AllThingsD » org chart

Microsoft Plugs In Some New Presidents

Voices — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:43:17 +0000

For those of you scoring at home, it’s time to update your hand-drawn Microsoft org chart. Here are the lineup changes at the presidential level, as announced today: Kurt DelBene becomes president of the Business Division, which includes Office, replacing Stephen Elop, who left to head Nokia. The mobile and gaming units, which had been combined under the now departed Robbie Bach, are independent again, with Andy Lees taking the helm of Mobile Communications and Don Mattrick leading Interactive Entertainment.

Apple Ad Guru: I'm Not Going Anywhere

Peter Kafka — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:57:32 +0000

Lee Clow, who gets credit for a couple decades worth of Apple’s iconic advertising campaigns, wants us to know that he isn’t going anywhere.

His agency, TBWA/Media Arts Lab, is shuffling people around, however. If you’re reading this story on this Web site, you probably don’t care about the details, but you can find them here and here. The takeaway: Clow isn’t retiring, he’ll still have a hand in Apple (AAPL) campaigns, and he’s a bit bemused by the way the Internet has treated his org chart shuffle.

“Look at how the blogosphere decided to make it a conversation about me,” he writes in a letter distributed to his staff.

Psst! Big secret here: The blogosphere doesn’t really care about Lee Clow.

It cares about Apple, Apple, Apple. And if it’s an Apple, Apple, Apple story that gives the blogosphere the chance to embed some Apple advertising, too? Then the blogosphere really likes that!

AOL: More Org Chart Shuffles Coming; So Are Ad Dollars. But Mum on Microsoft.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:15:01 +0000

It’s Advertising Week in New York! Which means that for the next few days, ad sellers will be meeting, greeting and buttering up ad buyers in hopes of prying some of their dollars free. Just like every week in New York.

One difference for the likes of me: Big ad sellers are making themselves very available to the press. This morning, for instance, AOL sent out CEO Tim Armstrong, sales boss Jeff Levick, sales deputy Erin Clift and content boss Bill Wilson to poke at eggs and ignore a plateful of bagels and lox.

Oh, and they talked, too! The big message was that they’re still in the process of overhauling the Internet giant on behalf of Time Warner (TWX), which brought in Armstrong from Google (GOOG) earlier this year and says it still plans on spinning off the company by the end of 2009.

Afterward, I got a brief interview (along with PaidContent’s David Armstrong) with the AOL chief. The video is at the bottom of the post, and you may need to turn up your speakers to hear it. But the takeaways are:

AOL is still looking for a chief marketing officer. The search is in the “early stages.” Do you know anyone? Internet experience is not a prerequisite.
More org chart moves, like the one that saw COO Kim Partoll pushed out last week, are coming. They’ll be part of the internal review process Armstrong has dubbed “Project Everest,” which should be complete by the end of the year.
So are layoffs. See above.
Internet ad dollars are beginning to flow out again–or if they’re not flowing, Armstrong thinks they will be, as big marketers like Procter & Gamble (PG) make permanent shifts in their advertising mixes.
Armstrong professes to be surprised by a report last week that he had met with Yusuf Mehdi, who runs Bing and MSN for Microsoft (MSFT). “I know Yusuf. I’ve known him personally for years. So if I saw him I would be happy, but…”

[ See post to watch video ]

YouTube Co-Founder Steve Chen Moves On, Stays with Google

Peter Kafka — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:50:02 +0000

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who oversaw the company’s technical operations as it grew from an upstart to the world’s biggest video site, no longer works at the site day-to-day.

This is old news, literally: Chen left his spot as chief technology officer last fall, though he remains employed at Google (GOOG), which bought his company for $1.65 billion in 2006. “Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects. He’s still involved with YouTube and invested in its success,” says YouTube spokesman Ricardo Reyes via email.

Google hasn’t officially named a replacement chief technology officer for Chen, and people at the company say the job no longer exists. But the highest ranking engineer at the company is now Louis Perrochon, who has been at Google since 2003.

Chad Hurley, who co-founded YouTube with Chen and Jawed Karim in 2004, remains the company’s CEO. But it’s not unusual for founders to move on from their companies within a few years of selling them.

The fact that Chen’s move has gone unreported until now should underscore that his departure didn’t represent a major org chart reshuffling. The technical challenges of the site have long been handled by a large engineering team, which makes sense considering that the challenges themselves are large. YouTube now uploads 20 hours of video per minute.

Chen was reportedly working on a technology incubator project last fall along with BitTorrent co-founder Ashwin Navin; no word on what Chen is actually doing at Google now.

Here are Chen and Hurley in a video they shot and uploaded on Oct. 9, 2006, the day they sold their company to Google.

Chris DeWolfe Likely to Step Down as MySpace CEO; News Corp. Talking to Facebook Veteran Owen Van Natta

Peter Kafka — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:41:05 +0000

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is likely to be on his way out of the company he helped found, and News Corp., which bought the social network in 2005, has a single potential successor in mind. Sources say that person is former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta, who is currently CEO of music start-up Project Playlist.

People familiar with the matter tell me that DeWolfe and News Corp., specifically new digital boss Jon Miller, are discussing a leadership change today. News Corp. (NWS) officials declined to comment. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Sources tell me Miller hadn’t been planning on getting rid of DeWolfe (pictured above) in the near future, and that until yesterday he was still evaluating his options. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch had once treated DeWolfe as a favorite and gave him significant autonomy at MySpace. But Murdoch, who brought Miller on earlier this month, has been leaning toward a change as MySpace’s traffic has stagnated and its buzz and momentum have moved to Facebook.

Still, Murdoch had left the decision about the site’s leadership to Miller, his new hire, sources said. One possibility: Elevating DeWolfe to a nonexecutive advisory position.

Those options narrowed last night once TechCrunch ran a story claiming that News Corp. had hired a headhunting firm to “scour for possible replacements” for DeWolfe.

News Corp. hadn’t actually hired a headhunter, I’m told by multiple sources. But I’m also told that the report was enough to spook DeWolfe into calling Miller to ask what his plans were. That conversation led to today’s negotiations, which will likely lead to his stepping down as CEO, although he may remain affiliated with MySpace in some capacity.

Meanwhile, News Corp. has been talking to Van Natta (pictured here) about taking DeWolfe’s place. Van Natta, who had been a highly regarded executive at Facebook, was at one point the leading candidate to head up MySpace Music, which launched last fall, and the two sides held extensive conversations.

But Van Natta, like many other potential hires for that position, bristled at the job’s org chart: Rather than a standalone company, a la Hulu, the site News Corp. set up with GE’s (GE) NBC, MySpace Music is simply a unit of MySpace, reporting to DeWolfe. MTV executive Courtney Holt eventually took the job.

But Van Natta’s fate has remained closely intertwined with MySpace anyway. Project Playlist, the free music-streaming site he took over last fall, has seen traffic plummet after MySpace, along with Facebook, cut off the site’s access to their users, a move prompted by lawsuits from several major music companies.

Van Natta has made some headway at extracting the company from its legal mess, which predated his hiring, and he has hammered out a settlement with EMI Music Group. But Playlist is still being sued by Warner Music Group (WMG) and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, and even music sites that aren’t in legal trouble are struggling to keep their heads above water. Plenty of Silicon Valley watchers wonder why Van Natta landed at Playlist in the first place and think that he has been looking for a way out.

Here’s a video of DeWolfe talking with BoomTown’s Kara Swisher a little more than a year ago when MySpace opened a new office in San Francisco. Below that is a video of Van Natta talking to Swisher in 2007 about Facebook’s ill-fated “Beacon” project.