Yahoo has lost one of its top mobile engineers, TechCrunch first reported and confirmed by Yahoo, as Sandeep Gupta will be leaving the company.
Gupta was the company’s senior director of application development and there’s no word on where he will be heading to next but he is just the latest departure from Yahoo’s mobile team since CEO Carol Bartz took over. Mobile head Marco Boerries and Chief Scientist Marc Davis have also left the company within the last year.
The move comes as the company has disbanded its standalone mobile division in order to integrate mobile into the larger company. This means that nearly every Yahoo product from now on will have a mobile element baked in from the beginning, which I think is very smart.
The company used to be in silos, but Bartz has been trying to reorganize into a sleeker, more focused Yahoo. It will definitely need a stronger mobile experience in order to overcome competitors like Google.
“We are more tightly integrating our mobile business into the company’s DNA as we create the best possible user experiences for our consumers and partners regardless of device or access point,” said Cory Pforzheimer, Yahoo’s senior manager of corporate communications, in an e-mail. “As the adoption of Yahoo’s mobile services continues to grow globally, mobile continues to be a priority for the company.”
The refocus on mobile will be place a heavy emphasis on content but search will still play a major role because the default search engine on a phone is generally the most used. Yahoo used to provide the search for T-Mobile phones but the fourth-largest carrier kicked it to the curb in favor of Google earlier this year.
Yahoo’s not dead in the water though, as it still has a deal with AT&T to be the default search for multiple devices, although this excludes the iPhone. This is why the Google Android Motorola Backflip uses Yahoo as its default search.
[Via TechCrunch, photo]
