Sunnyvale, California — Struggling search portal Yahoo, in its continuous management revamping found someone new to manage a collection of its most important offerings. The company has appointed digital-media veteran “Bryan Lamkin,” who previously worked at Adobe Systems and two venture capital firms, will join the Sunnyvale-based corporation with the title “senior vice president of Applications Products,” the group that manages some of its highest-profile products and is an essential element of the Yahoo Open Strategy.
This is perhaps the most important change that occurred in the recent weeks is the replacement of SVP Scott Dietzen–who has been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo–by former Adobe Systems exec Bryan Lamkin.
Lamkin has been designated as senior vice president of Yahoo’s Applications Products division, apparently taking over the portfolio from Scott Dietzen, who joined Yahoo! with its $350m purchase of open-source email start-up Zimbra. Dietzen will become vice president of strategy.
Lamkin will be incharge of Applications and Products division, which encompasses its e-mail and instant messaging services, photo-hosting site Flickr, as well as Yahoo Answers, Groups, and e-mail and calendar service Zimbra. He will report directly to Executive Vice President of Products and Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh.
The odds seem decent that Lamkin will be up to the task. But so far, it is not clear what exactly Lamkin’s mission will be at Yahoo! According to his profile on LinkedIn, he does bring 14 years of product development, management, and marketing experience on some of Adobe’s signature digital and media products. Lamkin has most recently served as SVP of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit, where the software exec has handled Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, and the Creative Suite as a whole.
As part of its “Yahoo Open Strategy,” the company is struggling to better integrate social connections with its online applications.
His role will be a central one at Yahoo in light of a recent reorganization led by CEO Carol Bartz, which unified Yahoo’s product and technology groups under Balogh. Bartz said Tuesday she was dissatisfied with the unfocused engineering work at Yahoo and called for a new round of layoffs, in part to make room for new engineering talent.
Lamkin left Adobe in November 2008 after Adobe began grappling with the challenge that open source and online poses to closed-source, desktop software from companies such as Adobe.
Lastly, in another executive lineup changes, The Wall Street Journal last weekend reported that Yahoo’s most senior communications chief, Brad Williams, has left the company. He had been running PR–admirably and with good cheer, and despite all the bad news–since its head, Jill Nash, departed earlier this year.