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Ho-Boy! There have been a lot of high profile reorganization of the corporate org charts lately. Without further ado lets recap the latest in big business musical chairs!

• Yahoo Yawwn! Parody T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $15.99

  Yahoo finally got some good news: Google was pulling out of the online answers game, an area where they were directly competing with Yahoo. It was the first victory in the press that Yahoo! has gotten in a long time - their problem lately being perceived as loosers rather than actual financial looses. Before people could get too excited Yahoo! promptly pulled a play from the book of lame and stuffed existing management into each other’s jobs. Bold. Only one real player, Llyod Braun, is moving on to another ship.

• eBay, unlike Yahoo!, knows how to make a shakeup. It axed the entire business development part of its Skype division. People are still wondering what eBay saw in the European VOIP software that warranted a $4 billion price tag. Must not have been the talking heads.
• Next HP is dumping Larry Sonsini, once one of the most powerful lawyers in Silicon Valley. Turns out advising your paranoid clients that tapping phone calls was ok is a bad career move.
• Bram Cohen is gone from BitTorrent, the company he started in his bedroom. The company raised $20 million to pursue deals with major content provides; a business move that is no sure bet. In my mind I like to picture Bram, himself an uber nerd, storming out of the smoke filled board room in righteous disgust. In reality, however, his ouster probably has many more dollar signs written on it.

You may remember Amanda Congdon, the former (only moderately) tolerable host of Rocketboom. Well, she’s moving on to be be moderately tolerable on ABC’s online efforts. However, after seeing her video announcement, we can probably add ‘narcissistic’ to her description.

One has to wonder, is this how bloggers appear to the rest of the world?

Call us late to the party but Militant Geek just read about Friendster and the greed therein (article is behind a NYTimes walled garden but Michael Arrington does do a wrap up). There are so many slights I’m not even sure where to start.

Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003.

Everything went downhill from there.
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Key points of failure seem to be a disastrous initial architecture that just couldn’t scale, a succession of high profile but out of touch CEOs (Tim Koogle, then Scott Sassa, then Taek Kwan), infighting at the executive level (particularly between the VP Product and VP Engineering) and a general level of arrogance at the board and executive level. No one is spared in the article, including Kleiner Perkins Partner John Doerr and former partner Russ Siegelman.

Hmmm…. Fiendster? Fraudster? Greedster? Too many options… Which is why it would make a great poll! Take a moment and vote for the most appropriate name for everyone’s favorite social networking also-ran.

Update
From Geek and Poke (what a ca-wink-a-dink!)

Big props to each and every one of you that voted in our first poll, How Best to Mock a Bubble. Despite all options doing fairly well eventually two ‘bubbled’ to the top; expect ‘Adsense is not a Business Model’ and ‘the checkboxes’ to make an apparence in the MilitantGeek TShirt store in the next few days.

Flock was one of those products a geek really wanted to believe in. It was to be a browser built on the Mozilla code base and developed with passion. They have a community ambassador who blogs… kinda. It even had the idealistic Chris Messina declaring that it would change the world (wha? we’re still talking about a web browser, right?).

Skip forward several disappointing browser releases later (instead of browsing to your blog to make a new entry you could type in a special browser text box… wow… yeah… um). That’s what they raised $2-3 million in venture capital for?! And they’re implying that there users are sheep?
Now comes word that the company built on more feel-good philosophy than common sense has fired its CEO, Bart Decrem. At least Chris Messina had the good sense to get out back in March.