Timothy Morse

Continuing to look beyond its community to bring in new blood, Yahoo reached outside the company and outside the Internet sector to replace departing CFO, Blake Jorgensen.  Yahoo reached into the ranks of semiconductor supplier, Altera, to recruit Timothy Morse, its CFO.  Morse will be responsible for the company's finance, investor relations, and mergers and acquisitions groups.  He reports to recently installed CEO Carol Bartz.  Altera did not announce a new CFO yet.

Based on a filing with the SEC, Morse will receive an upfront $500,000 bonus to compensate him for benefits he is forfeiting at Altera. He will also receive a base salary of $500,000, an option to purchase 400,000 shares of Yahoo stock, and 150,000 restricted stock units.

Morse previously served as the CFO andGM of business development for General Electric Plastics. A 15 year veteran of GE, he also held a variety of positions at GE Plastics, GE Appliances and GE Capital in North America, Europe and Asia.

Not that Altera has management problems.  The company was named the "Best Managed Company" in the Semiconductors Category by Forbes.com.  Selected from Forbes.com's Platinum 400, the 400 best big companies selected by its editors, Altera was chosen based on its strong financial performance.  

Many Bartz's  hires have also come from outside the Internet community. Elisa Steele, Yahoo's chief marketing officer, was previously at data storage firm NetApp.  Bartz herself was CEO at software maker Autodesk and, earlier, held posts at Sun Microsystems.

Bartz, who has been on the job for about five months, is trying to revitalize the once leading Internet brand.  She is searching outside the company to bring in badly needed fresh ideas.  So far, Bartz is focusing on discontinuing products and improving others, while globalizing its product platform to innovate more quickly.  Currently, Yahoo is not able to roll out a unified look in foreign markets quickly.

After a net income decline of 78%, Bartz embarked on a course to selectively trim the workforce by five percent.  Her assertion was that Yahoo had too many product managers who were not getting anything done.  The company's product and engineering teams were combined into a single organization under executive VP Ari Balogh.  Investments in R&D will continue to bring out new products with search being integral in the effort.

Bartz is trying to address its most serious customer service concern: the belief by many that Yahoo is not easy to do business with.  To address the issue, she recruited Jeff Russakow, a former Symantec executive, as its senior VP of customer advocacy.

In the last reported quarter, ONO (Yahoo owned-and-operated sites) search sales were down 29% internationally (down 12% on a constant currency basis); spending by travel, retail and financial services advertisers was down.  On the plus side, search revenues on ONO sites in the U.S. increased by three percent. Volume grew 11%; spending in verticals like CPG, tech, entertainment, and automotive was up vs. the previous quarter.