The Yahoo management, facing steady flak since it spurned Microsoft's takeover offer of $33 per share, has unveiled a major restructure to drive profits and enable "better decision making" in a move designed to deliver on CEO Jerry Yang's promise that it was right to reject a $47.5 billion takeover by Microsoft.

Yahoo yesterday announced the formation of three new divisions to be overseen by the Yahoo president, Susan Decker. Under the new order, current executive vice presidents Hilary Schneider and Ash Patel are being given expanded responsibilities over the Sunnyvale-based company's products and sales teams.

Schneider, a former newspaper executive, has been moving up the ranks since she joined Yahoo in September 2006. Patel has played a key role in developing many of Yahoo's most popular products, including its finance section and instant messaging service, since joining the company 12 years ago.

The Patel-led audience products division will be responsible for company-wide product strategy and product management. Schneider's division will be focused on "bringing products to market for users, advertisers and publishers".

The third new division is an insights strategy team that will "assume responsibility for centralising and executing a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo". Yahoo plans to name the leader of the insights strategy team "within the next few weeks".

Yahoo is also making changes to its technology operation, led by chief technology officer Ari Balogh, to develop a "world class computing and storage infrastructure". It is forming the cloud computing and data infrastructure group.

This is the third time in 19 months that Yahoo has redrawn its management chart as it tries to snap out of a financial malaise that has ravaged its stock price, jeopardized its independence and demoralized employees.

In the other two shake-ups since November 2006, chief operating officer Dan Rosensweig and CEO Terry Semel, famous for once drawing a $150-million salary, resigned.

This time, both of Yahoo's top executives - co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang and president Susan Decker - are staying put despite shareholder unrest about the company's recent decisions.

This news may not be much respite for beleaguered CEO Yang as faces hostile shareholders at the company's annual general meeting on 1 August. Upset by Yahoo's handling of the Microsoft negotiations, billionaire investor Carl Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of directors and promised to fire Yang as CEO if he wins control of the board. (See: Icahn seeks FTC clearance to acquire $2.5 billion worth Yahoo! stock; threatens proxy fight)

"The changes we are making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision making," said Decker."We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalise on the scale advantages while allowing for fine tuning to meet local market needs".

Yang said, these moves would accelerate the ability of Yahoo's talented  team to build great new products, grow its audiences and improve monetization globally.
"They are designed to put us in an even better position to leverage our leading global audience and capture the opportunity we see in the convergence of search and display advertising."

However, broader markets haven't responded very enthusiastically to the changes. Yesterday, Yahoo shares fell 64 cents to finish at $21.37.