Of all the many job openings in tech, perhaps the most interesting to watch will be who Groupon selects as its next COO.

The search has been on for a while for the critical hire for the Chicago-based social buying company, well before the recent announcement that it was parting ways with President and COO Rob Solomon.

Among those approached, said sources close to Groupon: Former Doubleclick and Google exec David Rosenblatt.

He’s not taking the job for a variety of reasons, sources said, but
finding someone to step up for the job will be tough, since it is likely to be one that will require a wide range of talents.

That includes: epic cat-wrangling of thousands of employees in far-flung locations; deep marketing and advertising prowess; high-level technology, product, mobile and e-commerce chops; and international experience.

The last is perhaps the most critical of all, since global growth–especially in Europe and Asia–is increasingly becoming Groupon’s main revenue driver, and the COO will have to pull together a crack team across the world.

That will become even more important after Groupon’s top international managers–Germany’s entrepreneurial Samwer brothers–move out of active management by the end of this year.

While company sources said this has been long planned, the Samwers (pictured here) have been fully involved in Groupon’s fast trajectory in Europe and elsewhere, since it bought their Citydeal discounting clone last May.

Thus, sources said, Groupon is looking at a range of candidates with experience abroad, as well as talent in scaling businesses quickly and to huge size.

And that means looking to companies such as Google and Amazon for an exec, where there are quite a few choices.

While BoomTown could not confirm whether Groupon has spoken to any of them, possible COO types are obvious.

At Amazon, some qualified execs include: Sebastian J. Gunningham, SVP of Seller Services; Diego Piacentini, SVP of International Retail; H. Brian Valentine, SVP of Ecommerce Platform; and Jeffrey A. Wilke, SVP of North America Retail.

At Google, there are tons of good candidates that Facebook has not yet raided, including: Stephanie Tilenius, VP of eCommerce; Henrique de Castro, VP of Media and Global Platforms; Dennis Woodside, VP of Americas Operations; and Margo Georgiadis, VP of Global Sales Operations (plus a Chicagoan!).

Other names being raised include Hulu’s Jason Kilar (unlikely, but I’d like it), various Microsoft execs and a spate of others.

(I say, let’s bring in Zynga’s Owen Van Natta, who was once COO of Facebook, since he’s missing a big pile of Groupon stock to add to his enviable collection of hot Web 2.0 company shares.)

While there are probably qualified execs outside the tech industry at retail and media outfits, sources said it is likely Groupon will select within the digital ranks.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason (pictured here) might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with Co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon Co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

As we await the decision of which uneasy head gets the COO crown at Groupon, here is the opening from the Swisher boys fave Animal Planet cable television show, “Must Love Cats,” to get you in the mood:

His group has had a remarkable track record of uptime, especially considering Facebook’s extreme growth.

Walsh was one of multiple people with the same title, but his departure is notable given his long tenure at the company and the context of other early employees leaving.

To give you a sense of how long Walsh had been at Facebook, he was hired by then-COO Owen Van Natta (who was since CEO of Project Playlist and Myspace and now helps run Zynga) in 2006.

As we understand it, Walsh does not have firm plans for what he’ll do next. Facebook declined to comment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Mike Murphy–Facebook’s first head of advertising sales, who left the social networking giant in October to take some personal time off–seems done with relaxing.

He is now taking a part-time, but significant, role at online gaming phenom Zynga to help formulate its advertising strategy.

In addition, Murphy is also close to formalizing a consulting relationship with Facebook.

Given there has been strong interest from more obvious Facebook competitors in retaining Murphy–including Google and Twitter–his move to Zynga is probably the best outcome for it.

Although the relationship has been tense at times, Zynga remains one of Facebook’s major strategic partners.

Facebook has reportedly been close to filling Murphy’s job, talking to several major online ad execs recently, but has not yet replaced him.

While it is not clear what Murphy will be doing for Facebook, where former Google exec David Fischer runs the ad business, Murphy’s role at Zynga will be quite deep and could expand over time even more.

It will include overseeing the development of Zynga’s advertising strategy, team growth and advertising products, and creating new relationships with top brands.

After being contacted by BoomTown about the new job, Murphy confirmed it and said in a statement:

“Social games are becoming a core way for marketers to engage with their customers. Zynga’s network of games have created an incredible opportunity for advertisers to create passionate relationships and emotional connections with their customers.”

Indeed, as it moves toward an inevitable IPO later this year, Zynga is upping its focus on building its advertising business, aiming at selling its fast-growing audience and the frequency and engagement they use its casual gaming products.

At Zynga, Murphy will lead and build the team, scaling its relationships with big-name partners.

The company has already dipped its toe in this arena, integrating some major brands into its games in recent campaigns.

Such online-offline customer efforts, although early, have had strong adoption, such as a recent one to plant branded blueberry crops–organic!–in its flagship FarmVille game for General Mills cereals.

There has also been a McDonald’s-branded farm in FarmVille. (McReally.)

Interestingly, in an inside-Silicon-Valley-baseball way, the move to Zynga will reunite Murphy, the former Yahoo exec who ran global advertising strategy for Facebook for five years, with Owen Van Natta.

Van Natta was once COO of Facebook and hired Murphy there. He is now EVP of Business at Zynga.

Along with Murphy, Van Natta has also brought in Dani Dudeck as communications head from Myspace, where he had a rocky tenure as CEO of the News Corp. unit.

And Katie Geminder, who was a design and user interface exec at both Facebook and Myspace, is also now at Zynga in a similar full-time role.

At the time he announced his departure from Facebook in the fall, Murphy said he had decided to step down in order to take some personal time off, noting that hundreds of nights on the road over the years had been enough.

“For the last five years of hyper-growth here, I have been focused on Facebook,” said Murphy. “Now, I felt it was time to shift that focus to my family.”

And now, apparently, to Zynga.

Sean Ryan (pictured here), who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources.

Currently, Facebook does not create social games, but hosts third-party publishers of them on its king-making platform. Its most stunning success has been Zynga, maker of Farmville and CityVille.

The move seems sudden, since he just got his latest position. But sources said Ryan and execs at the Silicon Valley social networking giant had been talking about a job there before he went to News Corp.

Thus, at this point at least, Ryan’s main job will be a high-profile developer relations dude–in essence, keeping Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in line and also, presumably, happy.

Translation: Adventures in babysitting former Facebook COO and now Zynga COO Owen Van Natta!

Ryan, whose title will be director of gaming partnerships, will report to Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Facebook is clearly building out its gaming talent bench.

