Yet another Yahoo executive departs the twelve-year-old company…
Just when Yahoo thought it was done with the tumultuous year of 2007, YSlow plug-in creator and Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Souders has ditched his Sunnyvale gig, has announced that as of Jan. 7th he will be working in favor of the greener pastures around the Googleplex, according to his personal website.
Before you all assume that Souders was in charge of Yahoo’s Mime Troupe, let us clarify that the Chief of Performance was in charge of website performance. Souders is author of the High Performance Web Sites. At Yahoo, he worked on the YSlow Firefox (Firebug) extension, as well as the official Developer Network and the User Interface blogs.
“Souders has worked at Yahoo since 2000. You may have seen him speaking at April’s Web 2.0 Expo or October’s Widget Summit or Future of Web Apps.”
“Is Yahoo going to zero?” asks The Silicon Alley Insider. Judging by the number of senior folks who are leaving, there is overwhelming evidence that would indicate so, plus reports of pitiful sales service, plus search share trends, plus the apparent lack of urgency at the top, this certainly does not seem an outrageous conclusion.
The implications of Steve’s and many executives’ departures are lofty considering the position Yahoo once held in the industry and the decline in demand and performance in the past few years.
We have observed plenty of departures on the VP level from Yahoo through 2007. Since the portal company has a few hundred of those positions, some winnowing probably had to take place anyway.
It is one thing to lose sales and marketing pros, but Souders’ departure means watching a respected geek type decamp for a competitor. That is not a great development at Yahoo.
Although it is not quite time to chalk it up to being a very sad online folklore story, Yahoo needs to have a stellar year and surprise everyone in order to prevent the predictions from becoming a reality.
Yahoo executives have been leaving the company with such frequency this year that it is hardly news. Some say that it is yet another sign that Yahoo, once the sweetheart of the Internet, is on the fast track to oblivion.
And here is another un-outrageous conclusion: If Yahoo cannot manage to turn its ship around; it will be the 12-year old Internet industry’s biggest disaster story. Yahoo has/had everything: great global brand, awesome financial performance, huge industry lead, the biggest media-company audience in the world, and, unlike the dial-up centric AOL, the right business model. And it still has most of those things.
“So if Yahoo ends up getting chopped up and sold at the junk shop, shareholders have every right to be outraged.”
Before Yahoo, Steve worked for many small and mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, CoolSync and Helix Systems. He has also worked at General Magic, Lycos and WhoWhere?
Steve also blogs about web performance on: ‘Yahoo! Developer Network’. He frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience. Steve is co-chair Velocity 2008, the first web performance conference sponsored by O’Reilly.
In the early 80’s Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning including several publications and conference appearances. He received a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
Ajaxian founder and Google coder Dion Almaer cannot wait for his new co-worker to report for duty next week. “Lunch is on me on the 7th, Steve,” Almaer wrote.
Souders’ announcement, placed atop his blog, showed he has embraced the model with which Google discusses its internal business: “I’m at Google as of January 7, 2008.”
But if Souders was at least partially responsible for speeding up Yahoo’s new mail client, he is going to be missed by his former co-workers.
“We, personally, are going to give it one more year. It is still nearly inconceivable to us that, given Yahoo’s tremendous collection of assets, it can not be fixed, and if/when it is, the stock should soar. But we confess that our confidence has been deeply shaken…”