Salim Ismail To Head Yahoo Brickhouse
Yahoo Brickhouse, a new semi-autonomous business unit to foster new product development, is yet to be formally launched. They've been busy, though. Yahoo Pipes, which launched on February 7, is a Brickhouse project.
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo has confirmed it appointed Salim Ismail to head Brickhouse, a semi-autonomous unit for new product development that has not yet been formally launched — meaning the hire lands before the structure itself goes public. Ismail confirmed the move on his own blog, ending what he called a long hiatus from blogging.
Brickhouse already has one shipped proof point: Yahoo Pipes, a Brickhouse project that launched on February 7, so the unit arrives with a working product rather than a promise. The appointment also fits a broader Yahoo habit of testing formats outside the mainline, as with the Internet-broadcast reality-series pilot the company shaped up in early 2006.
First-order effects
- Ismail's job is to take Brickhouse from informal project cluster to formally launched unit, with Yahoo Pipes serving as the in-house template for how it ships — small teams releasing directly to users rather than through Yahoo's mainline product process.
Second-order effects
- Inside Yahoo, Brickhouse creates a competing venue for engineering talent and roadmap attention, letting the company test consumer products without committing core-portal resources — pressure that falls on existing business-unit leads whose proposals now compete against faster incubator projects.
Third-order effects
- If Pipes-style releases continue out of the unit, Yahoo's product identity shifts incrementally from top-down portal planning toward skunkworks output — a structure that, if it works, rival large web companies would need to replicate to match the release cadence.
The trend: Large web portals are institutionalizing semi-autonomous incubation units as a way to outrun their own established product-development cycles.