Ryan will work closely with Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers–who joined Facebook after the acquisition of their social gaming start-up Walletin in November to head platform games engineering efforts.

Sources said that News Corp.’s efforts will now be taken over by John Welch, who came to the media giant after Ryan acquired his casual games company Making Fun.

At the time, Ryan said he was working on a platform designed to support games on Facebook, Apple’s iPhone Google’s Android mobile operating system and News Corp.-owned Myspace.

Ryan got to News Corp. a little after it acquired Irata Labs, a social gaming developer. He had the title of EVP and GM of Games at News Corp. Digital.

Ryan is well known in the gaming and monetization space. He was acting CEO of Live Journal and also CEO of Meez, a virtual world and also Listen.com.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

BoomTown is awaiting comment from Facebook and News Corp.

But Ryan and George Kliavkoff throw their 17th Annual “After-After” Party at the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas at 11:59 PM Thursday, so come by and say congrats!

That number could be as much as 50 percent of the 1,100 employees at Myspace, largely based in the U.S., but also in international locations.

While the decision of what cuts to make to its employee base have not been made yet, nearly the entire Myspace staff was given the last week of December off from work to save money. Update: Myspace tells us via email the week off was an employee perk, not a cost-cutting measure.

Sources stressed that management was still working out the details of more drastic cost-cutting measures that owner News Corp. has been wanting from Myspace, as its revenues and traffic have declined.

The layoffs are also part of a larger rethink about the future of the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company, which has had many difficulties in recent years, including several leadership upheavals and a talent drain, as well as stagnant growth.

Among the many options contemplated has been the sale of the Myspace unit, as has been widely reported. According to sources, Jack Kennedy, EVP of operations for News Corp. Digital Media, has been tapped to explore the sale of Myspace.

Until now, both large-scale cost-cutting and exploration of an acquisition were on hold as Myspace launched its redesign as an entertainment hub, which was rolled out about six weeks ago.

Myspace also recently started user account integration with former foe Facebook.

And the company also revamped its mobile offerings and signed a new search advertising deal with Google (at which time MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka predicted layoffs were around the corner).

But, according to many inside and outside the company, the redesign and strategy moves are not expected to result in a major turnaround of Myspace. Meanwhile, the piles of money the company once got from its Google relationship have also gotten much smaller. It’s not much of a surprise that News Corp. is moving to remedy the situation now.

In fact, during News Corp.’s earnings call in November, COO Chase Carey called attention to Myspace’s ever-weakening performance and said “current losses are not acceptable or sustainable.”

He added: “We judge in quarters, not in years.”

At this point, a sale would be the likeliest save for the media giant.

One juicy rumor that has been going around suggests Facebook game-maker Zynga as a potential acquirer of Myspace. While the two companies had discussed closer ties in the past–back when Zynga COO Owen Van Natta was still CEO of Myspace–those talks went nowhere.

Several sources said a private equity buyer for Myspace is now the likeliest outcome if the online property is sold.

Myspace declined to comment on layoffs or acquisition talks.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

Mike Murphy, Facebook’s VP of Global Sales, is leaving the company.

Facebook said the well-known advertising exec decided to step down in order to take some personal time off, which Murphy reiterated was the case in an interview with BoomTown, noting that hundreds of nights on the road over the years have been enough.

“For the last five years of hyper-growth here, I have been focused on Facebook,” said Murphy. “Now, I felt it was time to shift that focus to my family.”

Murphy will stay on at the Silicon Valley social networking powerhouse until December, helping with the transition. His staff was told this morning in an email from him.

Both he and his boss David Fischer, VP of Advertising and Global Operations, have discounted any notion of tension between them, since Fischer came on board at Facebook in March.

Murphy said he had been planning his departure for a while, and wanted to get through the most recent quarter to finally pull the trigger.

“It is something I have been thinking about for quite some time and I discussed it with David early on,” said Murphy, who noted Facebook execs tried to come up with other options at the company for him. “I wanted [my departure] to come at a time when I knew the team was in good hands.”

Fischer said that there are no precise plans to replace Murphy yet, but that Facebook would “evaluate a lot of options.”

Interestingly, while he said he had no plans for now, Murphy is perhaps the dream candidate for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to run its ad sales business, which has been drifting of late due to a series of exec departures.

In fact, Murphy is an ex-Yahoo exec, having come to Facebook in 2006 directly from a stint as VP of Media Sales for the Western region at the Internet giant.

At Facebook, Murphy has led media strategy, advertising sales and account management. He came to the company five years ago, when it was not the social networking powerhouse it is today.

He is one of a handful of experienced online ad sales leaders in the business, and the affable exec is very well-liked in the industry.

Murphy also worked at Ziff-Davis Publishing and CMP Media.

Reflecting on all the changes that have gone on in online advertising, especially with the advent of social media, Murphy noted how quickly the landscape has changed.

“It’s been an amazing progression for marketers from how you launch a campaign to having a presence on Facebook to how you make an emotional connection with your customer,” said Murphy. “The momentum has been huge.”

That’s why Murphy said he expects to eventually return to the fray, once he has spent some quality time at home and has a “clear head.”

For a look back, here is a video interview I did with Murphy in 2007, back in the days when Owen Van Natta, also in the video, was COO at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101026/exclusive-facebooks-longtime-ad-sales-head-mike-murphy-to-depart-company/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100813/zyngas-newest-deal-snagging-myspace-facebook-vet-owen-van-natta/ http://allthingsd.com/20100813/zyngas-newest-deal-snagging-myspace-facebook-vet-owen-van-natta/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:31:30 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=22683

Zynga, the dominant social-gaming company that seems to spend most of its time raising money, has finished up yet another deal: It has officially brought in Web veteran Owen Van Natta, giving him the title “Executive Vice President of Business Operations.”

Following last month’s hire of Allen & Co. vet David Wehner as CFO, the move will be interpreted as yet another signal that Zynga is moving toward a big-money public offering. Zynga officials won’t comment on the hire. But if they did, they would sidestep the IPO talk and mutter something about hiring a first-class team, etc, etc.

In any case, there’s no argument that this is Van Natta’s third high-profile Web company in two years. He was a top lieutenant for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook until February 2008, and in 2009 he took over News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, a job that lasted less than a year. Earlier in his career, he made a name for himself at Amazon (AMZN). He also popped in for a very brief stint as CEO at Project Playlist, a streaming-music company that has just filed for Chapter 11.

