Here is a memo just put out by Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella about big management changes at MSN, obtained by BoomTown.

Current MSN head Erik Jorgensen will move over full-time to focus on mobile efforts, and his replacement will be Ted Cahall, who most recently headed tech efforts at AOL (AOL).

In another move, Marc Davis has joined Microsoft as Partner Architect to the Online Services Division, working for Nadella on strategy. He comes from a stint as chief scientist at Invention Arts and before that worked at the MIT Media Lab, Interval Research, UC Berkeley, and Yahoo (YHOO).

But why listen to BoomTown yammer on–here’s the internal memo from Microsoft (MSFT):

From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:26 PM
To: XXX
Cc: XXX
Subject: OSD R&D Leadership Announcement

I wanted to share some changes we are making in OSD R&D team to better align and focus our leadership on key priorities across MSN and Mobile.

As you know, mobile is a top priority for OSD. Over the past year, it’s become increasingly clear that driving innovation in mobile presents an opportunity to rethink search. Specifically, we have an opportunity to build mobile search into an indispensible service for completing tasks and making decisions by weaving in geo-spatial & personal context.

To capitalize on the mobile opportunity we need to deliver innovation that consumers love and is competitively differentiated. To this end, I have asked Erik Jorgensen to focus fully on this opportunity. Erik will continue to drive our product strategy and execution across mobile devices, as well as building the cutting-edge location & mapping services.

Erik’s leadership across the MSN and mobile businesses over the past few years has been invaluable to the team. Asking him to double-down and focus on mobile and mapping is the right thing for our business, and I want to thank him for his leadership in the past, and for all the contributions he will make driving our mobile and location-based services efforts forward.

We have built strong momentum on MSN, and fully expect this to continue. MSN is a critical part of our online strategy, creating personally and socially relevant content experiences that drive massive amounts of traffic to Bing while maintaining a successful display advertising business. Over the past year the team has done great work–releasing a new homepage with a new design and feature set that is resonating with customers. MSN has also delivered new video experiences across Bing and MSN, Content Studio, a rich social platform, and UCP migration in all international markets. In addition, the team has driven innovative content partnerships in 46 countries, which give MSN a differentiated set of services to offer to our customers and keep our audience growing and engaged.

I am very excited to announce that Ted Cahall will join Microsoft as Corporate Vice President, MSN, reporting to me. It’s critically important to keep our MSN momentum going, and getting Ted is a big win for us. Ted brings a strong command of technical, operational and business details from his years of experience in the online world, including senior leadership roles at AOL, United Online, Bank of America and CNET Networks. Ted will move out here to Seattle, and will start on September 7th. Erik will be working closely with Ted and the MSN leadership team over the coming month to make this a smooth transition.

The MSN leadership team of Scott Moore, Geoff Sutton, John Skovron, Anil Mehra and Erik Zigman, will report to Ted and continue the great work and momentum we have seen in MSN over the past year.

This is exciting news for OSD. With our increasing investments in mobile and location-based services and our great momentum with MSN, putting such strong leaders against our biggest challenges will enable deeper focus on the things that will drive our business forward.

BoomTown liveblogged Yahoo’s “chalk talk” about search earlier today, which was an update of what the Internet giant is up to in the competitive space that includes Google and Microsoft.

Presenting at the event were Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Marc Davis, chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile.

At its HQ in Silicon Valley last week, Google put on a similar show-off, called “Searchology,” about its own latest search innovations.

And although they are clearly No. 1 and No. 2 in the search space, both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are bracing for the launch a major overhaul of the Microsoft’s (MSFT) search offering, which is expected next week at the D: All Things Digital conference and code-named “Kumo.”

11:45 a.m. PDT: A delightful lunch was offered to a room full of tech reporters at the San Francisco offices of Yahoo’s outside PR firm, Outcast Communications.

But all the munching was quickly swept aside by the aggressive tone of the speech to be delivered by the normally gentle-looking Yahoos.

Apparently, top Yahoo execs want to “kill the 10 blue links.”

Yipes!

“Nobody really wants to search,” said Raghavan, describing a broken consumer experience and how Yahoo wanted to fix it. This has been a bell he has been ringing from last fall, in fact.

But we all were soon deep in the weeds of tech, as he noted that Yahoo wanted to move from a “Web of pages to a Web of objects.”

It still sounded very, very Webby.

12:01 p.m.: Soon, Raghavan started to talk about Yahoo products, such as Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), which he says has generated almost as many daily queries as Microsoft’s whole search offering.

Snap!

Next up was Cornett, who began talking about intent and how Yahoo was trying to weave what a consumer wants in with what is displayed.

That means “helping users accomplish that goal by connecting objects in the real world.”

He trotted out Yahoo’s Search Pad offering, which is simply a way for people to keep track of their searches online, instead of on a dopey scrap of paper that the dog eats.

Cornett also showed how embedded music, video and other structured data are inserted into mostly dull search results.

Yahoo, in other words, is going to know what we want and give it to us–even before we know we want it. Sounds like my mother!

12:15 p.m.: Cornett reeled off lots of stats about its SearchMonkey technology, which is a year old.

There was a picture of a monkey with a birthday hat, natch! (See here!)

SearchMonkey, according to Yahoo, is a “framework for creating small applications that enhance Yahoo search results with additional data and structure.”

Cornett then invited up Facebook software engineer Alex Moskalyuk to talk about building apps with SearchMonkey.

Lots of tech talk that was actually incomprehensible to the reporters gathered, although they all scribbled away (I, at this juncture, chose to eat another sandwich).

Here is one line: “Originally used XPath extractor, switched entirely to hCard.”

