One more Yahoo reorganization, this time out of necessity

It is an obvious scramble by Yahoo's leaders to reassess a corporate structure that appears to have been shattered in recent weeks, and assemble a template that makes it appear the shards fell into place intentionally.

During the 1990s, Microsoft used to provide its customers and shareholders its vision of where the company was going by updating its running hypothesis for the future of Windows, always three years out or longer. The way Yahoo has performed the same task throughout the last three years has been by reorganizing and reshuffling its divisions.

But this latest rearrangement of deck chairs, announced yesterday, is more out of necessity than thoughtfully considered strategy, most notably because there are now far fewer chairs to be shuffled around. Yahoo's objective appears to have been to concoct a sensible sounding rationale for what's left -- for what remains of the company after so many key executives and department heads have departed.

The key casualty, as a result of this new alignment, appears to be the sensible, back-to-basics corporate alignment that CEO Jerry Yang and President Susan Decker announced just last October. In its place is a sort of fermentation of responsibilities based less around what the company needs, as much as what its remaining executives appear capable or willing to provide.

In short, the new alignment isn't aligned. As Yahoo announced yesterday, there will be three new divisions in the new company order, all reporting to Decker. One is devoted to Audience Products -- building the products and services that customers actually see and use, which had been one of Decker's own projects after she was released from her CFO cage in 2006. Ash Patel, who had been a key player in the development of one of Yahoo's bright spots, its Panama/AMP next-generation search engine, will be moved out of his area of greatest success, and will be asked to bolster the foundation for what Decker calls her company's "anchor properties."

The second new division is described as having accountability for "go-to-market" activities in the US (in the military, the term "tactics" might apply here, especially with contrast to "strategy"). The person who'll be in charge there, Hillary Schneider, is seen as a Decker loyalist and a rising star in the company, though her previous role was handling "go-to-market" worldwide in the Global Partner Solutions division. Worldwide performance had been another Yahoo bright spot.

And then there is a third new division called Insights Strategy, whose leader has yet to be named, and which sounds dangerously like the kind of department companies haphazardly create to reassure their shareholder that they're truly thinking about the future -- as well as to conveniently compartmentalize the kind of "futurist" thinking that always gets in the way of progress. Evidence of this kind of development appears in Yahoo's press release, which describes Insights Strategy as "[assuming] responsibility for centralizing and executing a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo."

In other words, a separate department for handling the question of how Yahoo best capitalizes on all that data it mines about potential audiences for advertisers -- a job you would think the platforms team, which had been headed by Patel, would have already sorted out. Historically, the creation of some divisions for thinking and separate divisions for doing has been a bad sign.

In the technology department, Yahoo will be developing a separate team for the development of cloud computing services -- storage and transfer of consumer data on Web-based servers. This is probably a necessary development, as companies such as Amazon and Symantec, with an acquisition two weeks ago, are seemingly coming out of nowhere to provide what in 2009 could be perceived as a principal, customer-facing service.