Kara Swisher sniffed out the hire last month, when she reported that Van Natta was spending a lot of time at Zynga in an unofficial role. She predicted a formal title in his near future, as Facebook prepared for both an IPO and head-on competition with Google (GOOG), which is moving into gaming and social networking:

Sources said [that] has prompted Pincus to increasingly bring in Van Natta as an adviser to the start-up, focused mostly on strategy and operations.

And, said sources, that could eventually result in a more formal role, such as Van Natta joining Zynga in an official job, like COO. Many say that both have been seriously contemplating such a move in recent weeks.

In fact, at the recent Allen & Co. media confab in Sun Valley, which both attended, Van Natta and Pincus told many of Van Natta’s more substantive advisory role.

A COO job like that would not be a big leap for Van Natta, who was COO and close adviser to Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg at the nascency of the company.

Zynga’s official bio for Van Natta:

Owen Van Natta is the Executive Vice President of Business Operations at Zynga. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s revenue strategy, corporate development, international expansion, and brand. Prior to joining Zynga, Owen was consulting for the Company across a number of critical business functions. Owen is also a member of the Zynga Board.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100813/zyngas-newest-deal-snagging-myspace-facebook-vet-owen-van-natta/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100715/where-in-the-world-is-owen-van-natta-try-zynga/ http://allthingsd.com/20100715/where-in-the-world-is-owen-van-natta-try-zynga/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:15:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30704

After longtime Internet tech exec Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of MySpace last February, after clashing with News Corp. (NWS) digital chief Jon Miller and also the other two top execs at the troubled social networking site, he seemed to drop off the map a bit to chillax and regroup.

Not for long, though, as the high-profile Van Natta (pictured here)–he was also a top exec at Facebook in its early days, as well as at Amazon (AMZN) before that–soon began doing mentoring and also unofficial consulting work with various start-ups in which he was an angel investor or had developed an interest.

Most especially, according to numerous sources, that effort has now been largely focused on Zynga, the red-hot social gaming company that has been on a growth and revenue tear of late.

Under CEO and founder Mark Pincus, that has included big new rounds of investment, renewing its partnership with Facebook after some contention, striking another deal to put its popular games such as Farmville throughout Yahoo (YHOO) and, reportedly, working on an even bigger deal with Google (GOOG).

It’s been a very active time for Zynga, which has been contemplating an initial public offering.

All that, sources said, has prompted Pincus to increasingly bring in Van Natta as an adviser to the start-up, focused mostly on strategy and operations.

And, said sources, that could eventually result in a more formal role, such as Van Natta joining Zynga in an official job, like COO. Many say that both have been seriously contemplating such a move in recent weeks.

In fact, at the recent Allen & Co. media confab in Sun Valley, which both attended, Van Natta and Pincus told many of Van Natta’s more substantive advisory role.

A COO job like that would not be a big leap for Van Natta, who was COO and close advisor to Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg at the nascency of the company.

Van Natta was key to some important early deals, such as bringing on Microsoft (MSFT) as an investor and staffing the young service.

In doing so, he formed a close bond with the then less experienced Zuckerberg.

Eventually, though, that relationship cooled, and Van Natta’s job shifted as more execs joined.

Van Natta left the social networking giant in early 2008.

He did a short stint as CEO of music discovery site Playlist later in 2008, but was put in charge at MySpace as part of an awkward troika of leadership by the following April.

Although he moved to reinvigorate the tarnished service, Van Natta’s job there was short-lived, After much internal wrangling with COO Michael Jones and product head Jason Hirschhorn, Miller suddenly fired him in a tense meeting earlier this year.

To be sure, to grab a big job at Zynga would be a splashy move for both the company and Van Natta, who has clearly seen quite a few of them in his Internet career.

When I contacted them to ask about Van Natta’s role, Pincus declined comment and Van Natta has yet to respond.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100715/where-in-the-world-is-owen-van-natta-try-zynga/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100617/myspace-co-president-jason-hirschhorn-leaves/ http://allthingsd.com/20100617/myspace-co-president-jason-hirschhorn-leaves/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:15:50 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20693 Jason Hirschhorn joined MySpace a little more than a year ago as chief product officer. In February, he was put in charge of the ailing social network, along with Mike Jones. Now he’s out.

TechCrunch reported the move this afternoon, and I’ve confirmed it with my own sources, who tell me Hirschhorn does not have a new job lined up. Here’s Hirschhorn’s version of the announcement, via Twitter:

And here’s a statement from Jon Miller, the News Corp. (NWS) exec tasked with turning around the once-dominant site:

We fully respect Jason’s decision to leave and his personal desire to return to New York. As many people know, Jason is like family to me, and as expected, he’s done everything we asked of him and more. We’re incredibly grateful for the passion and enthusiasm he brought to the company. And as I know Jason agrees, Mike Jones has done an outstanding job leading MySpace into its next evolution and is the right person to take the reins. There are no plans to bring in additional management.

And finally, HIrschhorn’s goodbye note to his staff:

From: “Jason Hirschhorn”
Date: June 17, 2010 5:20:38 PM EDT
To: “FIM MySpace All”
Subject: My Transition

MySpacers,
 
I wanted to share some personal news with you. After much thought I have decided to leave MySpace. It was a hard decision, but is weighted in my desire to move back to New York City.
 
The past 15 months have been the most exciting in my career. The challenge that we have all worked on together, reinventing MySpace, is a dream project.
 
With the roadmap in a solid place, the Futura designs being executed now, and a new leadership firmly in place, I felt this was a good time for me to transition out.
 
I did not take this decision lightly. But given my faith in my partner Mike Jones and his brilliance, coupled with the amazing teams we have in place, I feel as optimistic as ever about MySpace.
 
I cannot thank Rupert, Jon and Owen enough for giving me the opportunity to work at MySpace. It has been a pleasure working with each and every one of you.
 
I will be in the office until the end of the month and available to Jon and Mike during the transition.
 
You are all family. I will miss you.
 
P.S. My mom is pissed I am leaving LA!
 
Best,
 
Jason

Hirschhorn’s departure isn’t a total shock: It’s hard to find an example of any company, anywhere, that has really worked with more than one person in charge.

And Hirschhorn always seemed like an uneasy fit at MySpace, though his mood seemed to improve when former boss Owen Van Natta was moved out earlier this year. I’m told that he’s leaving on much more amicable terms than Van Natta and may end up working with Miller on some other News Corp. digital projects.

