Yahoo announced their expected re-organisation late last night.  Its worth a comment here, because the strategies of the big three (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) affect us all in our internet activities.

We’re moving aggressively to deliver the most possible value to our key customers — audiences, advertisers and publishers — and seize the major new opportunities we see ahead for the Internet,” said Terry Semel, Yahoo! chairman and chief executive officer. “The Internet is continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, and we’re reshaping Yahoo! to be a leader in this transformation, just as we did successfully five years ago. Our strategy capitalizes on big emerging trends and leverages our core strengths in search, media, communities and communications. We believe having a more customer-focused organization …..

Source: Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus on Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

They have re-organised into three divisions:

• Audience
• Advertising
• Technology

Reading the detail in the release, this sounds like the channel (audience), product (advertising), technology approach.  Segment and customer understanding sounds like it might be embedded in either or both Audience and Advertising groups.  This is something that will need to be clarified, because segment understanding will drive much of the strategy.

Change is good, and this organisation seems clear.  What is interesting is that they have initiated a search for a C level lead in the Audience group. So this will take time. This particular group (Audience) reads like it has the mandate to address the issues raised in the peanut butter manifesto which outlined Yahoo was spread too thin.  This re-org certainly seems designed to address that problem, and we shall see where Garlinghouse, the manifesto author, ends up in all this.