Earlier this month, we reported that Yahoo’s Director of Geo Engineering, Gary Gale, was the latest to leave the company. He declined to say where he was going at the time (except to say that it wasn’t Google), but how he has. In a blog post today, Gale has announced that he’ll be the Director of Ovi Places for Nokia.
What’s interesting about this is that Yahoo just announced a deal a week ago that aligns them with Nokia in the mobile space — which will obviously include geolocation. Gale notes this coincidence, but says he’s been talking to Nokia long before Yahoo was. Regardless, even though Gale is leaving Yahoo, it appears he’ll be working closely with his old co-workers on some projects.
Gale also used his post to say a few things about Yahoo. Having spent nearly 4 years at the company, Gale writes that “you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the media about working at Yahoo! It’s been an amazing experience and one I would willingly repeat if I had the opportunity to go back and do it all again.” Of course, he also notes some of the negative things about the experience — 3 of his “lows”:
- People leaving the company as a result of the Microsoft bid; the unsuccessful Microsoft bid, something that never actually happened.
- Reorganisations and new VPs; far too many of them. Six reorganisations in the space of twelve months and six VPs in the space of four years is too many by my reckoning and meant you sent more time rewriting your strategy than you do actually delivering and shipping product.
- Teams that ship successful products in spite of the company not because of the company.
The second point in particular seems to go along with our recent post wondering what exactly Yahoo is now? Judging from the various answers from the top over the years, it’s a very fluid thing. That also seems to show in the fact that Yahoo was one of the early players thinking about the now red-hot location space, but doesn’t have much to show for it (at least from a front-end user perspective).
Following the news Gale was leaving Yahoo, another key player in Yahoo’s location plan, Tom Coates, announced he was leaving as well.
Hopefully Gale won’t experience the same sort of top level confusion and frustration at Nokia — even working with Yahoo again.
[photo: flickr/vicchi]