Still, despite Hirschhorn and Miller’s sunny description of MySpace, it is very much a troubled, money-losing asset. Former rival Facebook eclipsed it in audience, dollars and mojo long ago. And an ad deal with Google (GOOG), which generated the bulk of its revenue for years, is expiring very soon.

The most charitable description of MySpace would be a “work in progress,” which is the phrase News Corp. COO Chase Carey likes to use, over and over.

The good news for Hirschhorn’s former co-worker Jones: If he can show any positive result at all, the glory will be all his.

Here’s a March interview Kara Swisher conducted with two men, in which they explain that things aren’t as bad as they seem:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100617/myspace-co-president-jason-hirschhorn-leaves/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100420/like-boomtown-said-partovi-brothers-finally-leave-myspace/ http://allthingsd.com/20100420/like-boomtown-said-partovi-brothers-finally-leave-myspace/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:22:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27307

Well-known tech entrepreneurs and twin brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi (pictured here, right to left) are leaving MySpace, in a high-profile departure for the struggling social networking company.

Internal memos were sent around to staff this afternoon about the executive change, said sources, which you can see below.

“Hey everybody, it’s been super tough staying quiet about this news at the request of our execs,” said Hadi Partovi, in an internal memo obtained by BoomTown. “I know some of you are very surprised about this, and I want to apologize for not having had the option to brief you personally in advance.”

Hadi was SVP of Technology at the News Corp. (NWS) unit, while Ali was SVP of Business Development. Hadi will leave MySpace entirely, while Ali will have a special adviser role, said the memo from MySpace Co-President Michael Jones.

In a blog post in March titled, “MySpace Musical Chairs: Will the Partovis Stay or Will They Go Now?,” I wrote:

“In all likelihood, said sources, the Partovis will remain at MySpace for the next several months, although they are likely to move eventually to more senior advisory or special-project roles there in order to pursue longtime outside investing and entrepreneurial interests.”

Now that has come to pass.

The fate of the well-known tech wunderkinds has been one of the more interesting guessing games of late at MySpace.

MySpace managers have been keenly interested in avoiding the appearance that the company is in the grip of a talent drain, especially related to such well-known innovators.

The Partovis arrived in the midst of turbulent change at MySpace last August, just after its original CEO and co-founder, Chris DeWolfe, was suddenly tossed out and replaced by CEO Owen Van Natta, as well as COO Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.

As part of its new strategy to become an entertainment hub, the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based MySpace bought the Partovis’ social music start-up, iLike, in a deal engineered by Van Natta.

After it closed, Hadi was mostly working in MySpace’s Seattle office, and Ali was mostly based in San Francisco.

(See this funny welcome video Ali Partovi did at the time.)

But Van Natta suddenly got the boot in January after clashing with News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller, as well as Hirschhorn and Jones, sending MySpace into yet another storm.

Hirschhorn and Jones were then named co-presidents.

While several sources said the Partovis are not unhappy with the pair or with the new MySpace mediacentric strategy, the brothers sold their company with the idea of working with Van Natta.

“That firing reset things,” said one source close to the situation in March.

Nonetheless, there was some progress with iLike, including integration of MySpace Music with Google (GOOG) and a MySpace Events offering.

In addition, the pair have wide-ranging interests outside the company, including an active investment portfolio in such start-ups as Facebook, Dropbox, Opower, BlueKai and Flixster.

They have already scored big with investments in Tellme, which was sold to Microsoft (MSFT); Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon (AMZN); and IronPort, now owned by Cisco (CSCO).

And though iLike was not the success they had hoped for, their entrepreneurial record is strong. Ali Partovi sold LinkExchange to Microsoft, and Hadi Partovi, who also worked at Microsoft, co-founded Tellme.

Now, it seems, the Partovis are moving on to the next challenge.

Here are the internal memos from Hadi Partovi to iLike staff and from MySpace’s Jones:

From: Hadi Partovi
Date: Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 5:15 PM
Subject: Fwd: Organizational Update (re Ali + Hadi)
To: staff
Cc: Ali Partovi

Hey everybody, it’s been super tough staying quiet about this news at the request of our execs. I know some of you are very surprised about this, and I want to apologize for not having had the option to brief you personally in advance.

I also want to call out looking backwards that we’ve all done a heck of a lot in just the last 6 months to help improve the MySpace business and to integrate iLike technology. Just a short list is below.

- iLike integrated MySpace Music into Google search (iLike provided the team, technology, and Google deal)
- iLike team+technology helped implement MySpace Events, launched with multi-million-dollar sponsorship commitments
- all iLike.com traffic has been merged into MySpace’s overall Comscore metrics
- iLike’s products have been featured in a TV ad by Apple, and will be in an upcoming TV ad by another major tech company
- iLike’s promotional engine has been used multiple times in coordination with MSM to promote new albums or new artists
- MSM videos have been integrated into iLike.com and iLike on Facebook
- iLike’s artist-stats are integrated into the MySpace artist dashboard
- iLike.com drives search engine traffic to MySpace artist pages
- iLike team implemented the imeem traffic redirection and data backend of imeem playlist integration
- iLike team provided backend metadata + recommendation engine for MySpace music search and song-similarities

Most importantly, thanks to our work, MySpace is the #1 provider of music on Facebook, music on Google, and Concerts on iPhone. Regardless of any challenges that MySpace needs to overcome, that is a great legacy that I know we’re all proud of.

I’m personally very sad that I won’t be working with any of you–the amazing team we built at iLike is perhaps our greatest accomplishment.

I’ll send an email to the Seattle folks to organize a proper going-away celebration :)

hadi

From: Mike Jones
Date: Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 4:52 PM
Subject: Organizational Update
To: XXX
Cc: Jason Hirschhorn

Hi everyone,

Effective on Friday, MySpace SVP of Technology Hadi Partovi is leaving to pursue other opportunities. In addition to continuing his work as an advisor and angel investor to various startups, he will be following his passion for education by working directly with technology focused non-profits. Hadi leaves as a valued friend to the company, and we wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Ali Partovi will be stepping down as SVP of Business Development, but will continue working with MySpace as a strategic advisor working on special projects. He will also be taking time to invest in and advise startups.

Hadi and Ali were instrumental in integrating iLike’s best in class technology into the MySpace brand. Last week’s successful Events launch was a direct result of that collaboration. Other noteworthy product integrations include last year’s Google Music Search integration and the Local Concerts App, which is currently the most downloaded concerts app for the iPhone and was featured in one of Apple’s latest iPhone TV spots.

