More on Yahoo Reorg: Sue Decker's Memo
We got the full internal memo Sue Decker sent this afternoon to the team, on Yahoo's (Nsdq: YHOO) reorg..the full memo is here. See our earlier post on the reorg. Salient points from the memo: — Jerry and I and the rest of the management team …
Context & Ripple Effects
The memo is the confirmation beat for a story that had been running all week: paidContent publishes Sue Decker's full internal note to staff hours after the reorg broke, joining BoomTown's running 'vision quest' coverage, Valleywag's report — explicitly unconfirmed — that the sales chief may be out, and a New York Times writeup of the shake-up under Yahoo's new president.
It caps a busy product summer at Yahoo: a sophisticated Yahoo Local makeover and acknowledgment that Google, Microsoft and Yelp are gaining ground there (August 2007), live search suggestions in July, dynamic URL support in late August — and a firm denial of MySpace acquisition interest earlier in the month. The reorg is the management-side answer to that competitive picture.
First-order effects
- Decker and Jerry Yang's memo formalizes new reporting lines across the company today; every executive whose unit moves answers to a different boss immediately.
- Valleywag's unconfirmed report that the sales chief may be out hangs over the reshuffle, putting the ad-sales organization under scrutiny even where the memo is silent.
Second-order effects
- The restructuring lands just two weeks after the Local relaunch conceded ground to Google, Microsoft and Yelp, forcing the reorganized product groups to compete against rivals' momentum rather than from a stable base.
- Advertisers and publishers now wait out the transition: whoever ends up owning the consolidated sales relationship controls pricing and bundling across display and search inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the memo-then-reorg cycle repeats, Yahoo's structural answer to a faster-moving Google becomes recurring reorganization itself — with product roadmaps reset by each shuffle and execution time lost between them.
The trend: Large web portals are responding to Google's speed with recurring top-down reorganizations announced by internal memo, making structure — not products — the lever of competitive strategy.