The House of Purple is undergoing yet another reorganization. The neighborhood's on fire, time to rearrange the furniture. That will save your major investment. Your marriage is heading for a divorce, time to rearrange your closet. That will fix everything.

Isn't that essentially Yahoo!'s philosophy? You don't notice the fire so much when you're tripping over the furniture and admiring the odd new view.

As long as you can find your favorite outfit, it doesn't matter that your husband, lover, best friends are leaving you.

From the Yahoo! viewpoint, it's like shuffling a deck of cards when you've had a bad run at blackjack. Perhaps from the dealer's point of view, this is good, if the dealer is Google. It keeps the people you're playing with from counting cards and making statistical calculations. Business, however, isn't about luck. It is about calculations and statistics. Yahoo!'s stats do not look good.

As a matter of full disclosure, at one time, I worked for Yahoo!.  At my request, a state government agency is investigating their employment practices.

I've experienced a few reorganizations. When I left the company, I couldn't remember the name of the department nor the team that I worked for because the department and team names had been changed so often, that even some managers had a hard time identifying department names. Apparently, Yahoo!'s board hasn't read much Shakespeare, where even the 13-year-old Juliet knew names really do not matter.

I came on as an Associate Editor; I left as a Search Enhancement Associate. What is a Search Enhancement Associate? That's just another obfuscation. It looks nice because several different categories of workers in the same pay bracket can be classified by this phrase and yet, let's face it, on a resume it means nothing. I wonder how much time was spent thinking up that job label.

New names, same faces and unfortunately, too often, same dumb strategies. Well, not all the same faces. According to PC World, in the reorganization announced on 26 June 2008, obviously some old faces weren't going to be around with this latest re-org including:

• Jess Weiner, Executive Vice President of Yahoo!'s Network Division
• Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President of Search
• Qi Lu, Executive Vice President for Search and Advertising Technology
• Usama Fayyah, Executive Vice President
• Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake who helped create Flickr
• Brad Garlinghouse, Senior Vice President for Communications and Communities
  

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