Please join us in thanking Ali and Hadi for their contributions to MySpace.

-Jason & Mike

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100420/like-boomtown-said-partovi-brothers-finally-leave-myspace/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100324/hello-goodbye-what-does-talent-exodus-from-internet-companies-like-yahoo-actually-mean/ http://allthingsd.com/20100324/hello-goodbye-what-does-talent-exodus-from-internet-companies-like-yahoo-actually-mean/#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:13:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25830

On March 30, a core group of Yahoo’s Buzz Marketing team, which focuses on all kinds of nontraditional marketing efforts, is leaving the company to set up a new firm.

The name of the group of former Yahoo (YHOO) staffers–including Brian Mullin, Sean Florio, Mike Weaver, Kelly Delaney and Jason Anello–is Manifold.

“After a great run at Yahoo!, we’re looking forward to new challenges in the world of nontraditional marketing encompassing social, word of mouth, experiential and interactive,” wrote Mullin to me after I inquired. “Exciting times.”

Maybe for Manifold, but what does the departure actually mean for Yahoo?

Does it represent a worrisome and seemingly unending hemorrhage of talent? Or is it simply an example of ever-shifting and very normal staff movements within a company? Or what?

Probably all three, although when big-name employees go into turnaround situations–as has happened a lot of late at Yahoo and MySpace–stories mount that paint a direr picture than is perhaps fair.

“I actually think that is totally normal in any transformative phase, the cynics may decide in any one situation to make more of it, but when you reinvent, people leave, new ones join and current employees with history and new-found faith make a nice mixture,” wrote Jason Hirschhorn, co-president of MySpace, to me about the lagging social networking site that is owned by News Corp. (NWS). “Change is a catalyst for all of it.”

Which is not to say that some departures do not represent potential trouble. Yahoo losing its top advertising sales exec, Joanne Bradford, was very bad news for the company. She’s headed for fast-growing social media start-up, Demand Media.

And the ugly circumstances of the firing of MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta created great uncertainty at the worst possible time.

And with those departures comes greater scrutiny, especially internally, about the efficacy of comeback plans, as well as a nagging worry that there are much greener Silicon Valley pastures to be found elsewhere.

That said, in the fourth quarter, Yahoo actually brought on 700 employees, including about 250 from two acquisitions.

Some of the more prominent of those hires, according to a Yahoo spokeswoman, include:

• Sashi Seth joined as SVP, Search Products to lead the search business. Shashi brings with him a wealth of experience from Google, eBay, Cooliris, and AOL.

• Raymond Stern, joined as SVP BD & Partnerships, North America. Raymond joined from Intuit where he was SVP/Strategy & Corporate Development and spent more than ten years 10 years as a partner at The Boston Consulting Group.

• Bobby Figueroa, VP, Consumer Advertising Experience. Bobby joined from Google.

• Gil Yehuda, director, Open Source Product Management. Gil was most recently an analyst at Forrester Research and also worked at Fidelity Investments and Xerox.

• Chris Lehmann joined Yahoo! News as News Blog Deputy Editor. Lehmann is a former senior editor of Congressional Quarterly, political columnist for the New York Observer and features editor for New York magazine.

• Eric Adelson joined Yahoo! Sports/Special Projects Editor. Eric wrote for ESPN The Magazine from its inception in 1998 until the fall of 2008. He has also written for Newsweek, Details, and Boston Magazine.

• Manish Sinha joined as the Customer Advocacy team as VP, Global Customer Care. Manish spent more than 15-years at Microsoft.

• Mollie Spilman joined the CMO organization as SVP of B2B Marketing. Mollie has held key leadership positions at several companies including People Magazine, BH&G, Discovery Networks, Phase2Media, and TidalTV. She was also at Advertising.com for over five years, both pre and post AOL acquisition, and ran both the sales and marketing organizations.

• Deb Meyer joined the customer advocacy group as vice president of agency revenue and development. She joined Yahoo! with more than twenty years of industry experience, having most recently worked for AOL as head of US sales for Bebo. Prior to Bebo, she spent nearly a decade with Nielsen Online and more than ten years in the agency world, working for McCann-Erickson and Grey Advertising.

And while MySpace has seen an ongoing exodus too, there have been numerous recent entrants, according to its spokeswoman:

-New VP of Data Platform, Arvind Puri (was CTO of Buzznet/Buzzmedia, before that worked at the LA Times, Yahoo and Overture)

-New Senior Manager of Online Marketing from BillShrink, Tony Adam

-New Director of Tech & Product PR, Vincent Chang, ran his own consulting co w/Tariq Krim’s Jolicloud as a client, based in SF

Hellos to all, of course, which at some point have to be louder than the goodbyes.

In that vein, please enjoy this video of the Beatles classic:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100324/hello-goodbye-what-does-talent-exodus-from-internet-companies-like-yahoo-actually-mean/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100311/myspace-musical-chairs-will-the-partovis-stay-or-will-they-go-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20100311/myspace-musical-chairs-will-the-partovis-stay-or-will-they-go-now/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:11:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25497

While there have surely been a lot of departures of talent at MySpace over the last year, including two major shifts in top management, one of the more interesting guessing games of late concerning the social networking company has been over the fate of well-known tech wunderkinds Hadi and Ali Partovi.

According to many sources inside and outside the company, that’s just the discussion the pair of serial entrepreneurs has been having with its newest leaders, as well as with News Corp. (NWS) digital head Jon Miller.

(News Corp. owns MySpace, as well as Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

In all likelihood, said sources, the Partovis will remain at MySpace for the next several months, although they are likely to move eventually to more senior advisory or special-project roles there in order to pursue longtime outside investing and entrepreneurial interests.

“They’re definitely staying for now,” said one source. “But it’s the ‘how’ is what’s being worked out.”

There are many shifting scenarios as the sides hash it out, said sources, but MySpace execs are keenly interested in avoiding the appearance that the company is in the grip of a talent drain, especially with such high-profile innovators.

Still, in an interview with BoomTown at MySpace’s Beverly Hills, Calif., HQ earlier this week (you can see part of that chat in the video below), Co-President Jason Hirschhorn said that there are likely to be a lot more departures at the company, as well as arrivals.

“It’s normal in a situation like this,” said Hirschhorn, quite correctly, given the wringer MySpace has gone through over the last year.

The Partovis arrived in the midst of turbulent change at MySpace, after its original CEO and co-founder, Chris DeWolfe, was suddenly tossed out and replaced by CEO Owen Van Natta, as well as COO Michael Jones and Chief Product Officer Hirschhorn.