Welcome to my world! It’s like some telephone guy talking apart a handset and explaining the guts of the device, when I am only interested in making a call.

12:23 p.m.: Next up: Matthew Hertz of Pipl.com, a people search engine built on Yahoo’s BOSS.

People search was, he said, a “deep Web challenge.” Indeed, there needs to be an easier way of finding out about a potential date online!

Actually, Pipl is a nice service and useful too, and Hertz is right that Pipl should not have to reinvent the search wheel to take advantage of all the data already available on big search services.

12:29 p.m.: Yahoo’s chief mobile geek Marc Davis was up, talking about “answers, not just links.”

Now they’re talking!

Actually, mobile is a key search arena with the increasing popularity of smart phones.

That means knowing everything from movie times to weather to flights to cheap gas prices nearby immediately.

Twittery humanity needs to know now!

Yahoo’s offering is called oneSearch. which is also a good product. It better be. “For many people in the world, their phone is the way to access” the Internet, said Davis.

12:40 p.m.: Now, the Yahoos summed up “What’s Next?”

Let’s review: Kill the blue links! Intent! Objects! Open! Mobile!

Raghavan then gave me a great joke by using the term: WOO, which is Web of objects. Apparently, they go around Yahoo talking about getting to the WOO.

It sounded naughty and I liked it.

Time for Q&A!

A question was posed about how quickly Yahoo rolls out these technologies, which are often limited in “bucket tests” of smaller groups of users.

As soon as they can, of course.

Next question was about how WOO impacts online ads. “It takes us away from a marketplace of keywords to a marketplace of intent,” said Raghavan.

That means advertisers can eventually make better ads. Oh, joy.

Then a question about when links are appropriate and when rich search should prevail.

Well, it depends on the user!

Next, a question about the currently trendy “real-time” search–a magical power that the blogosphere has, in its infinite hype-osity, bestowed on Twitter.

Raghavan called it a “buzzword” and I agreed.

Cornett added, correctly, that it should be about precision and accuracy in search, as well as serving “fresh” data. Fresh was a diplomatic word for whatever the mostly useless tweets are yammering on about at any given moment, which are most pointless.

The next question was about how soon a lot of this cool rich search data gets to the masses. Answer: Some of it is in testing and some is live systemwide.

I then asked about whether Yahoo would shove out the bells and whistles if, say, Microsoft’s new search service has a lot of the same features.

Cornett noted that Yahoo will only roll out after testing showed good results.

In other words, Yahoo will kill (or drink) no blue links before their time!

More questions about rich data, with one that makes the point that Yahoo was originally known for “curation,” which was its original business as the Web’s first truly useful directory.

It was.

1:01 p.m.: Still more questions.

Someone asked the Yahoos to comment on a recent post on TechCrunch that said the company was not developing for BlackBerry and focusing intently on the iPhone from Apple (AAPL). An exaggeration, said Davis, which was a diplomatic way of saying the story was wrong.

Blackberry users can now relax.

Yesterday, Yahoo trotted out a range of top execs who were unusually loquacious at its “open house,” where the company made a valiant effort to explain an aggressive strategy to open up its platform and products.

In an attempt to redefine and refocus itself, Yahoo has correctly wed itself to the trend toward more-open platforms, rather than locking consumers into its once tightly closed portal gates.

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to search and ad infrastructure. Now it is trying to show that it can be open all over the company.

BoomTown liveblogged the event, here and here, but nothing is as good as hearing all about it from the horse’s mouth. Or, in this case, the Yahoos’ mouths.

So here are video interviews I did with a range of Yahoo’s top execs, including Audience Product Division EVP Ash Patel, Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore (who cleverly used a Barbara Mandrell line to explain Yahoo’s open strategy), social media guru Marc Davis, Yahoo! Mail kingpin Scott Dietzen, Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries and PR minion Brad Williams:

Yahoo–because it has decided its living-inside-a-cave press strategy has been, shall we say, a bust–has invited a passel of media tomorrow to its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ and will trot out a range of top execs to talk specifically about the various facets of its “open” strategy.

In an attempt to redefine and refocus itself, Yahoo has correctly wed itself to the trend toward more-open platforms, rather than locking consumers into its once tightly closed portal gates.

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to its search and ad infrastructure. Now it is trying to show that it can be open all over the company.

Neither CEO Jerry Yang nor President Sue Decker will be at tomorrow’s event (he is at a Cisco board meeting, while she is in London–and BoomTown now sounds like the official Yahoo exec stalker). But the company will feature many key players.

The gathering will be kicked off by Yahoo’s CTO, Ari Balogh, for example, who has been a prime mover in the company’s open-platform strategy.

Also on deck: Yahoo Audience Product Division EVP Ash Patel, who will be talking about the opening up of platforms and products like email; Hilary Scheider, Yahoo U.S. EVP, who will discuss opening up Yahoo’s ad business; Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore, who will cover how Yahoo’s content properties integrate third-party partners and also become more distributed; and Marc Davis, Yahoo’s “social media guru” in its Connected Life division, who will do the open dance related to mobile.

As I have previously written, this kind of conceptual shift toward open platforms is something many have felt Yahoo has needed to do in a bolder manner, as consumer interest in massive centralized portals like Yahoo has waned.

Following in the path of start-ups like Facebook, the vision is of a more widgetized and social Yahoo and a Yahoo available everywhere.

Yang has also made open a core Yahoo strategy, saying at one point:

“These key strategies will be enhanced by our adoption of new, more open technology platforms that will encourage the development of new applications and the involvement of third-party developers–and help enrich the user experience.”

Now if Yahoo could just open up a can of excitement to jack up its moribund stock price-now in the $17 range again–things would really be looking up.