Garlinghouse wrote the infamous peanut butter manifesto.

Is this re-org caused by the defection of these people or is it just a matter of habit? If you haven't been keeping track, Yahoo! also had a major reorganization at the beginning of December 2006. Terry Semel was still chairman and chief executive officer at that time. The press release claimed four main objectives:

* Expand customer-centric culture and capabilities — Yahoo! will develop rich experiences for each audience segment and deliver solutions to meet the needs of all advertisers and publishers worldwide. Yahoo! will organize its services around audience segments and advertising customers, rather than around products.

* Create leading social media environments — Yahoo! will leverage its strong positions in community, communications, search, as well as media content across its global network to create leading social media environments, which will encourage every user on the Yahoo! network to participate in the consumption and publishing of information, and knowledge through tagging, reviewing, sharing of images and audio, and other social media activities.

* Lead in next-generation advertising platforms — Yahoo! will extend its industry-leading breadth of offerings to give the most diverse array of advertisers, from large brand marketers to local merchants, every opportunity to connect with audiences on and off Yahoo!.

* Drive organizational effectiveness and scale — Yahoo! will recruit and retain the best industry talent and focus its resources on high-impact, network-wide platforms to help capture the most significant long-term growth opportunities.

Somehow they don't seem to be able to recruit and retain the best talent. Granted, Semel did get Tom Cruise to Sunnyvale in January 2006, which was after his May 2005 couch-jumping but before Katie Holmes became an unwed mother in April 2006. Despite the coup which was meant, I suppose, to help Yahoo!'s newly launched Answers, I think more Answers about Tom Cruise can be found on Gawker.com although, to be fair, the Scientology video was posted in February of this year, 2008.

In June 2007, Yahoo! unloaded chairman and CEO Terry Semel, who, after five years, had earned $500 million and had stock options worth $70 million according to Wikipedia. That touched off a reorg that brought Jerry Yang, Chief Yahoo and Yahoo! co-founder, to the CEO position. In February 2008, Yahoo's re-org included downsizing, unloading about a thousand people. Under Jerry Yang and Sue Decker these people weren't offered the Golden Parachute that Yahoo! had been negotiating for its other full-time employees with Microsoft as reported by CNET on 19 February 2008.