As part of its new strategy to become an entertainment hub, MySpace bought the Partovis’ struggling social music start-up, iLike, last summer in a deal engineered by Van Natta.

After it closed, Hadi (pictured left) became an SVP of technology, mostly working in MySpace’s Seattle office, and Ali (pictured right) became its SVP of business development, mostly based in San Francisco.

But Van Natta suddenly got the boot in January, after clashing with Miller, as well as Hirschhorn and Jones, sending MySpace into yet another storm.

Hirschhorn and Jones were then named co-presidents.

While several sources said the Partovis are not unhappy with the pair or with the new MySpace media-centric strategy, the brothers sold the company with the idea of working with Van Natta.

“That firing reset things,” said one source close to the situation.

In addition, the pair have wide-ranging interests outside the company, including an active investment portfolio in such start-ups as Facebook, Dropbox, Opower, BlueKai and Flixster.

They have also already scored big with investments in Tellme, which was sold to Microsoft (MSFT); Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon (AMZN); and IronPort, now owned by Cisco (CSCO).

And though iLike was not the success they had hoped for, their entrepreneurial record is strong. Ali Partovi sold LinkExchange to Microsoft, and Hadi Partovi, who also worked at Microsoft, co-founded Tellme.

That said, with talent-retention packages in place for both Partovis, and good will between them and the new leaders, the sides are trying to come up with a workable arrangement.

MySpace declined to comment, but The Clash sure will (as well as Jones and Hirschhorn, below):

[T-shirt photo courtesy of Zazzle.com]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100311/myspace-musical-chairs-will-the-partovis-stay-or-will-they-go-now/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100310/video-back-to-the-future-at-myspace-or-just-another-retread/ http://allthingsd.com/20100310/video-back-to-the-future-at-myspace-or-just-another-retread/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:19:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25316

Earlier this week, BoomTown visited MySpace HQ in Beverly Hills, Calif., to interview its new co-presidents, Michael Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, and get a look-see at its evolving revival plans to stop the social networking ship from sinking further.

Thus, I got a tour of a storyboard-like room at MySpace, where the team is trying to formulate the “discover and be discovered” motto it is now using, which is pretty much its old motto restated.

Can the old become new again?

In fact, a lot of the plan does sound a lot like shades of the past at MySpace, focusing on a younger, artistic demo with a heavy dose of pop culture.

Jazzed up, of course, with the latest social networking hooks, a cleaner user page redesign, topics pages, a focus on sharing content of all kinds, especially music, games and entertainment, and more.

That includes a new Today on MySpace, or TOM, to greet new users, rather than the famous analog Tom Anderson, co-founder and former first friend to all. Get it?

It is all part of a very slow-moving effort to turn MySpace into a socially-charged entertainment hub, which is now being led by Hirschhorn and Jones.

They took over management immediately after News Corp. (NWS) execs suddenly fired CEO Owen Van Natta last month.

The pair reported to Van Natta, and now they essentially share his job to revive MySpace, which has lost ground to fast-growing and more innovative sites such as Facebook.

Still, it is not a small enterprise, with upward of 100 million monthly visitors and just above $350 million in annual revenue.

Here’s a video of the tour I did in which the pair describe some of what they have been up to, which seems to center, most of all, on turning back the clock and returning to MySpace’s roots.

Is a proper retread–which is completely dependent on keeping talent and executing well–enough to stem the losses if there are enough newfangled features to make it all feel fresh?

Or not?

Time will tell, but here’s a sneak peek:

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100310/video-back-to-the-future-at-myspace-or-just-another-retread/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/video-new-myspace-co-presidents-hirschhorn-and-jones-talk-about-the-past-troubled-present-work-in-progress-and-future-revival/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/video-new-myspace-co-presidents-hirschhorn-and-jones-talk-about-the-past-troubled-present-work-in-progress-and-future-revival/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:24:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25263

On Monday, as part of a press hello-there MySpace is doing this week, BoomTown traveled to Los Angeles for the day to finally check in with the new management at the turmoil-plagued company.

That would be new Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Michael Jones, who are now ferreting away on a slow rollout of a plan to turn MySpace into a socially-charged entertainment hub.

They took over the Beverly Hills-based social networking site immediately after News Corp. (NWS) digital head Jon Miller suddenly fired CEO Owen Van Natta last month.

The pair reported to Van Natta and, according to pretty much everyone you speak to, were very much at odds with him.

Perhaps that was inevitable due to the awkward way the trio was hired at the same time last April, as part of a grand plan of overhaul.

Their arrival followed the defenestration of co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, who was blamed for the declining prospects of MySpace in recent years after a red-hot start.

While former Facebook and Amazon (AMZN) exec Van Natta was selected as the experienced one in charge, Hirschhorn ran product and Jones was charged with getting the trains to run on time at MySpace–when they ran right at all, that is.

That all ended when Miller and Van Natta clashed over control of MySpace, which has about 100 million monthly visitors and just above $350 million in annual revenue.

And faster than you can say Rupe, former AOL (AOL) exec and serial entrepreneur Jones, and Hirschhorn–who is a well-known media exec with stops at Sling Media and Viacom (VIA)–got the nod.

What’s that famous Shakespeare quote? Uneasy lies the head that wears a MySpace crown? Or, in this case, two heads and two crowns!

How deliciously ripe with plot.

And so much to cover: From the corporate intrigue to how News Corp. looks at the troubled property to competition like Facebook to what to do about declining traffic, engagement and advertising revenue to rampant sale or spinoff rumors.

And most of all, and what gets unfortunately lost in all this mess–what the heck they are doing to innovate the actual product and make it into an entertainment hub.

Thus, here’s a video interview I did with Hirschhorn and Jones–at their joint desk, like some digital Oscar Madison and Felix Unger–where we talk about all this and more, including whether or not Hirschhorn is a kvetcher or not.

(He is, but I am worse!)

I also posted a tour of MySpace, in which the pair talk about their plans for the revival of the service, with the help of some visual aids.

Until then, enjoy, and no kvetching over the length:

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/video-new-myspace-co-presidents-hirschhorn-and-jones-talk-about-the-past-troubled-present-work-in-progress-and-future-revival/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100218/myspace-to-hold-a-remain-calm-all-is-well-meeting-today-for-staff-heres-five-questions-that-someone-should-ask/ http://allthingsd.com/20100218/myspace-to-hold-a-remain-calm-all-is-well-meeting-today-for-staff-heres-five-questions-that-someone-should-ask/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:07:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24579

MySpace has apparently scheduled an all-hands meeting today, which one source noted is to talk about the new order and to rally the likely much dispirited troops at the struggling social networking site.

