When Jerry Yang and Susan Decker took over the chief executive officer and president positions at Yahoo, ousting Terry Semel, everyone knew that it was just the beginning. Big changes for management and organization lay in the very near future for the venerable search engine. In this article, we’ll take a look at those changes, and consider Yahoo’s future.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang promised that no sacred cows would be spared when he assumed the CEO position in June and began a top-to-bottom examination of the company that he projected would last 100 days. Near the halfway point, Susan Decker released a memo detailing the new structure. It serves at least two purposes at once: it increases accountability while simultaneously streamlining the company by combining several different products and services that belong together.
The biggest change involved the creation of a new division called Global Partner Solutions (GPS). Yang and Decker gave this division responsibility for all of Yahoo’s partners, or as the memo put it: “advertisers, agencies, resellers, publishers, ad networks, developers, or others…This new group will be charged with creating, delivering and coordinating global best practices for solutions to all of our partners.” More importantly, however, the group will handle all of Yahoo’s sales, marketing, and business development for the company’s U.S. go-to-market efforts, with the exceptions of business development deals for Mobile and content.
Yahoo units that now come under the new GPS umbrella include Global Sales, the Online Channel, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, Corporate Partnerships and Hot Jobs. Susan Decker placed Hilary Schneider at the head of the new division. With Schneider in, six-and-a-half year Yahoo veteran Greg Coleman will be leaving the search engine in February. He took the company from $600 million a year in advertising revenues to more than $6 billion today, thanks to his work with the company’s search and display ads sales teams.
A change that big must impact other portions of Yahoo. For Schneider to assume her new duties, her old ones had to be moved. So Yahoo’s properties in the Local Markets and Commerce Division, except for HotJobs, shifted into the Yahoo! Network Division under Jeff Weiner. For Weiner, this must be almost like coming home, since he oversaw a number of these properties previously, when he served as senior vice president of Search and Marketplaces. Decker expects, as a result, that this part of the transition will be seamless.
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