Yahoo’s New Application VP

news.com has an article about Yahoo’s new application VP, Bryan Lamkin.

Yahoo hires former Adobe exec to lead applications group

by Jennifer Guevin

Yahoo has hired Bryan Lamkin to head up the group that manages some of its highest-profile products and is an essential element of the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Lamkin will take on the role of senior vice president of Yahoo's Applications 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.

As part of its Yahoo Open Strategy, the company is attempting 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.

Yahoo has been reducing data center costs along with the rest of the top players as data center knowledge reported.

Q&A: Yahoo Discusses Its Data Centers

October 6th, 2008 : Rich Miller

Search and news portal Yahoo (YHOO) is a major user of data center space, and is in the midst of a significant expansion of its infrastructure. We recently had an email Q-and-A with Yahoo Vice President of Operations Kevin Timmons, who oversees the company’s data centers, and asked about Yahoo’s data center growth and energy efficiency initiatives.

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What are the factors prompting Yahoo to seek additional data center space?

We’re constantly in expansion mode here, primarily due to simple traffic growth to the site and our efforts to continuously serve our global audience in the best manner possible. We also are continuously looking to consolidate many of our smaller legacy centers into more efficiently designed facilities that are more reliable and more cost effective to operate.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Bryan when he was a VP at Adobe and was curious what he was going to do after his retirement from Adobe in 2006. Hopefully it will not be long before I can get in contact with Bryan in his new role at Yahoo.

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YaWho? Is this end of Yahoo?

Yahoo’s CEO Yang steps down.

Hitting the reset button
"I think it's the right move for the company," said Eric Jackson, an activist Yahoo shareholder who has pressured the company for big changes. However, he added, "It's really too little too late. This is a board failure more than it is Jerry's failure. These problems have been around at Yahoo for well over two years now."

Who will benefit most from Yahoo’s failure?  Microsoft or Google?  If Google gains the most market share though, watch for the DOJ to become more focused on Google as a monopoly.

At some point someone is going to move into Yahoo’s Purple data center in Eastern Washington.  I wonder if the new tenants will want the building painted.

big_quincyexterior.jpg

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Google Withdraws From Yahoo Offer

I discussed the Justice depart vs. Google as a battle in this post.

And, Google withdraws from its Yahoo offer to avoid the battle.

Google Withdraws From Yahoo Deal

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Google Inc. backed out its advertising agreement with Yahoo Inc. Wednesday, as the Department of Justice notified the search giant that it planned to file a lawsuit to block the deal.

"Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement," Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote on the company's blog.

In a statement, Yahoo said it "continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court." 

The Justice Department issued a statement, saying it had determined that the deal would have made the companies "collaborators rather than competitors for a significant portion of their search advertising businesses, materially reducing important competitive rivalry between the two companies."

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Where the Clouds Meet The Ground

The Economist has a feature on Cloud computing.  An audio is available here.

Nicholas Carr summarizes The Economist article.

The Economist tours the cloud

October 25, 2008

The new issue of The Economist features a good primer on cloud computing, written by Ludwig Siegele, which looks at trends in data centers, software, networked devices, and IT economics and speculates about the broader implications for businesses and nations. A free pdf of the entire report is also available.

Siegele notes that the hype surrounding the term "cloud computing" may have peaked already - Google searches for the phrase have fallen after a big spike in July - but that "even if the term is already passé, the cloud itself is here to stay and to grow. It follows naturally from the combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors with ever faster and more ubiquitous networks. As a result, data centres are becoming factories for computing services on an industrial scale; software is increasingly being delivered as an online service; and wireless networks connect more and more devices to such offerings." The "precipitation from the cloud," he concludes (milking the passé metaphor one last time), "will be huge."

Part of the report is a specific feature on Data Centres.

CORPORATE IT

Where the cloud meets the ground

Oct 23rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Data centres are quickly evolving into service factories

Illustration by Matthew Hodson

IT IS almost as easy as plugging in a laser printer. Up to 2,500 servers—in essence, souped-up personal computers—are crammed into a 40-foot (13-metre) shipping container. A truck places the container inside a bare steel-and-concrete building. Workers quickly connect it to the electric grid, the computer network and a water supply for cooling. The necessary software is downloaded automatically. Within four days all the servers are ready to dish up videos, send e-mails or crunch a firm’s customer data.

This is Microsoft’s new data centre in Northlake, a suburb of Chicago, one of the world’s most modern, biggest and most expensive, covering 500,000 square feet (46,000 square metres) and costing $500m. One day it will hold 400,000 servers. The entire first floor will be filled with 200 containers like this one. Michael Manos, the head of Microsoft’s data centres, is really excited about these containers. They solve many of the problems that tend to crop up when putting up huge data centres: how to package and transport servers cheaply, how to limit their appetite for energy and how to install them only when they are needed to avoid leaving expensive assets idle.

But containers are not the only innovation of which Mr Manos is proud. Microsoft’s data centres in Chicago and across the world are equipped with software that tells him exactly how much power each application consumes and how much carbon it emits. “We’re building a global information utility,” he says.

Engineers must have spoken with similar passion when the first moving assembly lines were installed in car factories almost a century ago, and Microsoft’s data centre in Northlake, just like Henry Ford’s first large factory in Highland Park, Michigan, may one day be seen as a symbol of a new industrial era.

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Yahoo wastes Carbon-Neutral efforts

Yahoo’s Christina Page presented a keynote at the Uptime Symposium 2008 and has a podcast on Uptime here.

Listening to Christina explain how Yahoo went carbon neutral in 2007 by buying carbon credits, questions came up in her keynote asking what was the business value of going carbon neutral. Christina danced around this. But, I think what the reality is that Yahoo’s management, probably specifically Jerry Yang supported the idea of going carbon neutral and gave Christina the job of purchasing carbon credits.

With all the recent news questioning Jerry Yang’s management decisions dealing with Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid who would ever follow in Yahoo’s footsteps for anything they have decided to do over the past couple of years.  BusinessWeek highlights again how many executives are leaving Yahoo.

Another day, another high-level exit—or three—from Yahoo! (YHOO). The most recent round came to light June 19, when TechCrunch reported the imminent departure of three prominent Yahoos: Vish Makhijani, general manager of Yahoo Search; Qi Lu, executive vice-president for search and advertising technology; and Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice-president for communications and communities and the author of a scathing 2006 memo dubbed the "peanut butter manifesto" that accused Yahoo of losing its focus (BusinessWeek.com, 6/12/08).

Garlinghouse and the others are among more than 50 high-profile Yahoo executives and managers who have left the company in the past three months or intend to leave, raising concerns that a leadership vacuum will ensue in light of failed merger discussions with Microsoft (MSFT), and amid withering public criticism of Yahoo management by billionaire investor Carl Icahn. The exodus makes it harder for remaining executives to persuade shareholders the company has the means to turn itself around.

The end result is Yahoo’s carbon neutrality is wasted as who would follow their lead in anything right now.

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