With the sudden firing of relatively recently installed CEO Owen Van Natta last week by News Corp. digital head Jon Miller, it will be up to the two new co-presidents he installed, Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, to give MySpace employees a whole lot of reason to believe they can reinvigorate a site that seems woefully resistant to revival so far.

While the one-time trio of Van Natta, Hirschhorn and Jones did manage to stanch the traffic declines in their short and, in hindsight now, rocky, tenure over the last year and have worked to fix the shoddy plumbing, getting the water running regularly is nothing that will inspire anyone internally or externally.

But they do seem to know that, at least.

In any case, if BoomTown were there–and don’t assume I am not skulking around, boys–here are five basic questions I would want the new leaders to answer, including Miller, who is clearly the silent third partner here. (Bonus: I left out Facebook-related questions, as that would be too painful):

While it might be looking backward, exactly why and how was the decision to fire Van Natta made? Was the direction in which he was leading MySpace–related to the socialization of music and other entertainment content–the wrong one? And should those staffers he brought in, such as advertising head Nada Stirratt and many others, be prepping resumes?

What are the three top priorities for MySpace? A massive redesign? A rebranding? Perhaps spinning off as a kind of huge start-up from owner News Corp. (NWS) so it can live or die on its own merits and have more of a chance of attracting talent and encouraging innovation? And, if MySpace stays part of the massive media empire, what are the benefits of that now?

Is MySpace trying to keep its remaining users or bring in new ones? If the former, what will keep them? If the latter, what will get them to try the service (again)?

Do you really believe MySpace can once again be on the growth path it was once on, and can what has clearly become a tired brand be reborn? What are the precedents for such a situation–and you may not use Apple (AAPL) as the example, because there is no Steve Jobs present?

And, perhaps most important: Who’s really in charge?

Of course, that might or might not be a very rhetorical question, to say the least.

Until it is all settled, you can add more questions below in comments. Also, here’s that famous video clip from the movie “Animal House” to enjoy, which is still incredibly funny after all these years:

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100218/myspace-to-hold-a-remain-calm-all-is-well-meeting-today-for-staff-heres-five-questions-that-someone-should-ask/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100213/weekend-update-02-13-10-the-hot-mess-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20100213/weekend-update-02-13-10-the-hot-mess-edition/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:14:47 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=34853 Rogue waves aren’t completely unheard of during surfing competitions in Northern California, but a foot of snow in Dallas? About as likely as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz grilling Kara Swisher in front of a packed auditorium.

All right, it was a cafeteria packed with Yahoo (YHOO) employees, but still. Check out Kara’s write-up and video of the experience, but be warned: no embed of the official Yahoo video so far, so those of us who weren’t there have no idea (yet) about what sort of profanity ensued. We’ll keep you posted. Kara also took a look this week at the serialized drama that is MySpace. The latest episode, of course, is the firing of brand new CEO Owen Van Natta, who may or may not have wanted to leave anyway. An insider described the company to BoomTown as a hot mess, since it’s both “impossible to save and hard to give up on.” BoomTown started off the week with a couple of the more amusing takes on Google’s Super Bowl ad, “Paris Love”–now its own meme–which includes the search history of Tiger Woods and a different kind of Parisian story.

Walt recently fired up Windows 7 on a late-model Apple (AAPL) MacBook Pro, using both Parallels Desktop 5 and VMware Fusion 3. Not at the same time, although both have been updated to get the most out of Snow Leopard and Windows 7 and will run the two operating systems simultaneously on an Intel-powered Mac. The quick version is that Walt thinks Parallels is the better product. The version with all the logic and details is in this week’s Personal Technology. He also took time to answer some readers’ questions in Mossberg’s Mailbox about iPad batteries, zooming on text in Firefox, locating the calendar in the latest version of Windows Live Mail and feeling stuck between a Kindle and a Nook. In this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret tested some stylishly small scanners and desktop printers: the Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1300 and PlanOn System Solution’s PrintStik PS905ME. Not surprisingly, she found that style comes at a price with both gadgets.

In Digital Daily this week, John Paczkowski quoted Bill Gates’s underwhelming response to Apple’s iPad hoopla: “It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.” Then he quoted Gates on his initial reaction to the iPod in 2004: “There’s nothing that the iPod does that I say, ‘Oh, wow, I don’t think we can do that.’” Apparently, Gates was much more forthcoming–with his own Microsoft (MSFT) execs, anyway–about iTunes in 2003 when he wrote in a memo that “Jobs has us a bit flat footed again….” Maybe admitting you have a problem really is the first step toward overcoming it. But then again, Zune as a second step is pretty much three steps back. John also dissected the buzz around Google Buzz this week, which, admittedly, wasn’t overwhelming, but it could still dovetail nicely with the search giant’s mobile strategies.

Jeff Bronikowski, formerly of Universal Music Group–the world’s biggest label–explained in a Billboard interview this week that the business of Big Music is doomed. But Peter Kafka is reserving judgment, at least until a few more music industry vets leave their jobs and weigh in publicly on the matter. Which is not at all the same thing as being optimistic; it’s just being realistic. It’s important to point out, though, that Google (GOOG) made Peter feel better this week about having Time Warner Cable (TWC) as his ISP, which could signal optimism, realism or something else entirely. Back on the music front, MediaMemo spoke with Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro and found that although it’s tempting to blame music behemoth Universal Music Group for the company’s demise, the Web start-up dug its own hole.

Here’s hoping for good sound bites for next weekend’s update and no need for mention of the weather. Stay tuned.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100213/weekend-update-02-13-10-the-hot-mess-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100211/after-even-more-turmoil-can-the-hot-mess-at-myspace-be-saved/ http://allthingsd.com/20100211/after-even-more-turmoil-can-the-hot-mess-at-myspace-be-saved/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:33:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24330

Last week, someone who has been at MySpace for a while told me what it’s like working inside the social networking company, which has gone from supernova to also-ran in the course of a few years.

Reflecting on the downward spiral, which MySpace owner News Corp. (NWS) has been trying to slow over the last year, and how hard it has been to do a turnaround of any kind, the exec could not shake the idea that it could still be revived.

“MySpace is kind of a hot mess,” said the exec, referring to its still-large audience and well-known brand. “It’s both impossible to save and hard to give up on.”

