Larry Heck, the vice president of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo Labs, has been wooed by Microsoft. And when he gets there, he'll be surrounded by a few familiar faces. Heck is just the latest in a stream of Yahoos leaving the purple behind for employment with the Redmond-based software giant.
Sean Suchter, Qi Lu and most recently, Scott Moore have all departed Yahoo! for Microsoft.
Steve Ballmer may not be interested in acquiring Yahoo as a company any longer, but it appears that Plan B has been to acquire search-related employees instead. That leaves Carol Bartz will less leverage if she indeed wants to strike some kind of deal - even a partnership or a search-only sell-off - with Microsoft.
Then again, since it was widely speculated that Yahoo's woes were management-related, maybe Bartz knows best that saying goodbye to a few execs is a good thing for Yahoo afterall.
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