new boss for the ad sales team.
According to sources close to the situation, AOL has been busy selecting the board for the company, which is still set to spin itself off by year’s end–even as it slows down a decision on a new search deal with either current partner Google or a more emboldened Microsoft.
AOL is using Spencer Stuart in the search for directors, led by well-known headhunter Jim Citrin, sources said, and the company has already settled on several outside candidates.
Wenda Harris Millard–calling in to BoomTown HQ from a cruise either on the way to or the way from Slovenia, since she said she was not exactly sure, given that it was the middle of the night there–wanted to make one thing clear:
She is still working for her other dozens of clients at Media Link as its president, but also has a big new gig helping MySpace get its advertising sales house in order, especially related to strategy and execution.
“I guess it’s a matter of semantics, but I will be leading the engagement,” said Millard. “But we have a whole team here too, and I am also still working for all our great clients.”
Okay, people?!? Which is, in Slovenian, in case anyone asks there, Wenda: Vidirati narod?
After a while–in a BoomTown mangling of the old cliché–if you are a nail, everything begins to look like a hammer.
So, it is probably inevitable that the next thing for much-beleaguered AOL staffers to start rumbling about is 2,000 people getting laid off next week.
After all, the Time Warner unit has a long history of whacking employees. So, it is easier to assume things will not be different under the regime of the latest CEO, Tim Armstrong.
Except it’s not actually true that such massive cuts are in the offing, since–as many sources I spoke to said–Armstrong is in the early part of figuring out what to do about the cost structure of AOL, after laying out a company strategy and rejiggering management.
It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.
Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”
In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.
Back in April, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.”
It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner online unit globally to find out what’s what and what he should do to turn AOL around.
BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and what path it will ultimately put AOL on.
In what many sources at the company said is a major push, Yahoo is working on a massive plan to overhaul its brand in order to repair a damaged public image and focus consumers on what defines Yahoo.
The effort is being spearheaded by newly installed Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele, who has hired well-known brand consulting firm Landor Associates, as well as an outside consultant named Penny Baldwin, who was a former top exec at brand and ad giant Young & Rubicam.
Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.
Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.
Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.
But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.
Later today, as BoomTown reported last week, Yahoo is putting on a search party.
Well, not a “party” party–although there will apparently be some lunch noshing at the “Search chalk talk,” during which top techies at the Internet giant will talk up the strategy for its more innovative products.
At its HQ in Silicon Valley last week, Google put on a similar show-off about its latest search innovations, as both it and Yahoo brace for the launch a major overhaul of the search offering of Microsoft, which is expected soon.
I’ll be liveblogging the Yahoo event, which begins at 11:30 a.m. PDT.
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 had been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo–by former Adobe Systems exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.
And there’s even more…
Last year, Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider and then-Media Group head Scott Moore had a summery seaside dinner with Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt in Santa Monica, Calif., right around the corner from the online publishing company’s HQ.
While many speculated that Yahoo could be doing some friendly kibitzing to get a sense of where the eclectic network of general- and special-interest sites was headed, for a possible acquisition, nothing came of it.
But now, a year later, with recent indications that a major strategy for new CEO Carol Bartz will finally follow through on making Yahoo’s massive but disparate service more social, especially in its content offerings, several sources close to the company tell me another look-see at Demand is likelier than ever.
Buried deep in a recent New York Times profile of Yahoo Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Yang were largely unexplained references to the names of two new initiatives now taking place within the ranks of Yahoo management.
Curiously called Aikido and Judo, after the two best-known forms of Japanese martial arts, they are, in fact, yet another round of navel-gazing strategic overview efforts, aimed at assessing how Yahoo operates its consumer and advertising businesses.
And, according to several sources within the company, besides more efforts to streamline Yahoo in both arenas, Aikido and Judo are more specifically looking at what cuts the company can make to meet aggressive financial goals it promised when trying to rebuff a now-defunct takeover bid by Microsoft.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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