Unfortunately for all those involved, that mess got even messier yesterday after the ousting of CEO Owen Van Natta by News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller.

While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as infighting among top execs finally came to a head today.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Escalating tensions over strategy going forward had grown untenable between Miller and Van Natta, as well as among and between Van Natta and his top two execs, COO Mike Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.

(Pictured from left to right above are Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn.)

Sources said relations had gotten so bad that Hirschhorn had told Van Natta recently that he was planning to resign by June.

It was a threat that moved well beyond well-known gripes the former media exec had aired to many outside the company over the last year about how MySpace was in much worse shape MySpace than he thought, and that reflects weariness from the weekly commute between his home in New York and the company’s Los Angeles HQ.

And after a recent blog post that claimed Hirschhorn was the one leaving, relations became even frostier, sources said.

The relationship between Miller and Van Natta had also become badly frayed, several sources noted, mostly over the pace of change and the level of control Van Natta had over MySpace.

“There were serious disagreements and something had to give,” said one person close to the situation.

After firing Van Natta in an afternoon meeting yesterday in what several people described as a “termination without cause,” Miller (pictured here with Van Natta behind him) appointed Jones and Hirschhorn co-presidents of MySpace.

It was a dramatic shift from only nine months ago.

With the backing of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Miller hired Van Natta last April, after jettisoning co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe.

But despite his CEO title, the former Facebook and Amazon (AMZN) exec didn’t get to select the two top executives beneath him.

Both Jones and Hirschhorn were hired by Miller directly–also with Murdoch’s involvement and approval.

The idea at the time of assembling this troika was that three heads are better than one, especially in dealing with the technological, administrative and business hairball that MySpace had become over the years.

As it turned out, three heads came with three brains and three different ideas of what MySpace needed to do to fix itself.

While the work to clean up the company, make cuts and attract new talent proceeded, it seems as if not enough progress was made on the what-next part of the equation, as various strategies were considered.

That led to an increasing number of clashes as pressure began to mount to do something, even as rival Facebook’s growth skyrocketed.

While Van Natta and the others distilled the idea of making MySpace the place where consumers and artists store and keep track of their entertainment content online, using a series of “super tools” to move them all over the Web, the lack of concrete changes even began to irk Murdoch.

In News Corp.’s earnings call last week, in fact, Murdoch said about MySpace, despite recent encouraging signs of stabilization: “It’s not yet where we want it.”

Uh-oh, that might have been a clue to watch for big changes!

In addition, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted, News Corp. disclosed that MySpace and the rest of its digital portfolio were coming up short on their end of a $900 million, three-year search deal with Google (GOOG), meaning that News Corp. would receive around $100 million less than originally anticipated.

This was due to changes made to the site’s design, which cut down on some page views that the old site created to show higher traffic.

And, said sources, any new search deal with Google or, perhaps, Microsoft (MSFT) is not expected to be stellar.

“MySpace will get paid what it is worth,” said the source about search fees. “But the days of big payouts are over.”

The real problem, of course, is that MySpace’s audience has been going elsewhere, particularly Facebook, and will continue to do so until a bold new direction is set.

Many in the industry do not think that is even possible and that News Corp. shouldn’t even own MySpace anymore.

There is also a good argument that the company should have, and could have, sold the asset several years ago, either to Yahoo (YHOO) during its takeover fight with Microsoft or to another bidder when the company was riding high.

Now, News Corp.–which is dealing with many other vexing digital issues, including a pitched battle over paid content–is stuck trying to fix a distressed asset that became that way by allowing the old regime to run it in a less than rigorous manner.

And despite all the Band-Aids applied so far, reviving MySpace will take a lot of more arduous work from Jones and Hirschhorn, neither of whom has helmed as big an organization, despite recent layoffs.

In addition, the co-presidents must get along well, and power-sharing arrangements are always tricky to pull off.

So, until Miller, Jones and Hirschhorn figure it out–or not!–and, in honor of MySpace’s music meme, here is Cobra Starship’s “Hot Mess” video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100211/after-even-more-turmoil-can-the-hot-mess-at-myspace-be-saved/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100210/myspace-ceo-van-natta-was-fired-by-news-corp-digital-head-miller-in-late-afternoon-meeting/ http://allthingsd.com/20100210/myspace-ceo-van-natta-was-fired-by-news-corp-digital-head-miller-in-late-afternoon-meeting/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:59:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24314

The long-running telenovela that has been MySpace over the years took yet another dramatic turn late today when News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller fired MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, whom he had hired only nine months ago to turn around the troubled social networking site, according to several sources.

(The pair are pictured above in happier times, with Van Natta on the left, during an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with them at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in May. You can see the full video below.)

While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as problems among top execs finally came to a head today.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Among the issues were tensions between Miller and Van Natta, as well as growing tensions with his top two execs, COO Mike Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.

Miller hired Van Natta, but the CEO didn’t bring in the two executives directly beneath him: Both Jones and Hirschhorn were hired by Miller, along with News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch, who signed off on both men.

Sources also noted that Van Natta, a former Facebook and Amazon (AMZN) exec, had begun to bridle at not being able to select his own execs and at increasing meddling in the MySpace turnaround by Miller.

“There were three senior thinkers put in place to fix MySpace and it became clear that not all those voices were needed anymore,” said one person close to the situation. “So, Owen was the odd man out.”

And out he went in a flash, with Miller flying to Los Angeles early in the week to deal with rumors that it was Hirschhorn who was on his way out.

In fact, the well-known media exec had been vocally complaining for months about the harder-than-expected struggle to right MySpace’s once innovative business and had told many he was contemplating leaving within the next few months.

Today, several sources said, he conducted an all-day review of the plans Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn had been working on to revive MySpace and morph it into an entertainment and music hub.

After it was over, multiple sources said, Miller met with Van Natta and told him his tenure at CEO was over.

The move came as a shock to the staff at MySpace, as it was not expected, although it was clear that top execs at News Corp. were aware of the decision made by Miller.

“Simply put, it was a power struggle and Jon won,” said one source.

Miller has not returned my emails or phone calls about the situation, and a News Corp. spokeswoman declined to comment.

Ironically, after fixing a range of technical and product issues over the last several months, MySpace was beginning to see stabilization in the bleeding of users.

Comparatively, rival Facebook has seen explosive growth, reaching 400 million global users this week.

More details to come, but here is the D7 interview with Miller and Van Natta:

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